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  • Hello everyone and welcome back to the Keep productive YouTube channel, it is francesco here

  • And today we're very lucky to be joined by Daniel Eckler now me and Daniel were just talking

  • I just get to know him

  • Camille from the notion team and he recommended that I definitely get in touch with them after asking her

  • some of the tools that I wanted to sort of get involved in the new Tube channel more tours more interesting setups and motion and

  • apparently

  • Daniels blows everyone away. So I'm excited to dive into this notion

  • Daniel please do introduce yourself and a bit about your work

  • Yeah

  • Founded in sold a few consumer technology companies have spent my career kind of at the intersection of

  • Technology and art and design and culture

  • So the first company I founded was a blog network for men's fashion and lifestyle

  • cruda, five million readers a year

  • Pictures of jackets and shoes and all sorts of stuff like that

  • We quickly learned that we had positioned it as a magazine, but no one wanted to read what we were writing

  • they just wanted to see the pictures and

  • We took that insight and said why don't we form a community that enables anyone to curate images and form community around that?

  • So essentially Pinterest before Pinterest just called pixie

  • Sold the previous company built up pixie to 35 million visitors a year did the whole DC circuit?

  • Eventually Pinterest did launch got enormous

  • Number two, so kind of automated pixie slow that off

  • Spent some time in the marketing industry and anomaly and BuzzFeed

  • Really just realizing that what I'm about to do most is

  • Just come up with ideas

  • Having run companies and focused on one idea for 10 years as

  • Opposed to in the marketing world you get to do five ideas a day

  • Was really really exciting transition for me and it's kind of informing the work that I'm doing today

  • So yeah kind of in a transition period right now thinking about what to do next and probably

  • Taking all the lessons

  • I've learned from the technology world and Mark world - how other people come up with cool

  • viral ideas to promote their businesses

  • fantastic and and Camille particularly

  • what like mentioned your creative brainstorming process and and I think that will obviously from all of the learnings from

  • those previous businesses be able to reflect in the notion a

  • question about notion

  • How did you?

  • Discover notion and why did you go about choosing it? Because I think sometimes there's a lot of modular apps out there

  • But which why did you decide to go with this one?

  • Sure

  • Designer developer named Corey Gibbons referred it to me

  • We share a lot of the same brain and interests and took his reference with a lot of weight

  • That said I still didn't try it for six months

  • Which I very much regret I'd encourage anyone today

  • If you're watching this and have not yet used notion to at least dive in and play around. Let's see if it's for you

  • It's the best - all I've ever used in my life. I'm obsessed with it

  • the primary reason that I use it is

  • Most of my work is kind of research and thinking and writing and organizing

  • And I've not found a tool that's even close to notion to allow me to do all those things

  • It's fast and minimal and simple and - as you mentioned modular allows me to kind of organize things and exactly the way I want

  • Yeah, it's just that I can't even imagine what life without it now

  • yeah, I'm the same like

  • You can't go back. Can you?

  • It's even harder

  • Well, I will pass over to you Daniel because you're gonna give us a little bit of a tour of your account

  • So let's jump in if you're if you're up for it

  • Lovely hopefully I've done there the right sharing settings. Oh, there we go. Well, it's great

  • So I spend I'm gonna put you up here I

  • Spend most of my day in these two windows

  • So the right window is kind of like my to-do-list, you know, that's the meetings. It's meeting with you

  • Meetings later today some things I want to do

  • As well as just like a scratch pad so, you know put some stuff that I want to take you through today

  • But throughout the day I'll just be typing random stuff in here

  • And always just using it. It's just a place to organize my thoughts and

  • Then on the other side, this is kind of a broader to-do list bigger projects

  • So actually you know what before we go there let's let's jump to maybe a pin another pin tab

  • So every morning I do

  • like a little morning routine thing and you'll notice here like this this this and this are all

  • different notion types that I use for different tasks

  • So half of my pin times are notion and to ask earlier, like why do you like it?

  • It's primarily for that reason if I could have all of my workflow be a notion. I'd be a very happy person

  • But yeah, so just every morning I kind of reflect and revisit kind of why I'm doing what I'm doing as I mentioned earlier like

  • Creating ideas and connected experience is really important to me helping other people do the same

  • And really pursuing like a person share with me this idea of idea foria

  • Just chasing ideas new ideas as opposed to you know, stuff like money and fame

  • I thought there's stuff in here, too

  • You know

  • Like I have my meditation and yoga just different stuff that I do throughout the day just keeps me grounded in the morning. I

  • Know hurry Asti on that vision area said you go about designing that in a separate application and then upload it as an image

  • Right. That's right. Yeah, if I could do it an ocean if there were some, you know simple image editing tools

