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