4/18/2023 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S14-E02

Duration: 64 minutes

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The BuiltOnAir Podcast is Sponsored by On2Air – Integrations and App extensions to run your business operations in Airtable.

In This Episode

Welcome to the BuiltOnAir Podcast, the live show.  The BuiltOnAir Podcast is a live weekly show highlighting everything happening in the Airtable world.

Check us out at BuiltOnAir.com. Join our community, join our Slack Channel, and meet your fellow Airtable fans.

Todays Hosts

Kamille Parks – I am an Airtable Community Forums Leader and the developer behind the custom Airtable app “Scheduler”, one of the winning projects in the Airtable Custom Blocks Contest now widely available on the Marketplace. I focus on building simple scripts, automations, and custom apps for Airtable that streamline data entry and everyday workflows.

Dan Fellars – I am the Founder of Openside, On2Air, and BuiltOnAir. I love automation and software. When not coding the next feature of On2Air, I love spending time with my wife and kids and golfing.

Show Segments

Round The Bases – 00:03:31 –

Meet the Creators – 00:24:23 –

Meet Jason Montoya.

As a follower of the Way, the Truth and the Life, I am also a husband, father, teacher and storyteller.
I believe in sharing good, and not so good, stories from my journey through this website as a way to process ideas and inspire others.
In my journey, I have personally experienced and seen others experience the life of surviving in isolation. In these times of need, others helped and inspired me when I needed it. As a result, my personal aim is to inspire others to a place of thriving and togetherness.

Visit them online

Base Showcase – 00:36:07 –

We dive into a full working base that will Jason Montoya showcases a few bases he uses to run his business. These will demonstrate how to use Airtable for Freelancer Project Management and another for SEO Optimization Marketing.

Scripting Time – 00:54:25 –

Explore Scripting with “Date Based Change Log”.

Kamille will walk through a script that generates a change log for one or more date fields..

Full Segment Details

Segment: Round The Bases

Start Time: 00:03:31

Roundup of what’s happening in the Airtable communities – Airtable, BuiltOnAir, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Segment: Meet the Creators

Start Time: 00:24:23

Jason Montoya –

Meet Jason Montoya.

As a follower of the Way, the Truth and the Life, I am also a husband, father, teacher and storyteller.
I believe in sharing good, and not so good, stories from my journey through this website as a way to process ideas and inspire others.
In my journey, I have personally experienced and seen others experience the life of surviving in isolation. In these times of need, others helped and inspired me when I needed it. As a result, my personal aim is to inspire others to a place of thriving and togetherness.

Visit them online

Segment: Base Showcase

Start Time: 00:36:07

Project Management | SEO Optimization

We dive into a full working base that will Jason Montoya showcases a few bases he uses to run his business. These will demonstrate how to use Airtable for Freelancer Project Management and another for SEO Optimization Marketing.

Segment: Scripting Time

Start Time: 00:54:25

Scripting Time: Date Based Change Log

Explore Scripting with “Date Based Change Log”.

Kamille will walk through a script that generates a change log for one or more date fields..

Full Transcription

The full transcription for the show can be found here:

