 I wanted to close, even though I didn't want to speak to be honest with you, it's just not my desire to speak, I do it for a living. But I wanted to close today talking a little bit about really, I think something fundamental when we need to talk about, when we talk about software, and that's, what do we do once we make a decision that we want to use software to either change our business or change our family? And I want to share with you a little bit behind the scenes about what I did, what I've done. There's a video on YouTube that a lot of people have seen it, where I met with Francesco and I shared a little bit of my base and a little bit of my methodology, but I really didn't go into like why and why I think this is so important, but before we do that, I just really have to give a shout out to my three chat chairs, Jen Rudd, Chris Guthrie, and Shay Redding Rogers. I mean, we did all of this like in a couple of weeks and we got almost a thousand people signed up this event. It was really overwhelming. And then they worked with all of our amazing speakers, would it be Nate, Shay, Edmund, Matthew, I'm looking all of them now, Camille, Camille Sox, we have to give a special shout out to those, Justin, Chris, William, of course, Dan, Dan, you know, gave us some great gifts, Mike, Jen, and Sherry, but also again, even though this was all free and I didn't charge anyone to collect any money, OpenSight offered three vouchers and gifts, Gap Consulting, Gareth, who started our day, was our keynote, Gareth, the reason that a lot of us know about this sort of thing from YouTube, Grow with Jen, Air Connects, and Air Table. So there's just been so many amazing pieces of this day. But now I've gotten all that out of the way, we can talk about what we're doing, what I'm going to share with you. So I think it's no secret that I think about software may be a little different than most people. When I think about my base, my base is really fundamentally runs all my life, but it also connects to my business. It also connects to my family, it connects to my friends, you know, my base really is the platform for which I kind of make my moment by moment decisions. So I'm not going to go through my base because it would be really overwhelming. This is just the what I call the wizard in the base that kind of shows you the different tables that are in my base and how they function and what they do, what the purpose is, so I have a table for my tables, but it also allows you to access those tables so you can start to create routines. Instead, I'm going to share with you guys a little presentation I put together about why I think about the stuff, the way I do, and maybe you'll find something here that helps you think about your life a little bit different, maybe you'll find something here that helps you think about, you know, anything really. I think there's going to be a lot in here for everyone. I call the presentation building a valued based life using software from love and support to the world. And that's because I think it's fundamentally possible that we can do that. Humans by their very nature are tool makers and tool users. I don't see a separation between technology and humankind. I don't think we have a world run by polarized people. I think we have a world run by less inspired software and just people who have given up. And I think tools like Airtable can help us start to see the difference there. For my little talk today, it's going to be real quick, it's only about 20 minutes. I'm going to go for the real quick introduction of who I am in case you don't know, how I thought about designing my base, the functionality of my base that just at a high level gives me the accessibility of my base because I think it's really important about how you get in and use this data and also the future of bases. When I think about introducing myself, I'm one of those strange people that have like I give good Google search. So I always hope if you just Google most connected, my name comes right up. But my life actually started back in 1968. I was born the same year the internet got started. And from that time to 1988, the first 20 years of my life, I was heavy into computers. I started helping my dad with computers in 1978, helping him build a Lotus spreadsheet on DOS to keep track of all the people who were his customers. From 1988 to 2008, my life was really exciting. I did a lot with software. I was at WebMD early when WebMD got started. A couple of big software startups, just you name it, it was there. But the problem was my life got kind of unhealthy quickly. And that just means I just was overeating. I was constantly angry. And the software wasn't helping me as much as it used to. And it wasn't actually making my life or any of the people around me much better. From 2008 to 2020, this is where most people kind of know me. Like, so from that time, I kind of got the name, the moniker, the most connected person in the world. You can just Google most connected. My name comes up in every country with just those two words. My goal is to kind of someday just have the most, like you just use the word most and Google that and I'll come right up. But this period of time for me has been really important because it's really helped me solidify the parts of me that are a good human and the parts of me that maybe need help. I mean, I don't think help whether you wear glasses or a hearing aid or you're using a chip to somehow make your life better. Help us help. And what defines the difference between humanity and