Revolutionizing Note-Taking: Exploring Productivity Apps for ADHD

Hello, hello, it's time to go. It's ADHD money talk. We're gonna talk about things that are not even related to money today, because I've got ADHD and I've gone down a rabbit hole. I've looked at many productivity apps and now I want to yell about them because it's ADHD Money talking. It's gonna be an episode of so much fun. I can't wait to talk about ADHD money and all the things that comes along with it. It is so funny. Welcome back to ADHD money talk, the show that helps dynamic but distracted ADHD brains take back control over their money in order to Stress less, live a more enriching life and open up new and amazing possibilities. And I'm your humble and very ADHD and very impulsive and very compulsive and very incredibly frustrating and Incredibly paradoxical and very all the ADHD things. Host Dave to it. Today we've got a very fun show because we're gonna talk about everything besides money. I know you've all been waiting with bated breath for the next episode of ADHD money talk to drop, because you were just so ready and so excited for me to share with you more personal finance tips filtered through an ADHD lens, and As much as I want to do that for you today, i'm not going to because I have something on my heart that I want to share with you. And what's on my heart that I want to Share with you is what I've been spending probably the last month obsessively hyper focusing on, and That would be Productivity apps. Yes, i went down the rabbit hole in a very deep and insidious way, because This was not productive really at all while I was doing this. So the iron irony is certainly there that I was being as procrast I was sophisticated, procrastinating While I was looking at productivity apps YouTube being productivity apps Testing them all out, playing with them, trying to create the perfect ecosystem for all this stuff and Trying to remember right now what actually got me started on this little journey of mine. I Think it was because I wasn't crazy about the Task system that that HubSpot uses, which is what I use for all the things. You know. I use HubSpot for all of the marketing and all of the business things. It's great, it's an amazing app. It really is next level, but expensive but next level. But the tasks just weren't great because I couldn't quickly add a task to it. You know, there wasn't like a keyboard shortcut to like add a task. There's the phone app. It's, you know not useful to quickly add a task. So that was what started it looking for a better task management solution. It started there and then it just went everywhere. I was looking at everything under the Sun related to productivity and technology and things that could help me, and so I'm just gonna share a few my findings and sort of what I What I looked at and kind of what I landed on in terms of what I'm currently using as my productivity system, so to speak. And So, yeah, i mean I just this is like you. Like I'm not prepared for this podcast. I Didn't prepare anything, so be warned, i might be rambling and it might be a waste of your time, but I warned you, so don't be mad, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. So the first thing I want to say is that There is a way to take notes in a new way that is so much better than any way I've ever taken notes before in my entire life. Okay, because when you think about notes normally, how do you normally take notes? I'll tell you how I used to take notes. I'm not at all like I had this new way of taking notes, but this is how I was taking notes just a week ago or two weeks ago, i would forward an email to myself. That was a note. I would jot it down on a piece of paper in front of me. That was a note. I would actually send an email to myself and that would be a note. I'd open up my phone and go to my you know I'm an Android person, because I'm weird like that I'd go to Samsung Notes and write a note. What's the point of notes? Are they for reminders? Are they because you want to revisit them? Like, what is the point of a note? I imagine if I'm writing it, if I'm sending an email to myself, i want to remember that thing, at least for a period of time, like while that thing might be useful. Or I want to have notes that I can go back and read. And so I have notes. I had notes all over the place. I had notes and scrambled up pieces of paper. I have notes in my. You know, i have, like client notes in my CRM system. I've got planning notes. You know some of my client notes are in a Google Doc, some of them, you know, there's notes everywhere. There's personal notes on my desk, there's personal notes in my phone, there's notes about everything everywhere And it's just like a mess. But it's notes, and so the thing I'm going to focus on the most in this episode is note taking and then an app, or really a style or structure or type of app that is like been life-changing for the week and a half or so that I've been using this app, and so I'm going to continue to hold off on telling you what the app is because it's just fun for me to just, you know, torture you the five of you that are listening not tell you what it is, but you'll know, you'll know soon. So, basically, the way that notes and files in general have worked for us humans on computers and phones and stuff for a long time has been you have a folder full of more folders, or a folder full of files, or a folder that's full of more folders, that's full of more folders, until you get down to a place where there's files within a folder. There could be many folders, but it's all very hierarchical. It's like you have a big, broad topic and then a less broad topic than a less broad topic, and it just kind of branches down to the files or the notes or whatever you're doing. If you have notes in your phone. If you're just taking quick notes in your phone or a notes app, you could have folders or you could have like what I have, which is like a long list of never-ending