[00:01:41] Welcome back to the BuiltOnAir Podcast.
[00:01:44] We are now in episode two of season 14.
[00:01:47] Good to be with you myself,
[00:01:48] Dan Fellars and we have
[00:01:50] Kamille with us after a week
[00:01:51] off. Welcome back, Kamille.
[00:01:53] Hello,
[00:01:55] good to have you as always.
[00:01:57] Alli is off this week and we
[00:01:59] should be joined shortly
[00:02:01] by our special guest,
[00:02:03] Jason,
[00:02:04] hoping that he comes on to join us,
[00:02:07] but we're gonna get started.
[00:02:09] And if he doesn't join us,
[00:02:11] we'll, we'll call an audible.
[00:02:13] So, welcome to the BuiltOnAir Podcast.
[00:02:15] Every week, we go through four different
[00:02:17] segments, talk about what's going on.
[00:02:19] I'll walk you through what we're gonna be
[00:02:21] doing today.
[00:02:23] We always start with our Round the Bases
[00:02:25] to get you caught up on what's going
[00:02:27] on in the Airtable world
[00:02:28] and all the different communities
[00:02:30] and make sure that
[00:02:31] you know, the latest and greatest
[00:02:33] in all the news.
[00:02:35] Then we'll do a spotlight on On2Air
[00:02:38] our primary sponsor, get you up to date
[00:02:40] on that product
[00:02:42] and then assuming Jason joins us,
[00:02:45] we'll learn about him and his story and
[00:02:48] how he found Airtable,
[00:02:49] then he will hopefully be walking
[00:02:52] through some bases that he uses in his,
[00:02:54] in his daily business.
[00:02:56] And then we'll do a quick shout out
[00:02:58] to our community, how you can join and
[00:03:00] participate.
[00:03:02] And then
[00:03:03] Kamille will walk us through
[00:03:05] some scripting,
[00:03:05] how to do database change logs.
[00:03:09] So
[00:03:10] we'll assume that's the show
[00:03:12] after we get through our roundup
[00:03:15] if Jason still hasn't showed us,
[00:03:17] we'll get him on in a future episode
[00:03:19] and we'll do, we'll go to Kamille
[00:03:21] and then we'll,
[00:03:22] we'll do a couple other fun
[00:03:23] activities to make sure that
[00:03:25] you are learning this hour. So
[00:03:28] Round the Bases,
[00:03:30] it was a relatively quiet week this week.
[00:03:34] not a whole lot going on
[00:03:36] couple P S A announcements.
[00:03:39] Airtable is gonna have some
[00:03:42] outages with the database.
[00:03:44] let's see, April 28th.
[00:03:47] That's still next week.
[00:03:48] So that's coming up.
[00:03:50] They, they've actually had a
[00:03:51] couple outages.
[00:03:52] They, they've been doing this
[00:03:54] and I haven't noticed that I,
[00:03:55] last time I was on and I didn't,
[00:03:57] I didn't get any errors or anything.
[00:04:00] And so it was a very minor downtime.
[00:04:03] So they're getting better at their,
[00:04:06] at their outages. Hopefully
[00:04:09] when the, when was the
[00:04:11] unannounced outage?
[00:04:13] Unannounced outage?
[00:04:16] I think about two weeks ago,
[00:04:18] 2.5 weeks ago or, or something,
[00:04:20] something like that.
[00:04:24] Yeah. So here's an announced outage.
[00:04:26] So they're getting better,
[00:04:27] at least at, at announcing their,
[00:04:29] when they know it will be down.
[00:04:31] So keep that on your radar.
[00:04:33] They do it Friday evenings at night.
[00:04:35] So,
[00:04:37] shouldn't impact too many people.
[00:04:41] The other P S A
[00:04:44] coming from Chris Dancy
[00:04:46] and,
[00:04:48] Ben Green who run the,
[00:04:50] Airtable community in Facebook
[00:04:53] are announcing a DareTable.
[00:04:56] So thirtyish days left, actually,
[00:04:58] less than,
[00:05:00] yeah, less than 30 a month
[00:05:02] from today is actually when it is May 18th
[00:05:05] so, it's in San Francisco.
[00:05:07] It'll be at the headquarters of Airtable.
[00:05:11] So
[00:05:12] we'll see what life is like at
[00:05:14] Airtable. Myself, Kamille will be there.
[00:05:17] Alli will be there.
[00:05:19] Kuovonne,
[00:05:20] friend of the show will be there.
[00:05:21] She got the spotlight
[00:05:23] in this one on formulas
[00:05:24] you didn't know you need.
[00:05:25] So she'll be doing a show.
[00:05:27] Kamille you'll be doing a
[00:05:28] segment.
