Unlock the Secrets of Top Productivity Tools with Francesco D'Alessio by Kazuki Nakayashiki

Unlock the Secrets of Top Productivity Tools with Francesco D'Alessio

Kazuki Nakayashiki

Oct 22, 2024 8:32 PM

Summary

Introduction and Background (00:09 - 00:33): Francesco D'Alessio, founder of Tool Finder (formerly Keep Productive), shares insights on productivity tools, leveraging over a decade of experience and a subscriber base of over 400,000 on YouTube.
YouTube Journey Start (00:58 - 02:18): Francesco began his YouTube channel in college to help people find productivity tools, inspired by assisting teachers with various applications.
Rebranding from Keep Productive to Tool Finder (03:16 - 03:53): The brand change allows for a broader focus beyond productivity to include life management software, enhancing their service offerings.
Discovery of Tools (05:34 - 06:18): Francesco utilizes Product Hunt, Google Alerts, and community suggestions to discover new and niche productivity tools, showcasing a hands-on approach to finding resources.
Tool Review and Bias Reduction (08:10 - 10:25): He emphasizes the importance of recommending tools suited to individual user needs, while maintaining a small personal toolkit to minimize bias in his reviews.
Future of Productivity and AI Impact (17:47 - 21:56): Francesco predicts the integration of AI will shift productivity tools towards more assistance in daily routines, allowing tasks to be handled during downtime for enhanced efficiency.
Legacy and Impact (46:24 - 48:46): Francesco aspires to create tools that improve people's work-life balance and productivity, sharing personal anecdotes about the positive impact of his applications on users with specific needs.

Transcript

Welcome back to Graph Talk. Today we are very excited to have Francesco D'Alessio with us. Francesco is the founder and host of Tool Finder, aka Keep Productive, a YouTube channel and a website that helps people discover the best productivity tools to enhance their life and work. And with over a decade of experience and over 400,000 subscribers, Francesco has become a trusted source for professionals and individuals looking to optimize their

workflow. And beyond YouTube, he has helped numerous tech startups sharing his expertise in marketing and content creation. So let's dive into his journey and insights on the future of productivity. Thank you for joining Francesco today. Thank you very much, guys, for having me. I really appreciate it. So first of all, it seems like you started your YouTube channel when you were a college student, right, back in 2014. And I wonder, why did you choose productivity tools at the time?

And was there any trigger or turning point in your life? Yeah, that's a good question, because productivity apps are quite a specific thing that people tend to go after. And I think what started was when I was in college, high school, I was helping my teachers with productivity applications and software on their computer, and just in how to find things, how to organize things. And I thought, this is probably something that I'm quite good at, because I was helping all of these

different teachers. And then what happened was, I just went away, and I started looking at different type of applications and productivity software. And I was going, I really like the differences between these applications, and helping people to choose the perfect one for them. And it was only a few years later that I decided, why don't I start a YouTube channel to help people to categorize these, to narrow down the options, which one's best for them.

Because from the surface, a lot of these productivity applications are, they look very much the same. Like, a note-taking application can do the same thing as another note-taking application, but there are some small differences between them. So I just, I jumped to doing videos, and 10 years later, I'm still helping people to define the difference between their applications. That's really beautiful. And I love watching your YouTube

video, and then also website, and to find interesting tools. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. By the way, I realized, did you change the name from Keep Productive to Tool Finders? Yes, we did. Yeah. That was quite a big move. We decided that one of the things that we want to do is not just help people with productivity, but work software as well, and also life management software, which isn't only dedicated to productivity. So this sort of helps us expand beyond

productivity, but still allows us to cover productivity and other tools. So it's a big change, but one that I think makes more sense for the future. Yeah, it makes sense. Thanks. But just curious, like, you know, you are reviewing many softwares, note-taking apps, knowledge management, so you know pretty much about, like, you know, those categories, those products, right? So you can just combine all the insights and experience, so you can make your

product. So you don't do that? Yeah, so that was one of the problems from, like, because I created so many videos over the years, I just got to this point where I was like, how can I rent out my brain to other people? Because I was just like, I was like, I know I'm very weird at this point. I know probably 700 productivity app logos instantly, you know what I mean? But I don't want to be relying on my brain to create content. So what we did with Tool Finder is we sort of made a database

of them. And what we're trying to do with that is make it so that somebody can go into the application and find what their problem is and find a solution to it, because that's one of the biggest problems. But sort of using things like artificial intelligence and things like, you know, smarter database structures to be able to find that. And not make it all about me, if you know what I mean. Provide a tool that helps them find tools.