notes that I've never had in incentive or reason or thought to even look at. It's in one ear and on the note and then out the other ear of my phone or whatever. I don't even know if that makes sense, and the way that humans kind of learn or think of things is usually by association. So, like our brain will be like hey, i smell a flower. This flower reminds me of a time I was in elementary school and was sitting on the ground playing with flowers and eating them or whatever. Or you'll have a thought that'll make you think of another thought because it's a related thought or whatever. So our brains are more like that and they're not like we don't have like especially us ADHDers, right? I mean we don't have folders of different categories in our brain with subfolders and then like, compartmentalize files of things very organized or whatever. No, we're like all over the freaking place, and so this new style of app really supports my brain in a way that is so freeing that I've been like a little fanboy. I've been telling my clients I'm just like my god, you gotta check out this new app. It's so cool, but whatever. Okay, so I'm doing a podcast now and I'm talking about the app And the app is called Men, m-e-m. Not men. Everyone thinks I say men. One guy's like I'm not gonna have my wife use an app called menai. I'm like, no, it's men, like a memory. So maybe the menai it's like memory. Maybe it's short for memory because you're gonna put in your memories into the app and I'm being weird on purpose, anyways. So menai. And so there's other apps that are similar in some ways, but this one was a great. So, broad level, the whole idea of this note taking app and others that are somewhat similar is that, instead of having hierarchical I think I'm saying that word right structured to it, where you have to take a note and then you have to say, okay, where does this note belong? and go find its little fancy home or create a new home and then create many new homes and then have what ultimately becomes a ridiculous mess for me, at least, instead of doing that, you put in a note and in the note you just start writing and then it turns into. Whatever it turns into, and maybe the note that you wrote could be used as a podcast episode content. So you could create a tag. You would write hashtag podcast idea and then you would create a new collection And then anytime you have a podcast idea, you would just write it down there real quick and then tag it podcast collection And then in this note taking app you would have a place where you could go look at all of your podcast ideas. However, you could also add another tag So you could have it be podcast collection and in progress. So it's a podcast idea that's in progress. It's not fully fleshed out. You could have a whole like workflow. You could have podcast idea in progress, podcast idea in editing podcast idea published. You could have all these different tags, but maybe in this note or this meme will call it they're called memes. It's a podcast idea but it's also a blog, so you could also tag it as a blog idea And maybe it's also got a really good idea that you want to apply to a client. You want to make sure you tell a client about this idea. Within that note, you could either highlight something and then create a new note that you could tag the name of the client, maybe. Or you could write in that note, write a bracket, so you would just write it's like shift, then the key. That's like the bracket. You make a bracket and when you make a bracket in this app it turns into a task. So then you could write why are this? so? think about this way while you're writing the podcast notes, an idea pops into your head that, oh, this would be great for this client. You could just quickly right there, write the bracket right, tell so and so, client about this, press enter and then it's a. It became a task that gets moved into a centralized location for tasks within men. So you could have like tasks scattered throughout notes and men, but they would all be found in one spot where you can like delay them or prioritize them or however you want, but you can do that. The other thing that you can do is link notes. So let's say that you have a podcast idea and you're writing this podcast idea. As you're writing the podcast idea, you think of how this other idea, which is similar to this idea, would also be a great podcast idea. So what you would do in men is just do control N, which is a new men You would write the title of this new podcast idea. That's very similar like the line of thinking that got you to this idea, also got you to this idea. So then you could tag it podcast in progress, potential blog and then you could also link it. You go at and then you write the name of the note you were just making. So now you've linked this note to that note. So now anytime you go back to that note you can see that you're going to be able to. Or the other note on the right hand side, mem is going to bring up that note But also similar notes to it and you can quickly just click on that and bring it up So you can be working on this podcast idea. This other podcast idea that's similar to it pops up. You can click that. It opens that up in a on the right side So you can see both and you can associate, make the associate, make the connection of how you have the thought in the first place to this thought and you can build upon it. And then, basically, you ultimately you're creating this network of thought, like your thoughts now are linked in, networked, and you're finding ways, ultimately, to make connections and make new realizations and to actually Kind of build knowledge and like build More connected thought is really the best way I can put it. It's very weird, but also amazingly freeing, because the other thing is that it uses AI so that if you don't even tag it at all Or you don't even link it at all, it's still a man that's in there and if you write a new thing, it's still going to recommend