 Hey everyone, Chris Dancy here and I'm excited that you came to this video, Building Heart-Centered Apps, Episode 1, Loving Your Best Life. In this video, we're going to have a brief introduction of me. We're going to talk about why build heart-centered apps, what heart-centered apps are, how to get started, some examples. There are actually five different types of heart-centered apps. Everything from building an app for yourself to get to know yourself, to building app to help your community and then finally the future of heart-centered apps. Let's get started. Welcome to the Mindful Cyborg, a series of videos, talks, thoughts and content about living in hyper-connected times. Your host, Chris Dancy, known as the world's most connected person, will guide you through how to live more fully connected by your values, not your settings. Place yourself in airplane mode and welcome the mindful cyborg himself, Chris Dancy. Apps, Episode 1, Loving Your Best Life. I said Episode 1 because we're having another one of these next month and we're having one every month until we change the world. Probably not, but that's my goal. And what do I mean by that? I mean next week or next month when we do this, we're going to be having three people come on and talk about three different solutions they've built that changed either themselves, their community, building these heart-centered technologies. But more importantly, we are having a call for speakers. So if you've built something cool on air table that you think really helps maybe define yourself, your community, but supports a group of people, what I would call heart-centered apps, let me know. And I would love to get you on to actually show what you've built. The agenda today is going to be pretty straightforward. I've got like five main things. The first thing is why heart-centered apps. Second thing is what a heart-centered app. What will make more sense second? How do you get started if you've never built one? Some examples of heart-centered apps and then basically the future of heart-centered apps. The goal for today is very simply to inspire you to create differently with air table. Today's webinar is actually dedicated to Jordan Scott. First, a little bit of an introduction. Think to understand my relationship with air table. You have to understand my relationship with technology. Now see, I'm one of these kids who as you can see here in 1984 loved computers. I had an IBM Tandy in my room. Does anybody remember those? I drove a Ford pickup truck in the 80s and I dressed like Michael Jackson. Quickly got a job at the age of 15 where I basically lied about being 16 so I could work on computers from age 23 1991 through the year 2000. I did all sorts of database work in a little company called WebMD. From there I moved over to database work at the age of 31 and from 31 until now I'm 55. But no, from that point until now I basically built and installed some of the biggest technology. Ever been to the White House or the State Department? I installed their IT system. I did a lot and it all came from these IT service management solutions and it was this education of logging tickets and tying them to people that really taught me about the power of saying these problems go with these people. But some of the things that came to me and I first started rethinking and reshaping my mind about heart centered technology came from this period of time. From there things got a little hectic for me. Around 2006, 2007 I gained a bunch of weight, gotten a little bit of trouble. My technology career is doing really well but my health was actually tanky. By the time I turned 40 in 2008 I was on two different heart medications, two different antipressants. I weighed 320 pounds. I drank 36 cans of Diet Coke. I've been in jail a couple of times for DUI. I've been to rehab. What could I do to make a heart centered app? Because all the technology in my life knew about me but I didn't know about it. I wasn't using the same principles in the technology to get to know myself. What could happen if I put a database together where everything about me in my life and my relationships went into something in real time? This first system was built on Google Calendar. Each day had thousands of micro appointments in it. What were these micro appointments? They were everything from what I ate to how many steps I took to who I talked to. All this automation in my life at that time didn't go unnoticed. Really simple things one view of my calendar was things I did but another view of my calendar was things that happened to me. For example if I said something on social media and people got really kind of animated by it. If I spent a lot of time in 2009 binging Netflix which people do a lot nowadays I suddenly saw my productivity go down. If I was really nasty on Yelp but a lot of people liked it when I was nasty I was really nasty in real life. What I found was this relationship this mirroring of who I am what was important to me became really instrumental understanding how I use technology different. I took all of this data from my life put it in Mazzo's hierarchy of needs every single app and service and device I used created these views for myself on this automation and this automation allowed me to stop drinking how I treated myself because if I spoke too loud the lights would dim in my house. Today my house is actually automated over time so not only did my computers dim throughout the day but the music and the house changes the temperature changes and the house also changes from season to season. But what about today this is about Airtable what does all that have to do with Airtable? It has everything to do with it because when I think about what it's like to build heart-centered apps this