I see. By the way, you review so many tools, right? And I really wonder, how do you find these tools? I mean, you cover the new tools, I mean, you know, like a famous tool, like Notion, Obsidian, but at the same time, you cover really niche and new tools. And I'm curious, how you always, you know, discover these tools? Do you have someone helping you? No, no, no. I spend too much time on things like, you know, like Product Hunt and Twitter. And,

you know, like, I have lots of different keywords set up for Google Alerts, for new productivity tools. And I also have an amazing community that, like, are pinging me about new apps all the time. And I think it comes from an interest as well. Like, I'm quite interested in marketing and sales and startups. So, like, I'm always finding tools and just constantly on the pulse of new apps. It's kind of a problem, though, isn't it?

Yes, that's productive. It's not productive. Not productive, okay. But yeah, do you mind if I ask you, like, how did you discover Glass in that sense? Because, like, you know, Glass became so not famous, a little bit famous after YouTube summary was, you know, went viral. But so you already know Glass before that. How did you discover it? Or any person recommended to you? That's a good one. You know, I think, I don't know what it was exactly, because there's so

many apps. But I was in 2019, or 2021, I can't remember which one it was. I recorded a series with Anne-Laure Lecomte about knowledge management. And I think she may have, I don't even know whether we were just browsing which apps we had, or something like that. And I saw Glass. Maybe that wasn't the first time I saw it. But I remember that's when it stuck for me. And that's when I started exploring you guys a bit more. And sort of looking into Glass.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Yeah, I already know that. So you wrote a review for Glass on Medium, also took a video on YouTube. So that's really helping us. Thanks so much. Thank you. I need to update it. No, no pressure at all. But by the way, I think you review, I mean, hundreds of products, right? On a daily basis, in total, and also daily basis, you review many tools. But I wonder how you minimize or lower your bias when you review application? Do you have some strategy or

workflow? Let's say you use some tools in at least two weeks or something, so that you can review better. Because you have preference, right? Oh, let's say if you use Notion, Obsidian, then if you review other tools, then you might find, ah, this UI, UX doesn't work for me, or something like that. Do you have some strategy to reduce that bias when you review product? It's quite tricky, because there are so many apps, and I do have my favorites.

But I sort of go on two principles. The first of those is always being the most trustworthy person to recommend the tools for the right person. So for example, if somebody emails me and says, Francesco, I need a productivity app for X, Y, and Z situation, what I try and do is try and probe them on a variety of questions, like, you know, what is your current situation? What's your budget? Are you working in a team? Are you working as an individual? And try and

narrow down the solution for them, just so I can pick the best tool for them. So the way that I bake that into the reviews and things like that is just always have in mind the concept of who this is best for in the situation they're in. So like one tool could be great for individuals that are busy professionals, but another tool could be good for small teams that are working in sales and marketing. So I'm always trying to think of the end user as much as I can.

And the second sort of principle is to try and keep my own productivity system of apps as small. small as I possibly can, and the idea behind that is so that I can always be in the mindset of picking an app for as long as possible, because what people tend to do, and running a site like Tool Finder, is they jump between applications. They see a new app, they download it, and then two weeks later, they're on another application

that does something slightly different. So I try and distill those principles in how I choose productivity apps, and I try and help people pick for the long term, if that makes sense, even though it is quite hard, because you've got to do your research, which is so important. So yeah, I would say that's how I go about the bias side of stuff. I see. Yeah, that totally makes sense. Yes. And I see. So at the same time, I'm curious, you've reviewed a bunch of tools, and I think we already know

what kind of tools you are using, but for our audience, I'd like to ask, after so many reviews and many tools, what workflow or tools did you choose for each, like a note-taking, knowledge management, or to-do list, and so on? Could you share the tools you use? Sure, yeah. So the tools I decide to use are Todoist for task management, just because I find that the application is great for capturing across my day, because I'm always driving in the

car, or I'm with my kids, and trying to capture a task, or a note, or a link, quickly, game of the game, because I want to be able to remember it or process it for later. So I love the Siri integration and things like that. But it's also got some good, more recently, calendar abilities that I like. It's strange, because for note-taking, I don't note-take a great deal. So the way that I typically note-take is by capturing documents that are important to me.