similar things for you to observe or look at or whatever. On the right hand side, that's called the men. That's like men acts. It's the part of the AI, part of it. So they advertise themselves as being somewhat like self-organizing, and so It kind of it really is self-organizing because you don't have to worry about When you put a note in there. You can just put it in there and then if and when you might need that note or want to see that note again While you're in men, it'll bring it up for you, like it'll appear where you so you can look at it. You know, like that's really cool, and so the way I've been using it It has been. I've been starting to put nothing personally identifiable, but I've put in some high-level client notes in there And you know, this app for me It's the. I feel the freedom to be able to mix business and personal in it, like it's that awesome to me that I can just put my entire life into here. So one thing I've been doing is, you know, i love golf. So one thing with golf is that like it's such a fleeting sport because you'll find something that's working and helping you That you'll just forget that was helping and working for you And then you'll come across another thing that was really helping and then you'll find things that aren't helping and you know There's like different feelings that you know really work, but then you forget about those feelings. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what I wanted to start doing was journaling. Every time I would go to the driving range As I was going and as soon as I found something that was working, i would journal it into a mem. I call it like my golf journal golf feels, tag it. I talk a tag, a golf feels, range set, and I take a golf feels and I take it range session and then if I do a round of golf, i'll reflect on it and I'll tag that as round recap. So I have all these different golf things, kind of like folders in a sense, but you know, just very easy to structure and organize. I did that for about two weeks. I probably had like five or six notes and there's not a ton or anything, but then it has. Probably the coolest part of this, of which I haven't even talked about yet, is It's AI chat. So Think of this. So let's say, you've been using mem for an entire year. You've put in like 10,000 notes into there. You've put them about notes about your business, you've put in your journal entries, you've put in your your golf reflections and you've put in Your feelings. You've diaried What you know. Everything is in there, all of your notes, business, personal, whatever. So you can go to the chat and you can say hey, i'm having a round of golf next week and I haven't been playing well. This is kind of what's been happening. What do you recommend I do to sort this out? It's going to use AI to go through your notes and give you a chat GPT style answer, but it's only drawing off of your existing body of knowledge. So it's super personalized to you and it's amazing. And so then you could also do something like you've put in all these podcast ideas. You've put in all these blog ideas. You have all these half bait thoughts. You know the thoughts are like half bait or whatever. They're all in there, but it's all in there. So you could say, hey, can you make a blog about so and so? and it's going to draw off stuff you've dumped in there. So if I make a blog, it's like make a blog about solo 401ks and why they make sense for ADHD entrepreneurs. Whatever it'll draw off notes I've put in. So it makes the blog content that you would otherwise be asking, like chat GPT potentially to make it makes it hyper original because it's only using your thoughts, unless, of course, you paste it in which you can absolutely do paste in a chat GPT answer. But even if you did that, it's still drawing off your knowledge, like knowledge that you put in there, that you are kind of approved of, so to speak. So it's really cool. I've been using that a lot. It's been awesome And I just talked about that for like 18 minutes. I'm looking now. I had more things to talk about, so let's move on to the next app. So there's other ones. There's one called Obsidian. There's a new kind of growing wave and it's called personal knowledge management, so PKM. Think of things like there's a book called Second Brain by Tiago Forte And this is kind of like how I view men. I view it as my second brain, because anytime that I have I thought that I need to get off my brain because it's bothering me, i just meme it, i'm in it And what's cool also is that you can you can text them. So if you it gives you a number so that you can just send a text to men and then it'll put it in your men And then later on when you go to your computer or you have time, you can actually go to your inbox and men and go through the things that you've sent its way and kind of organize it and maybe flesh out the thought a little bit, add a task or whatever. So you can also forward emails to men. It has a Zapier integration, so if you know what that means So basically if you're familiar with Zapier, you'll know what I'm getting at. You can push Slack messages. It can house all your stuff And you don't have to worry about it being a mess, because it's only going to surface stuff for you when you need it and what you need and stuff that's junk You know. You could maybe clean it up once in a while. But I imagine the junk if it's really just junk it's just not going to get used a whole lot and you're not going to even notice it's there. The idea behind the app is that it's it's networked thought. It's not hierarchical. It's meant to be frictionless and useful. It's literally cool. There's other apps There's Roam Research and there's Lodge Seek Logs, logsec, l-o-g-s-e-q, whatever. So these three are also alternatives to this that you can look into because you can. They call it like back linking, so you can connect notes to other notes and have this like network. So if you go to like Obsidian Roam Research, they