[00:05:29] What, what's your
[00:05:30] topic?
[00:05:32] The title is called
[00:05:34] Your Wish is My Command line. And the,
[00:05:38] what I'm hoping to get out
[00:05:41] of that session is to sort of explain
[00:05:43] that a lot of what you can do
[00:05:46] in your table. There's different tiers,
[00:05:48] there's stuff that's,
[00:05:49] you know, baked, right.
[00:05:50] And it's a feature of Airtable,
[00:05:52] there's stuff that you
[00:05:52] gotta do. Maybe a formula,
[00:05:54] maybe an automation to do.
[00:05:55] And there's some things
[00:05:56] that
[00:05:57] you need to go outside of Airtable
[00:05:59] to fully accomplish
[00:06:00] what it is you're you're
[00:06:02] looking for and the
[00:06:03] purpose of that session is more
[00:06:06] hoping to be a little bit interactive
[00:06:08] where people can say I have this problem,
[00:06:11] how might I solve it? And then
[00:06:13] if I can do it on stage, I will.
[00:06:15] And if I can't, then just, you know,
[00:06:17] just good advice
[00:06:18] of what I've seen and what
[00:06:19] I think might work for
[00:06:21] the, just
[00:06:23] the problem as described to me.
[00:06:25] So obviously I'm not gonna be able
[00:06:27] to go deep into everybody's use cases,
[00:06:30] but
[00:06:30] some quick advice for how might
[00:06:32] you do a couple of different
[00:06:34] things in your
[00:06:35] table because you can do a lot.
[00:06:37] Nice, nice.
[00:06:39] And we have Jason with us. Welcome Jason.
[00:06:41] Hello. Hello. Thank you
[00:06:43] for having me.
[00:06:44] Sorry, I'm a few minutes behind.
[00:06:46] No worries. No worries.
[00:06:48] We're glad to have you.
[00:06:49] We're going through our round
[00:06:50] up and keeping people up to date
[00:06:52] with what's going on in the community
[00:06:55] and we'll get to hear Jason's
[00:06:57] story in a bit.
[00:06:58] So glad to have you feel free
[00:07:00] to, to chime in.
[00:07:01] Are you planning to go to
[00:07:02] DareTable conference?
[00:07:03] That's what we're talking about.
[00:07:05] I didn't even know it was happening.
[00:07:07] So that's news to me.
[00:07:08] Where is it? Is it a virtual or in person?
[00:07:10] So this is in person in San Francisco
[00:07:13] at Airtables headquarters a month from
[00:07:15] today
[00:07:16] and
[00:07:17] not sure how many tickets are left.
[00:07:20] But yeah, daretable.com
[00:07:22] ok. Yeah, I'll check it out.
[00:07:23] I guess I missed,
[00:07:24] I missed the announcement.
[00:07:25] Yeah.
[00:07:26] Yeah. So we're getting the word out
[00:07:28] and some friends of the show,
[00:07:30] help run it. Chris and Chris
[00:07:32] and Ben have both been
[00:07:33] on the show in the past
[00:07:35] and,
[00:07:36] and they put on a great show.
[00:07:38] They did. This is their 2nd,
[00:07:39] 2nd year doing this.
[00:07:40] So last year was in Austin
[00:07:42] and,
[00:07:44] this year it's,
[00:07:45] it's actually at Airtable's
[00:07:46] headquarters, so have good
[00:07:47] participation from Airtable. And
[00:07:50] so yeah, we'll be there.
[00:07:52] And so yeah, get the word out.
[00:07:55] I think it was a pretty tight,
[00:07:57] I think only like 75
[00:07:58] spots just because of the,
[00:08:00] the location couldn't handle a lot.
[00:08:03] So it's gonna be a pretty small,
[00:08:04] small group. Should be fun.
[00:08:07] Cool.
[00:08:09] Awesome. All right.
[00:08:11] That's, that's the P S A announcements.
[00:08:16] Then one other, a couple other
[00:08:18] things this came from the BuiltOnAir
[00:08:20] community
[00:08:21] Hannah who is involved with BuiltOnAir
[00:08:25] noticed this link to a support.
[00:08:27] So we've talked about.
[00:08:29] So this is a two way
[00:08:30] sync overview.
[00:08:32] So we've talked about this
[00:08:34] in the past. It's been in beta
[00:08:36] at the enterprise level,
[00:08:38] I believe you have to be an
[00:08:40] enterprise account to,
[00:08:41] to get access to this beta.
[00:08:43] But I know I've, I've seen it,
[00:08:45] I've, I've played with it and it's out
[00:08:48] there.
[00:08:49] So, but I don't know, so this
[00:08:52] this update or, or I guess this article