is how I came to this realization. If you go to Google right now and just put a most connected you'll see me hundreds of videos about me I've done a TED talk there are five TED talks about me which is even crazier been on the cover of magazines I have a book in bookstores and I've done work for some of the coolest companies in the world. See I wanted to solve the biggest problem we all face today when building heart-centered apps and that is simply we don't know how to measure what we care about so we care about what we measure and that's fundamentally our opportunity as designers in Airtable because we get to decide what gets measured and what's important so why heart-centered apps? See to me when I look at the way we've developed technology we seem to be recreating the same problems over and over and over again we design apps around processes we don't make them actually accessible to the types of things that are important to people we give the user preferences but the preferences we decide so if we were to think about what we could do to stop repeating these mistakes we'd actually build heart-centered apps differently. I think technology's focus has really shifted up until about 10 years ago I think most of our technology was shifted towards and focused toward us yet today if we look at some of the problems in the world we'll see that technology is really starting to focus on all of us so if you think about Matso's hierarchy of needs historically until about 2020 all of the technology we're using really was personal technology like the iMac you know the purse the pc things like that but yet over the last 10 years I'd say it started sometime in 2012 you started seeing what I call population technology everything from how social medias scaled affects how we design software and how we should be designing it finally the last reason why we should build heart-centered apps is we must understand that technology is shaping us and that means we need to be active in that shaping if I look around at the world today I really see two groups of people team one who are very kind of more self-centered entitled and then team two people who are very kind of overwhelmed and feeling out of control and I'm sure some of you guys know what I'm talking about and this is because the way we use technology the preferences we enable easier ways we make technology shape to us ends up shaping us I always say if it's good or easy but it can't be both and I think it's really important that we start to talk about what makes the difference and how do we do that some of the most scariest things we see aren't chat GPT or AI it's the way that people just don't think about how they're using their technology so what are heart-centered apps heart centered apps connect people to their values and align to the to the needs of a community for a greater mutual good I think that is so elegant and so simple and with that design philosophy whether you're doing a blog a website or building a CRM I think you'll start to see that things are differently because it puts into focus two fundamental differences that we don't think about when we think about technology that's our values aligning and mutual good so we think about traditional no-code app or traditional app versus a heart-centered one you'll start to see this very clearly a traditional app creates a sense of ownership whereas a heart-centered app creates a sense of community a traditional app connects people to processes whereas a heart-centered app connects people to purpose traditional focuses on automation a heart-centered would focus on cooperation a traditional app would focus on making visible metrics a heart-centered one would make visible values and then it would align to responsibility when in a traditional mode but align to accountability when in heart-centered mode now look at these two listen think about them very carefully because definitely traditional no-code apps are built this way they're all about who owns it do I have something to do right now do I have a process I have to finish your automate do I have to like make something happen so that no one knows it's happening in the background what metrics are we doing or not doing today who's responsible for this it's really kind of a lot of pressure but you could rebuild that same application through a sense of communal purpose values accountability I think it's just such a different way and I'll give you some great examples of this there are five types of heart-centered apps the first one is a know yourself these types of apps are the easiest to use because there's not a lot of pressure on you to get them done quickly or you probably might have a heart-centered app level one you might be using a journaling tool right now for yourself or a tool to measure your food or track your finances you probably have something but it's probably missing one of those sections we just talked about level two is a little bit more difficult that's where you take those same principles and you support someone else level three is kind of the middle ground and that's where you not only support them but you empower a group of people at you empower a group of people you can connect them so they can empower each other that's level four and level five is where you take all of that power and all those amazing principles I'm going to show you some examples of and you elevate a marginalized community so basically you're taking the power of technology to spread your love out through the world so how do you get started with heart-centered apps like where do you go first well there's three ways the first is become inspired right now in the air table universe there are literally hundreds of air table templates that I would call heart-centered advancing