have like what you end up creating by doing all these backlinks and stuff is this visual of like these like pods, it's like a thought, and then all these branching thoughts. It's really cool. You can like create this like visual mind map of like all of your thoughts and how they connect in a very not hierarchical way. The more of like how our brain actually thinks. It's really cool. Now for task management, which was the original sort of inspiration for this. So Mem does like I said, has that task management within it, but I can't use that exclusively for tasks because I can't really share that. I can't really. There's not a lot of integrations with Mem yet, unfortunately, so I can't really get all of my tasks, maybe from other sources, in there and need like a more centralized location. So for tasks I looked at things like here's the apps I looked at and I'll tell you which one I went with and which ones I really almost wanted to, almost went with. There was Aki flow, which was really cool, but I can't tell you much about it because I didn't use it. I didn't use it for very long. There was Asana, which I know about, but I didn't actually test out in this go, but I know it's pretty good for a lot of people. And then we get to There's one called amazing Marvin, which is really cool and that that might be the most ADHD truly friendly one of all these. It's not the one I went with because it was just it was just having a hard time setting it up perfectly. But The one I did go with is called Sun sama, and Sun sama is expensive for one, so that's annoying, but I Kept going back to it after I started trying it. So why I like Sun sama is because One is that it has really strong integrations with a lot of other task apps. So unfortunately, i have to kind of have tasks coming from different sources because of the nature of my work. I have different people I work with and there's different places to have tasks. Yeah, so, since I'm like a centralized all of my tasks into one place, i use click up and I'll talk about that a little bit. I use click up and then also email will start talking about in just one second and to do is, which I use. So to do is I use exclusively just for adding quick tasks on my phone because it's the quickest. There's a little, there's a shortcut button and it uses natural language processing. So I use to do is for quick, for tasks, really quick and it's free. Like for my use It's it's free, but in Sun sama it has really strong integrations with click up and what to do is and with email and calendar, so that I can bring in tasks from other sources into one place. Okay so, in with Sun sama, what it really is more than just task management, it really is daily planning app. So with Sun sama there's a daily ritual. So you get on it and it's like this big white screen. It's really calming and then it's like we're gonna plan your day. So then we we always review the day before. First through the, we go through a process here. It's a process. It's having you do you review the day before shows you what you did, what you checked off. It shows you just today on the left side and just your tasks on the right, and what you basically do is you kind of drag over the tasks that you want to do today. You pick the most important ones that you want to do today and you filter through the different sources. So I look at to do is, i look at click up, and what I'll do here is I'll open up mem Just to look at my mem tasks and if there are any in there that I want to bring over, i'll just quickly type it in, because it's really easy also just to add a task within Sun sama and type it in. But I'm getting all the tasks I want to do and I just set my day and then you you also Choose it. Has you estimate how much time you think it will take, which is really cool, because Then you can really understand how long things are actually taking. You know We're really time-blind, us ADHD, or so It's really useful to actually get a slap in the face and be like you thought that was gonna take an hour. It took you like five. It's like oh crap, anyways. So it's really nice because it's just focusing on today And then if you put too many things on there, it'll actually warn. You say, if this looks like a, this looks like too much work, are you sure you can do all this? and then it'll prompt you to, it'll bring up like tomorrow or like next week and you'll They'll say, drag things that you can afford to bump back Over. So it really helps you intentionally set your day, which for me is just so needed, because if I just start working without intentionally setting my day Which I do a lot, still like even with Sun sama, i'll just do that some days. I'm just like it's. It just feels chaotic, more chaotic than it needs to be. So it's really cool. I'll also talk about amazing Marvin just for a second, because amazing Marvin is similar to Sun sama in that you can Totally set up your day like that. It has a zappier integration so you can zap over tasks from other apps and stuff. But I was having a hard time getting that to work smoothly, which is probably reason why I didn't go with amazing Marvin. But what's really cool about amazing Marvin is that there's, when you start doing the tasks, they have like different modules that you can either activate or deactivate. So out of the box it comes with really no modules But there's like 50 different modules you can activate to use to help you with your tasks. So, for instance, there's like a beat the clock module where you turn this on, you set the time and then it has a timer and you're trying to do your task before the clock runs out. So it's like a game of finding it. There's the eat the frog module where you tag tasks that are the hardest ones. You know the eat the frog method where it's like you get the hardest thing out of the way first, which, by the way, i'm. I never eat the frog first, but you can make it a little frog, so you know which one is the one that you're going to get done