[00:08:55] is relatively new. Maybe,
[00:08:57] maybe this has been around.
[00:08:58] I don't think they've publicly
[00:09:00] shared information
[00:09:00] about,
[00:09:01] this beta
[00:09:02] but now there's more
[00:09:04] information about it. So
[00:09:05] worth pointing out.
[00:09:08] The thing that jumped out to me
[00:09:10] is I knew about this,
[00:09:11] but I didn't know about
[00:09:12] all the limitations.
[00:09:15] Click down here on this limitations.
[00:09:18] There's actually quite a few limitations
[00:09:20] that I didn't, I didn't realize
[00:09:23] I don't know Kamille.
[00:09:24] Are you using this at all?
[00:09:28] This the
[00:09:29] first true test of,
[00:09:31] of me being on a podcast
[00:09:33] and also being a member of an interview,
[00:09:36] I'm not gonna say in what,
[00:09:38] in what company or
[00:09:40] Well, I could say I,
[00:09:42] I work at Apple now. It's
[00:09:44] an
[00:09:45] interesting series
[00:09:46] of events that led me here.
[00:09:47] We are an enterprise client of
[00:09:49] Airtable and we've interacted
[00:09:52] with the two way syncing
[00:09:55] beta and yeah, there's
[00:09:57] none of my projects use the
[00:10:00] two way sync. I could see it being
[00:10:02] extraordinarily useful
[00:10:03] in a lot of different
[00:10:04] use cases. But there are,
[00:10:05] you know,
[00:10:06] as this page points out a lot of different
[00:10:08] ways and that it,
[00:10:09] there's some things that you
[00:10:11] might expect to be there and they're not
[00:10:13] one of them that makes
[00:10:15] sense to me is formulas
[00:10:17] quite work because they're,
[00:10:19] you know,
[00:10:20] if you're not syncing in all of the data
[00:10:22] that the formula relies on, then it,
[00:10:23] the logic of it would break
[00:10:25] that kind of makes sense. But also like,
[00:10:28] can you just
[00:10:29] import the value as a text field?
[00:10:31] Like, you know,
[00:10:32] maybe there's a warning symbol
[00:10:33] that says it's not always up to date or
[00:10:35] there's a couple of different things that
[00:10:39] you know,
[00:10:40] are
[00:10:42] I understand why. But also,
[00:10:45] isn't there another way?
[00:10:47] That's kind of how I feel
[00:10:48] for a lot of the things that
[00:10:50] we see on this bulleted list
[00:10:51] here.
[00:10:52] Yeah.
[00:10:52] And it could be just in phases,
[00:10:55] you know, for this phase.
[00:10:57] They don't want to deal with that
[00:10:59] because of the complexity
[00:11:00] that it introduces
[00:11:00] and
[00:11:02] right down the road. But yeah.
[00:11:06] it's just, there's things
[00:11:07] like the first one,
[00:11:09] I don't know why it's listed in
[00:11:10] this order, but the first
[00:11:12] one is two way syncs
[00:11:13] aren't available in gant
[00:11:14] views.
[00:11:15] And
[00:11:16] like
[00:11:18] I get it because gant views
[00:11:19] are the ones
[00:11:20] that have very specific linking
[00:11:22] relationships with the records
[00:11:24] that are being shown.
[00:11:24] I get it.
[00:11:25] That's somewhat complex to do for,
[00:11:27] you know, a two way sync
[00:11:29] item. But it is like
[00:11:31] it works in all views except for gant.
[00:11:34] Yeah,
[00:11:36] it feels a little odd.
[00:11:37] Yeah. Yeah. There must be something
[00:11:40] under the hood in the code of the
[00:11:41] gant view.
[00:11:43] And then the one I thought
[00:11:45] was interesting is that
[00:11:46] you can't use automations to,
[00:11:49] to update the destination
[00:11:51] that one is confusing to me
[00:11:54] or API call. So you basically,
[00:11:56] yeah, you can't, you can't modify it.
[00:11:58] So that that's a big limitation
[00:12:01] that
[00:12:02] is really gonna hamper what
[00:12:04] you can do with the two way sync
[00:12:05] and using the destination table
[00:12:09] or the mobile app.
[00:12:11] Why the mobile app,
[00:12:13] what, what, what there
[00:12:16] I can like. Again, I can think of like,
[00:12:19] oh maybe they're trying to get around
[00:12:21] people circumventing certain
[00:12:23] Airtable limitations by having
[00:12:25] two way syncs into various
[00:12:26] different bases.
[00:12:27] You're splitting apart the total,