technology is how we use the tool. The tools don't make us cyborgs. Cyborgs is what we do with the tool. And I think it's really important we start to differentiate that because when I think about what the world looks like over the next 20 years after this decade or a now 2028 to 2068, it's radically different. And it's going to be shaped by people like us who came to this conference, who made a commitment to each other, who didn't know each other, who used tools, donated prizes and supported each other to make things that could really heal the world. And I believe we can do that. When I think about design, I had to think about, well, what is life? Like if you're going to design technology for life, what is it? For me, if I go back and I look at the systems I used to build for myself, it was really about unifying these four main areas of my life. Everything from the social media I post to the food I ate, to the money I spent, moving that into a repository of information which ended up being Google Calendar. And a lot of people, if you Google me, I've got a show on Netflix right now called DarkNet, you can see how I thought about just seeing my life and times through the data I collected. Unfortunately, the database I was using, the Google Calendar, wasn't very adaptable, which only allowed me to fix certain processes in my life. Yes, it fixed my life, but I couldn't fix all of it that quickly. But it led me to this greater realization that if all life is technology, then all technology is really a time machine. But what is time? I feel that time is really a values machine. When 2017, when I started thinking about moving, I'd been playing around with the air table for a little bit, and I was thinking about moving large portions of my business to air table. At this time, I created this diagram you see where I could start to say, well, how do my customers interact with me? Because I do a lot of consulting and speaking. And how do my publisher and other people? And at that same time, I thought, wait a minute, this should actually connect to my life. If I have a database managing my business, it really should integrate with my life. But what's strange, life was the smallest part of this whole puzzle. And it got me thinking to myself, how do I go ahead and make something more profoundly connected in air table that could actually start to manage my life, but also think about how I was expressing my values? And then that made me think, what do you do with values? Do values belong in a database? Do you really need to put your personal values or ethics or priorities into technology? Yes, you do. That's half the reason we're in the problem we're in right today is because we don't put values and ethics in technology. We just don't. It's as if it's an afterthought. You know, ethics and values aren't a feature. They're the things we need to put in technology. So I define values as the beliefs and experiences that inform our life moment by moment. Values are firm and they also don't change day to day, year to year. Values don't trend. All right. And I think it's really important we start to say these things out loud and also values collectively are how your life is defined and how you govern the connections to other technology people in the world. And I mean this, if you're listening to me now, think about that. You don't have to follow everyone and you don't have to have this amazing presence on the internet. You just have to have amazingly good connections, just a few. You only need one spark to start a fire. You only need one good friend to heal yourself. So when I built my value system, it was really about coming in here and saying, well, what are my values? In an air table, I listed them as things like health, home, family, work, financial, and then finally service. Service was a super important value for me to start to map because I wanted to show and start to commit to so much time back to the community. And I really think when you think about values, values are now. Values, and it's very definition of the word of what you do with your time now. Because the moment by moment you're expressing them, which leads you to the question, what is now? When I had to think about this when I was building this presentation for you guys, I had to think now is what you're feeling, now is what you're loving, now is what you're fearing, now is the future, now is the past. And that means that if that's what now is, then I'm on now. That means I'm a record. And this record or an air table really started with me. It was about how do I start to define myself and all the things that connect to me as a human in air table? But I had to go further than just me. I had to think about if now is me, then now is also love. Because that's something I really strive for. And there's a great saying by a mathematician I like, Richard Tappy. And he says, we don't know how to measure what we care about. So we care about what we measure. So the next thing I had to do on my air table was I had to list all the things I cared about. My husband, Fernando, my dog, Sonny, my cat, Luna, my dog, Rocket, and my company. These are all entities. These are pieces of my life that are so important to me. And they need to have the same type of love and diligence and protection from all the other technological systems that we deal with every day. So I would encourage you to after you think about your values with air table, whether it's the outcomes in your business, the outcomes in your life, those values, then attach them to the people