women in agriculture to mental health awareness indie women leaders to a justice hub the problem is they're kind of buried under all these other applications that help you automate your marketing routines again I have no problem with automating your marketing routines but I honestly believe the world has bigger problems the second thing that you want to do is select your tool set my favorite tool to use with air table is something called Miro Miro is just a big whiteboard but I think it's really important to have some type of tool that allows you to get your thoughts out there outside of air table and air table is amazing interface designer having a front-end web portal of some type I personally like Pory why do I like Pory two young ladies down in Australia a small little dev shop and last but not least strike now why would you talk about a money app with a heart-centered app at some point you're going to have to get more support into your heart-centered solution whether it be donations or helping people in different ways strike using strike payment links is a great way to make your solutions financially viable so making it real is really where the rubber hits the road and there are six steps to making your first heart-centered app real before I give you some examples the first one is find a challenge find something that is in your area that you might be struggling with step two in making it real is find a partner I made a few mistakes when I first started doing heart-centered apps I built my first one the one on my life by myself I had no idea what I was doing and I had no objectivity about what was important and what wasn't step three like I said before get your tools in order at least have a white boarding tool and a database tool or some type of no code tool step four is the most critical step of all six and that's help just one person so build your solution don't roll it out find one person and see if it can help that one person so often we'll do these like you know test to see you know does this form work can all these you know can all these people no no no just see if you can get one person from need help to help once you've done that scale the process then you do the normal stuff and then finally share the results you need to like share your results show how these solutions are actually impacting people so let's show some examples of heart-centered apps right now know yourself support another empower others connect communities or elevate the marginalized I actually have developed one of every one of these so the first one I'm going to talk about today is know yourself I went from being single from 2014 until 2018 to getting married see I took all the things I learned about my life and decided to say what would be different if I were to start over and challenge with dare tables how do I make my entire life easy to understand as easy as a simple picture but more than anything make sure that the things that are important to me are the things I'm focusing on because that means I needed something to actually help me decide moment to moment how I would spend my time see I don't save time I spend it right the first time and it's a fundamentally different way to think because how you make decisions to moment to moment come from a set of things inside you we call values values drive what you're doing priorities can direct your attention but they don't drive your decisions so I just sit down and kind of map out my whole life and my partner's life challenge was I knew that life would have some ups and downs now some of you might not have herms of the homes raw life stress inventory but this is a simple test that anyone can take on the internet but what it'll tell you very quickly is if you're probably going to have significant problems in your life you'll see that at 300 points or more 80% will have a health breakdown so the five things we kind of looked at were health home relationships job finance and death so from there I went ahead and built these tables in my air table and these tables really were going to be focused on all the ways we would get to know ourselves and each other but also be able to help focus on people what we're doing the first table I build in every heart centered app is a table of our tables the second thing was we had to take all of those tables then we had to think about what are the processes in our lives like we have assets we own we have revenue that we make from our jobs we have plans that we're making we have record keeping we need to do where do these tables live and understanding that helped us start to fundamentally shape out what was important and last but not least we had to build the system itself so the first part of the system we called value kit value kit helped us our family all of our pets and businesses our actual values so we actually define those put guardrails in so now when there's an automation it goes against the value of certain things don't trigger if value isn't been set because if it's not aligned to your value probably shouldn't happen and that could be everything from how you spend your money to how you spend your time to what emails you answer or don't answer health and even timeline the next system we built was task kit so that system was super important to help us understand what we were going to focus on what goals we were going to set what tasks the next system was called money kit that included the people in our lives the organizations we worked with our financial accounts our bills our transactions there's lots of applications to sync these types of things the next one was called asset kit which had our documents our physical assets where they're kept the apps we use business kit which had our two works and businesses all the