first. There's just so many other ones. I wish I had it up so I could just tell you, but there's like 50 of them. There's so many different strategies. They have the Eisenhower box. So why I'm saying this is so ADHD friendly is because as soon as you're sick and tired of beating the clock, you can just go find a new one. So it really scratches that itch and that desire for novelty and for something new and for something shiny. Whatever, it scratches that itch because you can just go change it up. I just the. The technology is a little bit tiny, bit clunky, and it's just. It wasn't, as for me, as frictionless and as integrative with my other stuff that I just couldn't see myself consistently using it. But I wish there was a free version so that when I'm having a hard time with a task, i could go in there and set up a module and like just try something different. For days I'm having a hard time. It's really cool. So I would check that one out for sure. Like it really, oh, it's almost so perfect, but it just couldn't quite get there for me And honestly, probably because I wasn't patient enough in setting it up right, i needed like something to get me going quicker. So for now it's in Samba, but I changed things all the time, so I'll probably end up using it at some point. Anyways, so other things that I'm using just in case these would be useful for you, i'm using something called fathomvideo for my client notes. So this records my zoom meetings and transcribes them and records the video and transcribes them and then uses AI. It's like chat, gpt three or 3.5. So it's not the greatest summaries but it creates pretty solid summaries of my meetings and then it automatically shoots it to HubSpot, my CRM. So it's amazing for notes. I mean because notes is so hard to take while I'm, it's hard to take notes on what someone's saying, simultaneously be listening and absorbing and trying to actively listen and reflect in all this stuff. It's very challenging at times. So, knowing that I can just have something that's taking notes and while you're having the meeting, there's like buttons you can say like highlight this part and then it'll like separate, like that part of the conversation, you can create your own custom tags. That's really awesome for anyone who has lots of meetings. If you're a sales person, have lots of meetings and you're able to use this. I highly recommend it. There's other meeting summary tools. Sum is a bit limited in terms of it can only be used with zoom and the only CRMs the only CRM that I'm aware of that it integrates with this HubSpot. So it's like I just happened to use those two things. So it's perfect for me. But there's other ones like Fireflies you can check out. You can check out Otter AI. They have a new thing called the Otter Pilot. What a great name. There's something called Sembly. I tried Sembly. Sembly was good, but just for whatever reason it wasn't quite perfect for me. Usually it's because of integration or something that wasn't frictionless, and there's a bunch of them coming out, so that's a very competitive space. Right now It seems like it's really competitive. So then I also decided I'm going to start using ClickUp. Clickup is going to be for there's also tasks within ClickUp, but tasks is going to be with my virtual assistant for the most part because she helps me with a lot of the marketing stuff, and so it's going to be for project management and for content management. So it's like putting blogs through the system, putting social media doing if I'm hoping to start building a course at some point. So I have I put that template in there for course management, project management. So I have a place where I can share tasks with my virtual assistant all in one place. It's great because it's like Trello task management. It has documents in it. It's like a lot of apps in one as opposed to having to have a lot of apps. So it's really cool. I was very close to using Notion for my notes but I didn't go with Notion and went with Mem because to me Notion looked like a playground of having too much fun setting things up as opposed to just getting stuff in there. So you can't do a whole lot with Mem, it's just for writing Like you just write. You can do bullets and stuff like that, but you can't do the tables, you can't do all the different sort of stuff that you can set up. There's not a lot of like tools like Notion has. But for me that's good because I would spend way too much time calibrating Notion and not actually being productive. So that was just a thought I wanted to share. And I'm also for my Windows computer, something called Listery, where you can just go control, control and then search anything on your computer instead of having to go to the Windows file whatever or the file explorer. It's really cool. I think for Apple people it's called Alfred, that's the name of the thing that helps you do that. And then I've been testing out for fun just this app that records. That also records just my audio and meetings And it tells me, like, as I'm having the meeting, if I'm talking too fast, if I'm saying too many ums, if I need, if I'm being sad or depressing or whatever. So that's been cool. That's called Poised. I just love trying this new stuff. I went down the rabbit hole way too hard, had to get it out of my system And this is me getting out of my system, and so thank you for listening. Hopefully I'll put all the stuff in the show notes so you can check them out and all that stuff. Don't buy too many of these things and whatever. Don't be like me and buy all of them, because you don't need to, but check them out. They're really cool And if they help you, great. I'm happy for you. I honestly really am. So hopefully I'll have another podcast for you in the near-ish future. We'll see. Thank you so much, all five of you, for listening to my show today. I'm Addy here. Stay productive, stay ADHD, because it's a beautiful thing even though it sucks half the time. Alright, see ya.