and things you really care about. Maybe it's your customer, maybe it's your dog, maybe it's your friends. And then you'll really have a solid base. Because from there, once you've defined these values and you've attached them to something, then you can start connecting to different things. You know, when I think about how you connect at that point, the world really becomes amazing because all these great solutions you see on air table take on a new meaning. It's not just an invoicing system. It's something much more profound. It's not just a, you know, a scheduling system. It's a way that you meet with your doctor or your physician. So when I was working on this, I had to think about the first part. So the first part of the tables that I built were really around after values and my family were about tasks, projects, goals, a place to keep records about myself and my thoughts, my journal, my inbox, requests from other people, a timeline and really important moments in my life. And then sitting on top of all of that, then I had room to create a base for people, people outside of my family, organizations, organizations outside of the ones I care about. From there, I actually then had room to think about how I spent my money. Right? Because we have our accounts, our bank accounts and our credit cards, and we have our bills. But they kind of just take control of us instead of us controlling them. So knowing that my bills and my accounts flow through other organizations, through other people, into my inbox, into my timeline, and then finally down through my projects, finally down to me and then ultimately to my values, it was important that I had this base. And then once you kind of got all of that together, you could start to think about the bigger things in your life. Maybe it's the assets you own, your home, your favorite laptop, your car, right? Anything that's really important to you that shows value, it's a statement of what you've done with your time and your resources. And where do you store those things? The places those assets are. And even the applications and how those applications intersect with those assets. From there, it's you can really start to say, okay, I'm going to take care of this. I'm going to, maybe I can take care of my health. So many people start with health and there's so many other disparately broken processes in their life, right? Like your health is a great system, but man, if you've got bad friends, you can't fix it. Your friends need you to be unhealthy. That's their job, right? And it's hard because for us to start to get healthy and use data to do that, we really have to think about what are the dependencies to that? Are there businesses that are charging me more than I need to or selling me food that's not as healthy? And then finally, ultimately, if you've got all your stuff together, maybe you can do some business, right? So for me, it's my product management, my CRM and my marketing. And I topped all this with something I called Maker Kit. And then my Maker Tables are really the, a wizard that shows you where all the tables are and then a blank template. So whenever I want to create a new table, I just duplicate it and then everything's automatically linked to it. Today, when I look at my system, like I started to you guys earlier, it's very easy for me to see these tables and see how they're connected and how everything works. But I had to go further. I had to be about the process, right? So what are the process that go through my life? Well, if you look at this chart, you'll start to see that all of the tables in my air table actually have a relationship to each other. My assets, things like me, my husband, our pets, our health, our home, our money are intrinsically linked to our liabilities, our bills, the organizations and people we owe money to, which are intrinsically linked to the revenue we make, right? And that could be the tools and things that I sell or my husband's school that he teaches at. But all that sits on top of our planning and that would be our values, our goals and our projects for the year. And then the record keeping, tables for documents, tables for apps and places, and a table for ledger. And your banking and credit card transactions should all be in your base too. Every dollar you spend should be tied to what you value. If not, you didn't spend it. It was taken from you. And I think we need to start talking about that. And we did talk about these links because Facebook didn't make us products. We did. We didn't think about what it was like to have friends and not subscriptions. And it's time we reversed this paradigm shift because we can do this. I believe in the power of people and technology. And then finally you've got simple things like actions. Like when someone emails you, what happens to that? When someone text messages you, that's like an inbox. Those become tasks. And life is not worth anything unless you have a moment where you can reflect and look back at your life and timeline. See, I want people to see now spend time differently because it's about spending time differently. So let's talk about time differently. If you think about your day and your database life, you've got things you're doing all the time. You're thinking, you're being, you're doing, you're planning, you're living, you're thriving. But that's interestingly a line to a timeline that we never talk about. Thinking happens spontaneously. You don't have any choice over it. Being happens daily. Like you just have to go through life. Doing is