different things we needed to run that and then these kits and tables actually started helping us by stringing them together and running our life through that so if you think about a new customer if you're a small business there's ways that that works through the process if you think about shots for your dog there's ways that works so sunny's the entity the task is a quarter of the or yearly vet shots the people would be the vet the organization would be the organization's vet and the health of the updated health rep so as you can see it gave us a way to start to string these things together first major update to heart centered apps integrated with our friends and family and our calendars so we created a form where our friends and family could fill out this form at any point and and put in their favorite memory of us like maybe we all went out think of it as like a survey but for the people you love and we'd all be able to collectively record those types of things we also then made this template of our timeline available to any of our friends or family in a calendar feed where we could start to see yearly the things that our family had done and participated in just really beautiful and lovely we then built a map where all of these forms could actually be visualized in 2020 we did our first family dashboard where we could actually come in and click on these important memories for our family but more importantly see the types of things that we all were working on so we just weren't in our own kind of applications and silos by 2021 I rolled out dashboards to my providers so my doctor my lawyer my cpa they all have their own portals into my life and then finally step four was actually making all this visible on a new website that people can browse that are close to me this was remarkable because it allowed us all to finally come around and talk about what was important with our apps the system has been amazing since 2018 allowed me to build care table and so let's talk about the next one as you know losing your job can be scary and I found a lot of people on my life over the pandemic we're losing jobs so I thought to myself well I've done a really good job at helping me that's phase one how could I help someone else so I built something called flair table so flair table is the system that I built and I create a portal for people to be able to share their work my first customer is probably Molly Cain so Molly is an amazing person she's got such a robust history but Molly like a lot of us she's a rebel she doesn't maybe do the best job of making like her values and what she does her businesses front and center for people so what we did with Molly was we went ahead and said how do we make Molly's career up front so we wanted to create a front end web portal that was also our portfolio so what we did again using porian air table and mirror and all those other tools we created this great robust front end for Molly where she could manage her entire career air table she could put the current project she's working on but more importantly she could come in here and see her career and log anything out so when I say log anything out this is where I think flair table really made a huge difference for her because what we did was we created a form called the accountability engine so what this is is it gave me Molly the ability anytime anyone said or did anything to her that made her uncomfortable to be able to log it see I think a lot of times people feel bad but they have no way of actually dealing with either it's not right in that moment now if you're not safe get out but there's no way to really capture them in a moment and I wanted flair table to kind of be your HR department in the world I'll let you know this it has been remarkably supportive everybody who's used flair table and used this function it's actually had just phenomenal results I had one friend of mine named Peggy who has a flair table she was recently let go of a company she was at for almost a decade before she didn't know what she would do because her flair table is there she had a job within a week so we even we've settled one HR dispute and I've got four people using it full time right now so super cool level to empower others so how would you go ahead and power another and that's what I call compare table because we're talking about and empowering others it's really about taking these resources and now I was asked by the US Army in 2021 to go ahead and help with the resiliency directorate now if you don't know the US Army and a lot of the armed services have some really big challenges not the types of challenges you might think of we're talking about human challenges whether it be sexual assault depression suicide drug abuse there are some things that are just so difficult going on in the armed forces and they came to me and said Chris can you help us by doing a presentation and creating some tools for other people so I knew right away that I had to create something kind of different I was like well this is much bigger than one person this is a whole group of people and using resources how would I even structure something for the US Army that would handle such heavy topics so I knew it had to be a directory type of listing I knew people had to be able to submit things to it and I knew it had to be able to integrate reviews and comments so what I did was I built something called the habit store now the habit stores public now you can go to the habit store.io I think it's the public version of the habit store but the first version of the habit store was actually built for the US Army and what we did with the habit store was we allowed people to put their favorite tips tricks applications suggestions anything they did to deal with certain