So for example, I don't know, like a medical thing that came through the post, and I want to be able to scan it in, into Evernote. So I typically use Evernote for that still. Then if I'm journaling, which is the sort of second part of my note-taking, I don't really take notes. I journal more about how I'm doing, or the week reviews, typically on like a Thursday. And I'll use something like Notion for that, just because it's a bit like Google Documents.

It's quite easy just to start writing, and let your mind sort of wander. It's strange, though. With those two applications, I don't use them in a very structured sense. I just try and get the information in. Because I'm in sort of the role that I'm in, I sort of do something. I don't know whether it's a real thing, but sort of progressive learning, where anything that I feel comes out of journaling that is useful, I try and implement as fast as I can,

if that makes sense. I can make a mistake and learn from it, versus write down information about it, so that my journal constantly gets better, I guess. So those are my sort of two note-taking apps, Evernote and Notion, where I use them in two different situations. Evernote is more of a filing cabinet, and Notion is more of a journal slash planner app. And then, thinking about it, the third sort of tool I use, the calendar.

It's strange. I don't really have a calendar app. I use Google Calendar, just because they're so similar a lot of the time that I never have one installed that I'm like, OK, I'll go with that one. And they're always shutting down as well. Once I start liking a calendar app, they shut down. And then I use Superhuman Email, which is an email application, because I spend quite a long time every day on email.

So that helps me to do things. So I don't have that probably five apps. I don't have like, I have sort of a medium amount of apps there. Probably for the average person, it's quite a lot. But yeah, they're the ones I go for, for daily routine. I see. And how about the tools you use within your team or with your clients? Do you use some tools with them? Yeah. For meeting agendas and notes, we use Notion. We don't, weirdly, because there's only me and Carl, who's the developer.

There's only two of us. So we use WhatsApp. So it's not very, we don't use Slack or anything formalized like that, because we don't necessarily need it. And then we occasionally will use Todoist for adding tasks, but it's very rare. We really try and keep things as slim as possible. There's not much. I think it's because we're moving so fast at the moment that we don't really have a structure to what we're doing yet,

because Carl only joined probably like a month ago, full time. So it's still working out the processes of what apps we actually need as a team, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think so. Thank you. How about writing for that? So I mean, writing for Tool Finder, like web articles. Like when you write a draft, where do you write and where do you publish it? So we use, there's no fun writing app that we use for this.

We use something called Contentful, which is a content management system. It's very boring looking, but it gets the job done. I do like, across my day, I use ChatGPT obviously quite a lot, because if I've got like a journal entry or a task that is like, you know, monotonous to do, like resizing headers or something like that, I'll use that quite a lot during the day as a sort of assistant tool. But obviously I think everyone tends to use that application these days to try and get a few things done.

Yeah. So regarding AI, so you mentioned AI. So I think nowadays, you know, anyone, any software developers can use OpenAI, ChatGPT through API, you know, coding API. And so that meaning, I think that generally speaking, like most of the productivity tools, productivity increased thanks to AI, I think. So that the difference between tools might be like less, I think, compared to the past. And how do you think the AI impact productivity tools?

I mean, you review, you know, for over 10 years, I think early days, few companies use AI, but nowadays most of companies can use AI, right? So how do you think impact the future of productivity? I think this is like the first sort of wave of artificial intelligence. And I always refer to it like a car analogy. You think of a car, the chassis, which is the body around the car, is the productivity tool.

And now we've got a brand new engine, which is AI. And once you put a new engine in, you can change the engine out whenever. But obviously, if you put a Ferrari engine in, it's going to do a lot more. That car is going to go a lot faster. And if you put, I don't know, a Ford engine, I'm thinking of a bad car provider, but I can't think of one, then it's not going to go as fast as it. So we have to think of the sort of initial wave of productivity apps as sort of very precautious, because when AI came out, the first 12 months was chaos.