  • That would be awesome and maybe one day there will be

  • Yeah, I guess just to see the workspaces so doing things you've seen that that's over here in

  • Progress I'll dig into a bit later. This is kind of like a flow for work that I'm doing right now. So

  • Maybe starting with strategy also use notion kind of as a wiki to just keep track of ideas and share those with other people

  • So the the company I'm working on right now is called space cadet

  • And the vision is to create other connected companies

  • and so

  • The problem that we're trying to solve is like innovations increasing and companies are having a hard time trying to keep up

  • And we believe that you know human progress is informed by

  • Experimentation and velocity the more experiments you do the faster. You do them the more likely you'll get a win

  • and you know

  • I won't go treated into this but just using this as a kind of an informative

  • reminder in the same way that the vision board reminds me personally what to focus on this helps remind

  • Me but also other people within the company

  • what we're doing in my

  • Testing and then that kind of leads into actual tasks coming out of that

  • So every quarter at the top here, I'll put like the three

  • big

  • Tasks so

  • You know continuing solve for exploration whether that's meditation or reading working on launching space-cadet and helping inspire ideas

  • and this just helps as an anchor to

  • Create new tasks and ensure they're lathering up to a broader vision and broader bigger goals

  • Every two weeks. I'll do like a little sprint to ensure that you know, I'm focused on the right stuff

  • Said I just look loads into like a process

  • Whereby, you know

  • I run through some things that have been happening in the past while and if they've been working and what I should focus on next

  • Those will turn into tasks that are here or I'll pull them from previous tasks

  • So you can see like there's a bunch of tasks here for example

  • lathering up to inspiring ideas

  • I'll do some work here as well. Alright, this this is more of a scratch pad these actually like I actually do work within these

  • So like I do in a weekly newsletter for creative technology, these are just a bunch of

  • You know things that I'm going to be posting in the near future just keeping notes and bookmarks in here

  • Or, you know a bigger project might be something like

  • We're trying to come up with something viral to launch and share the agency with the world

  • So we're coming up with an idea face two famous. Just a prototype. You can see in a moment my face will appear

  • And then over the course of a few different seconds

  • It'll take me three different celebrities all the way to looking like at least a Silverstone

  • So again

  • Using yeah using these just as actual work like doing actual work within these tasks

  • So, yeah, I guess when it comes, you know back to too focused on actual brainstorming part of those ideas

  • To actually come up with that idea. I think is the area that you'd probably like to focus on and more depth

  • So

  • Prior to to coming up with an idea like face two famous. I'll

  • Spend a bunch of time brainstorming

  • And so traditionally, you know, I'll create a new project. I

  • Have a template for those projects

  • And maybe I'll pop that over here and

  • Then this is quite extensive, but I'll go through it fast and then slow

  • Essentially this is just a series of prompts and resources to help me be creative and help me be strategic

  • So you can see it's quite long. There's a lot going on, but we'll go through it a bit more slowly

  • So I'll traditionally use this new project template in conjunction with work on the left so

  • this is almost like a

  • Process to focus on the different things that you see a lot there

  • So for example, well actually brought her to put it we use this thing called double diamond

  • Okay, which is

  • Just a framework for coming up with ideas

  • So that this stuff on the left is kind of like strategy the stuff on the right is creative

  • So if you you have you have a problem and you start by kind of diverging coming up lots of different ideas

  • exploring as much of it as you can doing a bunch of research and

  • then you kind of consolidate that research into different insights or opportunity areas and

  • Then you get you isolate like a few big opportunity areas and then use those as launching pads to be creative

  • So ID ate a bunch of ideas coming out of those respective

  • This is how might we use a standard thing a technology

  • Okay, we use this process and I'm loosely this takes you through that process so

  • You can see here. This is like the discovery phase and you work through what I've called bursts and

  • So maybe you start with breaking down the brief. So I have an example of that when we came up with

  • That face thing that I showed you earlier

  • The brief was oriented around something called synthetic media. So I don't know if your viewers are

  • Terribly familiar with all the deep fake stuff going on

  • Like face app turning you into an old person and that kind of stuff

  • I've been really excited by that so we thought you know how might we use personal inputs

  • To generate synthetic media that people want to share and use that

  • With that double diamond to really blow it out and come up with a bunch of stuff

  • So for example, one of those things is to break it down break down that brief and you can see

  • You know

  • We have the inputs. So

  • Sorry rather personal inputs is one of the things that we can break down what our different personal inputs that people can use

  • Voice text photo what's different media that they could generate?