[00:12:29] you know, number of records
[00:12:31] that you could fit in one base.
[00:12:33] Technically speaking,
[00:12:34] blah, blah, blah, blah, blah
[00:12:36] that I can kind of understand.
[00:12:38] But like the mobile app
[00:12:40] is like that's your product,
[00:12:42] you
[00:12:43] Yeah, you know?
[00:12:45] Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:45] Yeah, hopefully that's
[00:12:47] a future edition. Yeah.
[00:12:50] What else in here?
[00:12:53] So basically the general concept,
[00:12:55] if you're not familiar with it,
[00:12:57] you know, right now in production,
[00:12:59] you can do a one way sync
[00:13:00] from a source to a
[00:13:01] destination,
[00:13:02] but in the destination,
[00:13:04] all those fields can't be modified,
[00:13:06] they're read only.
[00:13:07] And so if you needed to change that,
[00:13:09] you'd have to go back to the source.
[00:13:11] Now you can
[00:13:13] to a limited extent,
[00:13:15] modify changes in the destination
[00:13:18] and
[00:13:20] and do that. So,
[00:13:23] but there are these limitations.
[00:13:24] Yeah, automations,
[00:13:25] so that means there's gonna
[00:13:26] be,
[00:13:27] you know, I'm just thinking
[00:13:28] about implementing this.
[00:13:30] You're gonna be talking back
[00:13:32] to the source base through an API call or,
[00:13:34] or a web hook or something
[00:13:36] to update the source from the destination.
[00:13:39] Some, some hack like that
[00:13:41] to get that to work,
[00:13:43] which will be frustrating.
[00:13:45] But
[00:13:47] but yeah, this and then,
[00:13:49] you know, hopefully
[00:13:50] at some point they said
[00:13:52] when they announce,
[00:13:53] I'm thinking of the, the new feature, the
[00:13:57] the data source, the one,
[00:13:59] what, what are those called? The
[00:14:02] you know, like the the
[00:14:05] universal tables
[00:14:08] that they announced
[00:14:11] verified data source,
[00:14:13] verified data source. Yeah,
[00:14:15] yeah. So when that comes out
[00:14:18] that that will probably
[00:14:19] reduce the need for two-way
[00:14:21] syncing.
[00:14:22] Because a lot of things might make
[00:14:25] better sense to put into one of those
[00:14:28] verified data sources
[00:14:30] and not sync them between tables. So
[00:14:36] let's see. Let's see.
[00:14:39] All right,
[00:14:41] good stuff there. Next one.
[00:14:43] This is coming from the new table forums,
[00:14:46] check out join table forums if you
[00:14:48] haven't already great
[00:14:50] great interactions going on there.
[00:14:53] Lots of,
[00:14:54] lots of experts that
[00:14:55] are answering questions.
[00:14:57] This one I answered.
[00:14:59] So I thought it would be worth
[00:15:01] worth showing on
[00:15:02] here since I'm a little familiar with it.
[00:15:05] This comes from Brandon
[00:15:06] who's actually a friend of mine
[00:15:09] and doing some Airtable stuff. So,
[00:15:11] so talking about so this is dealing
[00:15:14] with web hooks, which is fairly common if
[00:15:16] you want to send data from
[00:15:19] one system to another
[00:15:21] web hooks is a very generic
[00:15:23] way, universally supported
[00:15:25] across lots of different platforms and,
[00:15:28] and systems.
[00:15:30] So it's essentially you,
[00:15:32] you define a URL
[00:15:33] and then you send data to that URL and
[00:15:36] then and then on the other end,
[00:15:38] it will receive that data.
[00:15:39] So it's a way to message between systems.
[00:15:43] And so Scott had a,
[00:15:45] a post here that he linked to
[00:15:47] with an example of how to
[00:15:52] this is a pretty good detail of how
[00:15:54] to send to a web hook
[00:15:56] such as make it could
[00:15:57] be Zapier
[00:15:57] it could be any other system.
[00:16:00] This one
[00:16:01] is again a little bit technical
[00:16:03] but in the internet world,
[00:16:05] the
[00:16:06] the defined protocol that that you
[00:16:09] send data between basically when a browser
[00:16:12] hits a a website,
[00:16:15] it's doing what's called a get
[00:16:16] requests and the the server
[00:16:19] is responding in that
[00:16:20] there's different types of requests.