Obviously, there were a lot of, I actually made a point not to review a lot of new AI productivity apps, because a lot of these people and companies were just companies that just started quickly and tried to build something that wasn't very well thought out, if that makes sense. Whereas now everything's a lot more established, and those who are going to be in the AI game are probably going to be in the AI game a lot longer now because the other companies have drowned or not been able to survive.

And I think the next big wave in artificial intelligence is around the agents of things. So when we think about our work day, there's obviously things like when you get up, you sort of go to work, and when you take a break, you're not doing any work. And when you... you know, you finish your day, you clock out for the day. So we typically have a structure where nothing's happening in that time period. And I think AI agents are gonna fill that time for us,

allowing us to do more. So I think a lot of our work will begin to tailor towards AI agent. So here's an example, I think. When you wake up, you will be met with a report or a bunch of research or a bunch of insights or some scraping of information that basically allows you to start your work for the day because the AI agent overnight will have done a bunch of work for you. And you'll be basically passing over that information.

For, I don't know, for a lawyer that could be compiling a bunch of PDFs ready to send to clients or preparing stuff for you to review ready for sending out. And then you think about lunchtime. You'll prompt a bunch of things to go and do a bunch of things in the hour that you go for lunch. And then when you come back, you're reactional. So I think it will be this constant cycle of people getting used to having a true assistant,

a true additional person that they have to manage. So I think the next wave is about productivity tools taking the administration outside of their work and focusing on things being done for you in that time period. Whether that's productivity tools or whether that's other applications, I think productivity itself is gonna turn a bit of a corner where we don't think about organizing ourself. We think about doing more or doing less

depending on how you wanna, how much you wanna do which is sort of a good problem to have. Yeah, I see. Yeah, I mean, so related to that, so how do you define productivity then? So because like people are pursuing productivity tools but so it has many aspects, right? So people want to increase effectiveness or efficiency or speed up or do more or like low cost. So many aspects, right? And so how do you define productivity

and so why it's important for people? Maybe this is tough question, but. It is, it's a tough question but I think it's a really interesting one because like everything's shifting towards productivity becoming more of a mindfulness activity, which is really good. Cause like you think about productivity now, it's about the manual work of organizing your day which is in itself unproductive, but also productive.

If AI can do that for us, then the act of being productive will be about mindfulness. So like it could be somebody planning their day and reflecting on their week and bringing together their glass highlights. Do you know what I mean? It could be about that being a much more of a mindful tasks than actually a productive one which is a good thing because if we're communicating with AI agents a lot during the day

and those tasks have been done for us by assistants, then how you reflect on your day will become much more of a productivity habit. That's how I see it. But you know, this is a very good question. So yeah, people are saying, so AI is coming out, maybe like super agent coming out, but so people struggling, you know, with like productivity. Yeah, but mindfulness is interesting point, I think. I think it'd be so much more important, won't it?

For like people to see how they think about things, which is gonna be helpful for you guys, of course, but it'll be, people will get a lot more philosophical about work, I think. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, and I'm just excited about the future how people define productivity. And so, yeah, I think related to this question, so many people are pursuing productivity or productivity tools, but so later on they notice, oh, this is not productive.

So, you know, it causes like from mainly two things, like, you know, tool productivity, productivity tool has a problem, or people using it as a problem. So how do you think about it? So like, yeah, people think, so this is a productivity tool, so, but it's not productive, or like, you know, people using productivity tool, but the people have problem to use it. Yes, yeah. Like sometimes people do get sort of,

so here's an example on YouTube, if you Google, if you YouTube search bullet journal covers, it's the front cover of your bullet journal, but people spend hours making these beautiful designs in on the cover and inside of the notebook. They're really beautiful, but is that productive? It's a difficult question because in a way it is productive to have the book and start using it, but it's whether that's actually productive for you.