  • something on Alexa photo

  • Where might they share or how can we encourage them to share? Maybe there's a celebrity ruth

  • often it'll go way deeper than this, but obviously it'd be too much of a mess to share and

  • So just wanted to give a quick look as to what you know

  • One of these things looks like when it gets broken out a little bit

  • But yeah, essentially I'll go through these different tool sets to do research to find inspiration

  • Often they'll have like a header but then different prompts within them or sometimes they'll actually have resources inside

  • Yeah, I feel like this is a

  • As organized as it might look it's actually also a bit of a mess. So I'm happy to keep

  • One of the questions I had that was

  • It's really interesting how you've sort of gone about making

  • Something that you already know about the Double Diamond process and sort of creating it into an area

  • So am I guessing that this flash area with the burst?

  • That's like static information and then you create a new

  • A new row in the table every time you do a part of the process

  • Inside of that doing things area, right

  • I'll use this process as a scratch pad to start, you know, I'll break it down over here, you know

  • Yeah, I started taking all sorts of notes and whatever I come up with

  • And I'll be able to round to it's not as you know

  • Oriented as it looks I'll bounce from one part to the other and however, my mind's working

  • It's more just the things on the Left act as a reminder to bounce to other things if I forgotten

  • Okay, that's really interesting

  • Yeah, and and and is it so the the first part the process is bursts, but then does it expand into more stuff?

  • Yeah, that's right. So after you've done the bursts and built out, you know this part of the process believe this open maybe

  • You know bursts is kind of this part of the process

  • through

  • Expanded it. Maybe then you look at all the what's come out of all the bursts refine those things into two more

  • Things that people can understand as opposed to messy notes that I'm just taking and

  • Then coming out of that

  • You're gonna start being creative so

  • That's what we call sparks so there's much more resource here

  • And what I what I've essentially done is

  • Pulled from other creative frameworks

  • to create verges on my own

  • So there's a very popular creative framework called scamper and you can see here substitute combine adapt

  • modified put other uses eliminate rearranged

  • so I've taken scamper and

  • Put it in these prompts, but also added some prompts to each thing

  • so maybe you could substitute a place or a person or an emotion and

  • Then this was both to educate myself and other people as to this framework, but also to serve as a reference tool. I've also

  • Put thumbnails that correspond to each of the respective

  • Prompts to show you an example of that

  • creativity or creative prompting use

  • so to make this more clear because obviously these thumbnails are a bit too small for people to see an

  • Example of substituting place. Is this project? Where a

  • person

  • Sorry an ad agency. Can we open it up?

  • So, this is a project whereby they put this tooth into a person's mouth so that they can open beter with their mouth

  • And that would be an example of substituting place. Right? Usually the place that happens is on a beer opener

  • But should be in your hand not your mouth it would be funny if it's in your mouth Oh

  • All of these prompts correspond to different different ways to be creative and that all of these images are

  • References for those respective things too to both educate people that are familiar and serve as a reminder

  • Go ahead, sorry

  • I was going to say this is really interesting because I think like

  • particularly myself, and I know a few other people they don't like

  • Formalize their process and make it like a wick experience like you have where each time you go and replicate something

  • You can go back to that original resource

  • So even with your sort of sprint planning with the two weeks

  • I really like the way that I think I'm going to definitely steal that concept of sort of having a full checklist or a full

  • Availability of it and then actually just replicating it because yeah, I like the way that you're using pins as well to sort of

  • You know work alongside to your notion already. It's pretty good

  • And to your point I think well, especially with the creative process

  • a

  • Lot of people don't want to make that process driven and kind of want to let their mind go a little bit crazy and see

  • What comes out of it? And I do that too. This this serves more as a reminder to do things that maybe I forgot

  • In my organic process or all bounced around to different parts of it depending on how I'm feeling

  • so maybe another example would be

  • This is sorted but rather

  • Open this is sorted by

  • Different types of creative problems that you might have. So if you have an advertising problem

  • These are all there's a website called deck of brilliance that has 52

  • Prompts to come up with advertising ideas, and I've essentially pulled that in here and made it a little bit more concise

  • So if I have an advertising problem, I just go through these 52 prompts and see which one might be most applicable

  • To resolve that creative problem

  • so I don't always use everything and sometimes I use nothing but

  • Broadly, it helps as a tool set to to be creative if you're feeling stuck. Here's another good one

  • Just a random

  • Idea to connect random inspiration. So there's a bunch of resources in here. One of which is a random word generator

  • So if I'm feeling stalking and often creative ideas come from places that are not traditional or linear

  • I'll force myself to take that brief

  • You know

  • something like this and

  • Make whatever random word Association comes up fit with this idea

  • and so that only come up with random ideas that you otherwise would

  • Okay, that's good. That's quite interesting. And how long would you say that it took you to set up this catalog? I

  • Mean it's not something I did in a sitting

  • It's you know certain parts of it have come over time

  • for example, I started with advertising thing and then later I added strategy and I