[00:16:23] So this one is the standard
[00:16:25] get request that that is kind of
[00:16:27] how browsers work
[00:16:28] by default.
[00:16:31] What Brandon is asking for is
[00:16:33] is a post request.
[00:16:34] So there's a get and a post.
[00:16:36] The main difference is in a post,
[00:16:39] you can actually send like a body of data
[00:16:42] with the message into the server.
[00:16:45] So most API S
[00:16:46] you're sending
[00:16:48] a get usually if you're querying
[00:16:51] for data, that's a get request.
[00:16:53] If you're sending data, that's a post or,
[00:16:56] or a put those are the
[00:16:57] two different types. So
[00:16:59] that's kind of
[00:17:01] you know, high level of,
[00:17:02] of how API S work.
[00:17:03] And so that example didn't quite
[00:17:05] work for Brandon scenario.
[00:17:07] So I just replied with a
[00:17:09] small snippet of code
[00:17:11] and this is how you would send a,
[00:17:13] a post request. So that right there is the
[00:17:16] method of the the fetch.
[00:17:17] So you're, you're, you're fetching data,
[00:17:20] but you're sending it as a post
[00:17:23] and you're,
[00:17:24] you're wrapping it in this body
[00:17:26] and you also have to have this header
[00:17:28] in here to tell it that that it's JSON
[00:17:30] which is, which is
[00:17:31] what this body gets converted to
[00:17:33] use my name.
[00:17:35] That's right. That's right. You're famous.
[00:17:38] Yeah, JSON,
[00:17:41] I'm just now realizing why
[00:17:44] I never liked the function name fetch.
[00:17:47] It's because you can post with it as well
[00:17:52] because you, you still are fetching data.
[00:17:54] You're you're fetching a response.
[00:17:56] So you still get a response back.
[00:17:57] Yeah, but like
[00:17:59] am I? I
[00:18:00] don't want a response, just take the data.
[00:18:03] Yeah, this one, I actually didn't
[00:18:05] even do anything with the response.
[00:18:07] You could store the response
[00:18:09] in a variable and
[00:18:10] a
[00:18:11] lot of times and it's poor
[00:18:14] coding structure because you,
[00:18:15] you want to catch
[00:18:16] a response in case there's an
[00:18:17] error and you wanna know,
[00:18:19] but sometimes I'm just,
[00:18:20] I'm just sending stuff away and I,
[00:18:23] I don't want anything to do with
[00:18:25] what gets returned to me
[00:18:27] Yeah.
[00:18:28] So this is the code.
[00:18:30] If you're in an automation
[00:18:32] and you need to send a message
[00:18:33] to a web hook somewhere,
[00:18:35] it does require a little bit of code.
[00:18:37] They don't have a built
[00:18:39] in,
[00:18:39] you know, automation task.
[00:18:42] like Zapier and may have,
[00:18:44] you know, a task that's like an
[00:18:46] http request is
[00:18:47] probably something what it's called.
[00:18:51] I will throw out, throw out there.
[00:18:53] I need someone who needed a javascript
[00:18:55] written the other day
[00:18:56] and I didn't know how to do it. So
[00:18:58] I just used chat GP T and said,
[00:18:59] hey, can you write me the script and then
[00:19:01] they gave me what I needed. So
[00:19:03] if there's a
[00:19:04] table Airtablers
[00:19:06] out there that don't know how to script,
[00:19:08] you can use a tool like that.
[00:19:09] So yeah, yeah.
[00:19:10] Yeah. That would be a good test
[00:19:12] to see if, if chat GP T can answer,
[00:19:14] answer this one.
[00:19:16] Probably could,
[00:19:18] there would be some like nuances.
[00:19:20] So like we've talked in the past about
[00:19:22] so this would likely work
[00:19:25] inside of an automation
[00:19:27] script because those run server side,
[00:19:30] if you were to put this inside
[00:19:32] of a scripting extension,
[00:19:35] it may not work.
[00:19:36] It depends on the web hook
[00:19:38] that you're sending to.
[00:19:39] You might have to,
[00:19:40] they implemented a fetch remote.
[00:19:43] What's the name?
[00:19:44] Fetch, remote?
[00:19:45] That's
[00:19:46] a sync
[00:19:46] I think fetch remote
[00:19:48] a sync
[00:19:49] which is Airtable specific.
[00:19:51] That's not fetch is a,
[00:19:53] a javascript specific
[00:19:55] function that, that fetch remote