And another sort of thought is, you know, like if you look at somebody that reads a book from start to finish, and somebody that reads the audible book from start to finish, or listens to the audible book, did that audible reader read the book or not? That's something that is more of like a moral question of, okay, what do we define as reading a book? What do we define as not reading a book? So I think the real test for people is every single week,

you should be saying, how much time did I actually do work in? How much time did I actually take myself away from productivity application? I think if you're spending 20 to 30 minutes a week sort of pruning your productivity app and making it better or organizing yourself, I think that's a good target or limit to aim for. If you spend more than that, the time it's saving you might be wasting you the same amount of time.

So you need to be able to look at the input output of it. That's true. Yeah, sorry about like asking tough questions. Oh no, it's good. It's a very smart podcast. Oh yeah, I hope our audience like it. At least we love it, yeah. But you're revealing so many truths, but so yeah, some people start making productivity app, but so in like a year or two years, so they shut down sometimes. Do you have any common points or any common things

so in the productivity app when they started making it, so like, oh, this is gonna be successful or this is gonna be maybe shut down in a few years? Yeah, it's kind of turn over, right? And maybe it's not because people don't follow you or YouTube channel, you know? Yeah. It could be. I'm sure there's a chart out there like showing that. It's a tricky one because like even this week, I think three productivity applications shut down

and it's getting more common. And I think it's probably because you have to be able to differentiate your apps between other apps because I see them all. And I see you need to have two or three things that are different between those apps, really firmly different that actually make it more useful than the other one or more useful to use case of people. At the moment, it seems like I'm getting a new daily planner application every single week

to look at or review. So it's one of these ones that there's a trend in the market, people jump on it, and then they don't know how to differentiate themselves from other people. So it's a really hard one. It's such a shame when these apps shut down, but you need to be able to find something different. It's very tricky. I see, it makes sense. So yeah, many productivity tools started, so building, so they are struggling with monetizing,

so marketing, so tensile, yeah, maybe in three years. Yeah, this is a pretty common thing. So do you have any like, otherwise, not only for us, but for other productivity tool creators, so to like root in their product in this way? you know people's daily life so to be used also how to market it? Yeah that's a good question. I'm going to say get your app on Tool Finder to start. Oh yeah that's the first one.

I think it's like at the moment we're actually, we launched a productivity application about two years ago called Bento and one of the things that we found at the start is that what we have to have is an opinion and if you have an opinion about how something's done then you can find an audience. So our opinion at the time was people should be doing quality tasks not quantity tasks so we created a system that limits you to three tasks a day and you're not allowed to add any more

tasks to that and people loved it because it gave them a focus on what they need to do. We're rebuilding the application right now but I think you have to have an opinion about an experience. We're also launching another app at the moment called scrumplanning.com and what we found is that scrum agile meetings that you use for estimation are boring. All of the apps and software out there are boring so what we have an opinion is we want to make it fun so I think

if they can go in with an opinion then they can start tailor the marketing around that opinion and find the people that are annoyed at what that opinion is or like your opinion and you can build on it. I guess with you guys it's that the ability to share knowledge is not great out there and you want to try and solve that right? Yes. So you're doing a good job. I think so much and in that sense so what kind of platform or where do you think it's the best to

like distribute or market the product because you are doing like you know to find a website you know web application also youtube twitter linkedin right so yeah so eventually so you know marketing makes like you know people I mean products should be distributed in through those channels but so from your experience so what works the best so do you have any ideas yeah yeah I mean there's a product hunt is a very good website for launching a tool

that's probably a great starting point just to get the tool out there and and in the wild I think it depends on what your audience is if you have an audience that's focused on business customers then linkedin you know networking events and things like that can be a great way to to get out there so really depends on your audience like I think obviously knowledge people who are in the knowledge space these sort of knowledge applications are great when you

look at like reddit and community creators who have individual knowledge management communities youtubers I used to spend a lot of time doing I spent about three or four years doing youtube influence marketing when it first started and I used to sell one used to sell I used to work for a company that sold post-it notes but they had different languages on them so translated and you can stick them on the items around the house it was very good and the best way is to get some