  • mean if I had to

  • quantify how

  • much time I actually spent all in I

  • Don't know a hundred hours is just a loose estimate

  • But about that time so saved, isn't it now that you've done it? Oh

  • For sure, I mean it you know

  • traditionally

  • In advertising, let's take as an example. Just one create a project that the conception part of it could take 40 hours

  • You know what I've done here is help myself

  • Make that take 10 hours instead of 40. So I'm saving 30

  • Each week that hundred gets made up real quickly. Yeah, definitely

  • Yeah, there's a bunch of other stuff here so

  • Yeah, let's see actually we'll move on maybe so

  • Another thing that happens within organizing and and elsewhere is

  • You're often routing something in what they call a big idea and that big idea can manifest itself in different channels

  • So let's take the tooth tooth that we looked at as an example

  • you know, that's a product but there's also PR and maybe there's an advertisement associated with it and maybe there's

  • some

  • Out-of-home thing where the guys sitting on sitting on a curb and showing and opening people's beer at a bar

  • it can it can live in a bunch of different places and

  • What this area does is help you once you have that big idea to?

  • Orient yourself as to which channels it should it should predominantly live in so, you know

  • Should it be an app should it be on a billboard?

  • Should it. Should there be a blimp that's associated with it

  • And then all of those that are sorted by, you know, just a drive awareness

  • Does it drive acquisition and there's a drive conversion just a drug retention?

  • so that if you have a particular problem that you're trying to solve you can sort and

  • Determine the channels that are best associated to blow out your idea and out of curiosity

  • Since you've been using this how how many sort of ideas and sort of projects. Have you been working on?

  • Sure, this this channel area is quite new and actually haven't used it yet at all

  • But this top area these two in particular

  • I've probably ran through

  • 30 40 50 bro more probably hundreds hundreds of projects

  • Using these tools

  • fantastic and

  • Yet continue talking it's free

  • Sir, yeah, the last area that's in here is kind of a reference tool

  • So these that I use this is essentially like a Pinterest

  • Bookmarking stuff that is inspiration for the creative process

  • very well sorted so for example like you're looking at right now is

  • The same creative project to come up with that face connector

  • These are all just emerging stunts a viral emerging technology ideas

  • So, you know

  • This is an AI painting that made a new Rembrandt using AI or this is an influencer is made with CGI

  • Or this is AI making seven million versions of Nutella

  • packaging

  • so tons and tons and tons of creative inspiration here so that when I get a project I can

  • Sort by whatever, I think the most applicable thing to do is

  • See, so this is done by media and channel, you know

  • There's websites and there's experiential and there's video and social and PR

  • so

  • Depending on the project I get a look at a different category and look for inspiration related to that to help spark new ideas

  • So it's like a like a you'll miss out your brain Bank of all of those ideas for when it comes to it

  • Yeah, that's really nice. Yeah, I quite liked its visual as well that you can

  • you can find everything you need there and

  • And going back to the sort of the doing things area that you sort of

  • manage

  • everyday

  • Is it I think I saw on that that you had

  • Evening routines and things like that. Do you actively used?

  • It for work and sort of your own life

  • Yeah, I use a notion for both. So this I mean so a good example is I just moved to New York. I

  • Have not yet memorized my phone number

  • But when people ask it's here, or like oh, thank you

  • I'm waiting on a shipment of books from Amazon or you know, here's places that maybe I want to travel to

  • More broadly. I keep some of my more personal stuff down here

  • So like people that I want to stay in touch with or general reference

  • But yeah, I use notion both for personal and for business extensively fantastic. Well,

  • Sorry it went a bit with it

  • Well, Daniel, I really appreciate you taking us through that sort of ideation process and all of those banks that you've created

  • Where can everyone find you after this? Cool?

  • Yeah, check out daniel Eckler calm. It's got links to everything i'm doing on the internet

  • Daniel underscore Eckler at twitter. I'm quite active on

  • If you're interested in the company, I'm working on how to get launched

  • But you can go to space cadet at NYC to learn a bit more about that

  • and yeah, if I can help at all I think one thing that you'd asked in the email is how might other people

  • create creative processes for themselves

  • I'm also happy to share

  • Access to this if anyone wants to duplicate it and use it for their own purposes

  • Or if anyone else has any questions about how they might set up a creative process

  • I'm happy to to talk to people about that as well

  • Yeah, definitely. I know all one I'll grab that link from you and we'll share it in the description

  • But I appreciate you taking the time out and it's given me a lot of hints for my own day-to-day use of motion

  • So thank you and I look forward to sharing this one

  • Thank you. Alright. Thanks, Daniel and talk soon. Yeah

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Keep productive YouTube channel, it is francesco here

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