usually a monthly thing. Planning is usually quarterly. Living is usually yearly and thriving. But how those things then relate, those are either self-directed, you've had something happen to you thought of something or something happened to you. So suddenly you start to see that as the data flows through your life out to all these connections, there is a process for timing. Because a lot of people when they're working with records think about, well, when does this need to happen? Not everything needs to be scheduled. Some things just need to exist. So I want you to have this mantra in your head. Don't save time, spend it right. Seriously, don't save time. Everyone I know is saving time and no one's spending it on anything in the future. There's no future vacation club you can spend your time at. So stop saving it. Just spend it right. And I know you know what I mean. An air table allows you to do that. So let's talk about some functions in my life. So something really simple. We'll take all the little tables I use. So what is bill pay? Well, bill pay is a task to pay a bill tied to a bill tied to money I've got to spend that gets recorded in the ledger that then increases my assets or decreases my liability for my assets. That's bill pay. Bill pays five tables in a process that runs through it. How about something else? What's a new customer? Someone reaches out to me and says, we want to hire you to consult. I just did a big event for bear pharmaceuticals in Switzerland before the pandemic. All right. Well, gosh, a customer like bear comes over and asks you to do something or Fitbit or any of the other big companies I've done stuff for. You got to react, right? So that usually starts with an email in your inbox which then ties you to some new people you don't know which then ties you to their organization which then allows you to access your CRM and move them into your business processes which then creates a bunch of new tasks that you then have to manage tied to that process. But then there's intimate parts of data. What about my dog Rocket who just had to go for her vet shots the other day? She just turned one, right? You've got the entity. There's Rocket as an entity, a main database figure. I've got a task to take Rocket once a year. It's a reoccurring task. It's tied to my vet, Dr. Rocky, right? And then that's tied to his Klein Animal Hospital which is then tied to an update in Rocket's health record. So I can see it at Clance when the last time Rocket was vaccinated and I can also see when was the last time she went. What flea and tick drops is she on? How many times has Dr. Rocky emailed me about Rocket? All those types of things. It's really about Wikipedia is great there should be a Wikipedia for you, right? So learn your life. But when we think about Airtable, a lot of people sometimes get stuck with like, well, how do I make it accessible? There's like all these tables and things. I don't have that many tables. For me, accessibility is really about just using it the way it works for you. For me, most of the time I use Airtable, I'm in a Chrome browser and a browser with a couple tabs open by 90% of the time and 60% of my data gets entered that way. I don't really use the Mac app. The rest of the time, I'm really doing some automation. So about 20% of my data and 0% of my time comes in through emails and calendar appointments that automatically get created in my data. So I have access to them. But then I also have embeds. So I've created a mini website on my own personal website that's behind a password. This allows me to have a single place to go where I can do my journal entries. I can do my tasks and do my inboxes. If I speak to someone on the phone, I can put them right in my system. I don't have to jump around from table to table to table. It's really about creating a centralized repository for me to access or my spouse or any of my providers. My CPA has her own portal based on my life that she interacts with. In this portal, we also have views for our tasks and our goals so that everyone in my life who's intimately connected to me can see where we are and how we're doing on these things. But also I love to use my phone. So I've created these little micro apps I call them. I use Siri Tasks and you can actually create a little shortcut which then launches into a form. So I've got forms for my journal, for my task entries and my inbox and allows me to quickly get into anything I want to do throughout the day. So it's really, really cool stuff. So that's kind of the data of me. But once you've got your data in your system, then you have to say, well, what's next? On this accessibility pyramid, we then have to say, well, how does data turn into anything meaningful? Well, with Airtable, we've got these things called ops or apps or blocks. And that's where your data actually starts to take on deeper meaning on the level that I call information. And information is a collected, summarized view of your life. It's how you would understand something more about what you're doing. Information is really the access to your data now. Because your data now on its own doesn't do a whole lot. But when it's coalesced and put through a certain filter, it does. And then you've got the next level. Once you kind of get used to that and like looking at your data, you've got this idea of knowledge. Knowledge is really how information gets applied to data. So in my case, I've got a block for how many days are left in the year or how many days are left on a specific goal. And then how