influencer and not necessarily pay for it with them but to work with them in the long-term basis so find an influencer on youtube that is aligned with your values and try and find a common ground with them that you can have a long-term relationship with that's always a really good strategy these days there are so many different ways of doing it these days I see so much so much it's good thanks thank you yeah yeah long-term relationship and yeah yeah exactly yeah with

creators and influencers and yeah helps to distribute yeah product and to right people yeah that makes sense and at the same time I'm curious you know uh like uh what's happening nowadays in in productivity tools and you know many you know in many like uh like uh like spaces like not taking product project management pkm personal uh knowledge management and so on but in each uh topics and I think there are some trends right meaning let's say in case we're not taking

obsidian is quite popular now because uh it's it works it's a local app and so that it you know the the data is theirs and so that's good and also for other tools you know the open source of products so that the users can trust it right something like that do you see this kind of trend in each topic or each segment nowadays oh yeah it's it's crazy um it seems like every couple of months there's like a big focus and a big change like um the initial

sort of pkm wave was was very big because people were like looking for something different to note taking apps and then like you said like the local first open source markdown sort of applications had their wave um so I mean it happens in task management as well like I said daily planners they're sort of like a just a more advanced to-do list application but they've sort of grown as well um so yeah I've seen it all the time and I think I think even like in the future like

obviously we're getting this little bit of like ai note taking at the moment um but I don't think notes are a very very personal experience and especially in the pkm market when you've got a lot of people who have their journal their ideas their thoughts and they don't want well they like local first because of the security element of it where it's not sort of um you know damaging anything else so that's where I think like pkm space will be

uh have a lot more benefit when there's a local ai systems that are involved um so if you can plug your notes into a local ai then there's not that risk or a lot less risk of your notes being abused or something happening with it or things like that so I think the next sort of big wave and pkm will be the local ai um and it will be connecting your engine with your chassis but as a user which I think will be really interesting see interesting and you used analogy

you know uh of uh ferrari right and then and I saw you were a fan of ferrari since 1996 or 1994 and yeah when I was born that's amazing it's not a day and by the way uh so besides uh the productivity do you do you how do you like uh consume information like you know like how do you get information like do you read books or do you read web articles or do you subscribe to newsletters and I'm curious about your

information consuming process um I probably do I watch a lot of like youtube videos um but I don't I actually don't have uh social media on my phone um just because I don't like to consume it as I sort of go about my day um I go on twitter sometimes um and obviously for my job I'm always in the the social media realm being with youtube and things like that um so the main mostly I consume video because I quite like how it presents itself um

but I also like uh if I'm consuming information as well if I have a problem or I want to be able to talk through something a bit more like naturally then I will use chat gpt to sort of unpack a problem um across my day but I try to keep my information diet as slim as I can um just so it's not too intense in the day I see that makes sense yes and do you have something like you want to do in the future now like you know what like your country focusing are you do you have some like

things you focus on country or you want to do in the future you know yeah yeah personally anything yeah I would love to create a set of my own productivity tools and software um so I think we're at the start of that journey um so we got bento we're going to launch scrumplanning.com but I just I would love to just carry this journey on and creating a series of productivity tools it'd be so cool um because I'm so opinionated in the space I'd love to be able to just

try and pick out trends and build them. So that's, yeah, that's sort of, I'm moving more away from being a creator to being a software developer, not, I'm not a software developer, but building a software development, building apps and tools. So yeah, I think it's an exciting next part of the journey. Very looking forward to seeing it and using it. Oh, thank you. Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much. So I asked a bit before, but so do you have any advice

for creators, like, you know, like creating productivity tools or like, you know, marketing, because like our audience is, you know, looking into, yeah, you know, want to know, like, yeah, your thoughts about like, you know, being a creator, also like how to distribute and what kind of things they want, you know, they should start with at first. Yeah, in terms of the people building the apps, is that that, like,

yeah, building apps, also, like, you know, yeah, distribute, maybe creating and distributing apps. So like, not only productivity, but other domains as well. Yeah. I think it's, it's tricky to launch in those days, because it's so noisy. But I think it's just all about establishing a different approach to whatever else is doing. You know, like, you can be on all of the social media sites, but you need to be able to have