problems so if you were feeling anxious and you had an application or a habit or a practice that you could do you could log it so it became this real time and it is right now if you go to habit store.io there's real time searchable database of feelings so you're feeling mad filtered by mad it would show you all different things that people have suggested you could say I'm feeling mad and I need an app I'm feeling mad and I need a podcast I'm feeling mad I need a podcast and a practice and it gave them this robust amazing way to get so much more out of their lives I'm really proud of the habit store I would have never thought of building feelings as a filter into an application but that's where heart centered apps really comes into play connecting communities I built share table at the beginning of the pandemic I was in Walt Disney World we were thrown out of Walt Disney World not because we did anything bad but because they closed the park on the way home I didn't want to fly I was hurt out of Caroline and getting sick we drove and I built an application coming back the problem was in my neighborhood where I lived at that point we were in an older neighborhood so most of the people in my neighborhood were over 70 they were living alone it was a really really really beautiful neighborhood but I knew that the pandemic might cause some challenges for us especially as they were closing stores as you guys remember from the beginning so how do I do something different but now unlike the army allow people to collaborate with each other so what we did there was we built a resource directory of everything that people had in the neighborhood and these could be medical supplies they could be skills we had nurses retired nurses and doctors in the neighborhood people with skills people who know how to fix things because for a good two months when we're locked down we couldn't get people to come and do things whether it be electrical work in from the system we allow the neighborhood to start collecting and supporting each other people would submit a form and say I need someone to go grocery shopping or I need someone to come helping with my dog or I need someone to come look at my furnace the neighborhood would then get those alerts people in the neighborhood say I'll come over and help with it it helped neighbor to neighbor and it was phenomenal we really focused on three main areas making it accessible making it safe and giving our neighborhood a culture of preparedness because other than the pandemic we also had problems with floods and other types of things if you've ever seen some of the problems I have going on in Texas you know what I'm talking about but we had really simple bright forms so they were easy for people to understand we had charts and graphs that people would come in and see what was going on the logging was tied addresses because everybody's addresses were in the tax records so if I tie them to maps so the people can kind of see what's going on we even allowed the local constable that's what we call the place in Texas to be able to see real-time help this allowed us to really create kind of an entire neighborhood that helped each other but more than anything it allowed us to put a front end on this so we created an FAQ about our neighborhood how we help each other and why you want to live there or not live there and I believe helped increase the value of the houses it actually got picked up by air table and next door it's now I can't tell you how many content I think it's in three different continents hundreds of cities have adopted last thing I'm going to talk about for heart centered apps for an example is elevate the marginalized I was online a couple years ago and I saw this person share please book your speakers for for black history month before black history month so I sent her a message privately and I said hey what are you doing with this and she sent me back a message that I got a spreadsheet with 20 people in it and I want to be able to match people to speakers for black history month so I wrote it back and said send me that spreadsheet set a timer for 20 minutes 20 minutes later I sent her back black speakers so what black speakers was again was a database and air table with a great front end tied to specific topic areas that people could speak about with an easy button to link to people's profiles or you could book and get them paid right then and there I thought this was so easy and so disruptive and it literally took about 20 minutes we put a front end on it about a day later we said this is amazing and we went ahead and put it out into the world what black speakers did was it instantly made not the 20 speakers she had when she's when she handed this to me but it created in a week over 200 black speakers it's now over 2000 black speakers and it's been expanded from black speakers to black executives so again it was covered by fortune and Forbes again really simple tools thought about through a lens of shared mutual good and where our values aligned so hopefully that gave you some really great examples about how you can think about air table applications for yourself for your community for other people in ways that you might not have thought of before so what's the future of heart centered apps well that's up to you I've seen some people who've created amazing things but with the air table community I think it's really important to start setting an example that you can do more with air table so with that I am searching for you we've got three speakers coming up for next month in March but I'm looking for speakers from April and May and June and with that our next event is going to be on March 9th at 10 and with that I've going to go ahead and thank you guys and open up to Q&A