that's related to my health and or values. But I also am able to sort my bills by values. So for example, every single bill I have, every single transaction I have is tied to what part of my life. So in this case, I spend almost a majority of my money servicing other people because it's what I value. And I should be able to see that. If I look at my time budget, 60% of my time is in service to other people. It's because I want to value. And that's what I want to do. And this is the type of thing you can start to do with Airtable. Airtable isn't a tool to fix your business. It's an Airtable to fix your life because you can't manage what you can't see. And I think it's so important that we start thinking about that. And finally, we've got wisdom. You know, my Airtable has records going back to the very beginning of my life. I can see what house I've lived in, how big it was, how those houses have changed my income, how people that have come in of my life have changed my health. And I can see it all on a very, very specific dashboard built to me understanding the long patterns in my life because wisdom is access to feelings. And using your data to do that is really the last kind of hurdle in a lot of what we're talking about. When I think about the future, I'd like to think about how we could start to make what I've done accessible to more people. You know, the calendar is where I started and the calendar is where I'd like to head back to. Today's calendars are hard. They're just there. They're relentless. They're not giving us any help. And they're really about things we have to do now. But when we think about it, calendars are so much more than now. They're the things that have happened in the past, things that will happen in the future, the things that happen all the time, and the things that are always happening. Calendars really are our legacy, but we don't use them that way. We use them as really awkward task managers. So what I want to do is help people start to think about Airtable and their time in a way that makes it more profound. Because I think we need to stop valuing our schedules and we need to start scheduling our values. And this isn't hard to do. We just have to know what's important and start right there. It can be hard in a world that's so fast and overwhelming. But I promise you, if I can do it, you can too. You know, traditional calendars for the last 400 years have been kind of holding us back. Modern calendars have been all about making sure we got to work. But if there's one thing this pandemic has taught us, is modern calendars don't work in a world where there's no time. They don't. So I want to think about what a new calendar would look like. If you could see all your time and all time, all of your life and how it's connected to the beginning of the universe, to the day you pass away and your kids take over loving you. Because I think if we could reimagine how that data could be visualized, accessed, and articulated, but each one of us, the planet wouldn't be hurting. People wouldn't be feeling ignored. Data is just an opportunity to love more. I really believe that. So I want to build time travel systems. I want to build systems that allow us to go back to the past and to the future. Systems that align us to our human potential and our human caring for each other for the rest of time. I want to build systems from now and forever. But this talk is going to end with now. Right now, what can you do? Right now, I'd like anybody who's still watching this today or on the internet in a week or a month or a year, I want you to spend at least 10% of your error table time building something for someone else. 10%. Take a half an hour a day, find someone who needs something, and build them something. We can feed people, but we have to start to heal them with any tools we can. If we go out to Air Table Universe right now, there are so many solutions for community support, COVID. There's my solution. There's so much that people have done to help each other for free. They instantly transform and heal people. We've had so many examples of that today. We need to start building tools for we, not for me. And we need to do this and make it part of our everyday values. And also, the next and last thing you can do is, you know, seek help if you need it, right? I'm here now. I'm here to help you on your journey. I end every single video I've ever been invited to do with. My phone number's on the internet. You can call me. My email's out there. I will help you do anything from write a formula to build a base to walk you through a breakup. Because I believe in you. I believe in your potential. You can read my book if you'd like. It's been out for a couple of years. It's called Donon Plug, How Technology Saved My Life and Can Save Yours Too. I have an app I just released called Our Balance. You can find it in the Android Play Store or the iPhone App Store. Our Balance is a mutual well-being app. So it allows you to see how you and all your friends are doing, but not individually, anonymously rolled up. It's about caring for each other as much as we care for ourselves. And by the end of the year, I'll be releasing what I just showed you today, the now air table base, so that you can start to manage your life. And my next book, The Art of Appiness, 10 Rules for the 2020s, will be out also by that time. Because I think it's time we measure only what we value. So with that, now is our time. I believe it because the only thing that can be a bad system is a better system. Thank you.