something that's different to other people. And I'm sure it's like how you guys have built apps, it's having like a, like with your podcast, it's like having a close engagement with your community as much as you can. So I think, like, you know, showing yourself as a team as a founder is a good way to do that. And obviously start to reach out. But yeah, it's, there's so much stuff that you can do. It's almost like just picking the right ones to run with, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah. And also, do you have advice to people who wants to be more productive? You know, like, you already tapped on a little bit, but you know, like, yeah, simplicity is better is is the best thing, you know, or anything, any advice to those people? Yeah. I think some of that's like really underrated. And I think there'll be a big trend in the next three, four years is productivity health. Because we're starting

to get some metrics on, for example, like what your HRV is, or your heart rate or your stress levels, with some of our fitness trackers are able to start to track that those points of data. But I think if you combine that data with your work day, I think it could be a really interesting proposition. So for example, you know, say you wake up in the morning, your to do list application could plug into your health data and work out a lot of different things about you.

So for example, for me, it could be that I had a my to do list, record five videos, and I wake up and my recovery is low, I'm not feeling very well. And it what it would have done is automatically move that task to a day that I typically have higher recovery, or higher quality of sleep and things like that around. So I start, I think it'd be an interesting combination, if we had a productivity tools that was aware of our health at the same time,

and using AI to make decisions around that. I think that would be a really interesting perspective. But I think that's another element of it, people don't really think about their health as much during the day. I know that when I get a series of good sleep in eight to nine hours a night, I've got, I've got a one year old. So it's quite difficult. So sleep is not as good. But when I know I get nine hours, the quality of my tasks become increasingly better,

I'm able to think more clearly, I'm able to get more done, instead of focusing so much on the quantity. So I think sometimes people don't think about how their sleep, how their caffeine levels, how their movement and blood flow across the day affects how they're productive, but it actually really, really does. So looking at all of that, if you can get a fitness tracker of some kind that it gives you more data that you can make decisions over and change habits, and then see that data

change. So that's probably an underrated productivity tip, in my opinion. Wow, really insightful. And actually, one of our founder friends is building kind of similar app, like Calendar app, but with health data. So it's called The Mind. And based on your... I think I've heard of it. Yeah, I think he told me you featured his real product, I think once. I think a couple of months ago. He launched the product, so maybe a month ago or something.

Maybe, yeah. I have a feeling I've definitely seen it, at the very least. Yeah, what you mentioned reminded me of their product, by the way. Yeah, that's really interesting. So yeah, this is the last question, by the way. So since Grasp is a platform where people can share what they are reading, learning as a digital legacy, and we want to know what kind of legacy or impact do you want to leave behind for future generations or other people?

This is the big question, isn't it? The thing is, I would love to leave... It's a very difficult question because I'm sort of in the phases of my life where I'm going from changing what I've done for 10 years to doing something very new. But what I'd love to leave for people is a set of tools that helps them do more in a much more better way. And it allowed them to get more done, to spend more time with their

family, to produce quality work, and to just enrich their lives. So if I had to have a legacy, I think as long as those tasks, as long as those tools did those things, it would be really beautiful. I remember when we launched Bento, one of the things that we didn't see happening was that the application was actually a very good way for people to narrow down their tasks and set a timer on it and be very specific. And it was strange because we got,

about a couple of months in, we got loads of messages from the parents with children with autism or ADHD, and they found that the focus on three tasks and setting a timer, large, medium and small, like a Bento box, was a great way for a child with ADHD or autism to focus and to set intention for what they're doing, because it gives them a limited focus, but a quality focus. And when I found that out, when I had all those messages saying, you know, this

has changed the way that my daughter's routine for her day is set up, I was like, wow, how an app could affect that. And I'm sure it's the same with you guys with Glasp in terms of resurfacing of knowledge and things like that. So I think if I can make an impact on people using tools or picking a tool, that would be amazing. I rambled on a bit there. I had to work it out what the legacy was. Yes. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing, you know, all the insights and also,

you know, the impact legacy you want to leave behind. And yeah, and also we are huge fans of, you know, what you do. And yeah, thank you so much. And vice versa. Very much. Big, big fan. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Thank you for joining today.

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Unlock the Secrets of Top Productivity Tools with Francesco D'Alessio

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