[00:19:57] a sync is Airtable specific.
[00:20:00] And so there's nuances like that,
[00:20:02] that I doubt Chat GP T
[00:20:04] would be smart enough
[00:20:05] to know. Maybe it does. Like
[00:20:07] you could feed it if you knew
[00:20:08] if you knew that the nuances
[00:20:09] of time.
[00:20:10] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:20:10] Yeah.
[00:20:12] Yeah.
[00:20:13] Yeah.
[00:20:14] Yeah, that's common.
[00:20:15] We're talking, yeah, we talk quite a bit.
[00:20:16] We actually have,
[00:20:18] I think two shows coming up
[00:20:19] this season on,
[00:20:20] on chat GP T
[00:20:21] using it with Airtable.
[00:20:23] So we might showcase some of that.
[00:20:25] Yeah, there are definitely
[00:20:26] a lot of opportunities there
[00:20:27] and, and the flexibility of Airtable
[00:20:29] and all the integrations just makes the
[00:20:31] sky sky the limit for what you wanna do.
[00:20:34] Yeah, very true.
[00:20:36] So, yeah, that's kind of,
[00:20:37] that's kind of the,
[00:20:39] the world of Airtable this
[00:20:40] week. Relatively quiet.
[00:20:42] I don't think there's
[00:20:44] any product releases,
[00:20:45] any feature updates that,
[00:20:47] that I'm aware of.
[00:20:49] So that means maybe today,
[00:20:51] maybe this afternoon.
[00:20:53] So usually it's like during the
[00:20:54] show they'll, they'll put out some stuff.
[00:20:57] So we
[00:20:57] made,
[00:20:58] I believe I've made suggestions
[00:21:00] before that they just make
[00:21:02] feature release or
[00:21:03] announcements on like the
[00:21:05] Thursday of the week because it's,
[00:21:06] it's our show. It used to be Aaron Corn
[00:21:09] Show and then it was
[00:21:12] Chris Dancy
[00:21:13] and Ben Green show on that Facebook. Yeah.
[00:21:16] And each was on a different day,
[00:21:17] Tuesday, Wednesday,
[00:21:19] Thursday and I was like,
[00:21:19] just do it on Thursday when we're all done
[00:21:22] so that we're not,
[00:21:25] you know, I, who knows
[00:21:26] what they actually listened.
[00:21:28] Yep. Yep. So,
[00:21:30] we'll see, maybe next week
[00:21:31] we've got some good stuff to talk about.
[00:21:33] So,
[00:21:34] with that, we'll move on to On2Air.
[00:21:36] Our primary sponsor. It's an all in one
[00:21:38] tool kit to run your business
[00:21:40] on Airtable. If you,
[00:21:42] if your business relies on
[00:21:43] Airtable,
[00:21:44] you definitely need to check out On2Air.
[00:21:46] I was hoping to make one
[00:21:48] announcement today,
[00:21:49] but I think I'll save it for
[00:21:51] next week. So
[00:21:52] today I'm just gonna give a
[00:21:54] shout out to our backups product.
[00:21:56] This is you know, really important
[00:21:59] if you've got your important
[00:22:01] data in Airtable
[00:22:02] best practice is to make sure
[00:22:04] you've got a copy
[00:22:06] of that somewhere outside
[00:22:07] of Airtable.
[00:22:08] That's where On2Air
[00:22:09] backups comes in.
[00:22:11] It helps you to back up your data
[00:22:13] and store it in your own repository,
[00:22:16] either in Google Drive box or Dropbox
[00:22:20] are the ones we support.
[00:22:22] Somebody asked me this week about,
[00:22:24] about backups. If we're storing the data,
[00:22:26] we do not store your data.
[00:22:28] We act as a proxy
[00:22:30] to move it from Airtable to
[00:22:32] to your destination.
[00:22:34] So we do have, you know,
[00:22:36] obviously access to read
[00:22:38] from your Airtable and push
[00:22:39] to your destination, but
[00:22:41] we don't store other
[00:22:43] than meta information.
[00:22:44] We do store some meta information
[00:22:46] and it does pass through our servers
[00:22:48] from one to the other, but there's no long
[00:22:50] term storage of your record data
[00:22:52] or your attachment data. So
[00:22:55] trying to do best practices
[00:22:57] on security there
[00:22:59] and just kind of a quick shot
[00:23:01] showcase of what it looks like.
[00:23:03] You create a project
[00:23:05] and a project. It can have multiple bases.
[00:23:08] We do have an app in the
[00:23:11] marketplace. But if you,
[00:23:12] if you have lots of bases and
[00:23:14] it might be easier just to go to the
[00:23:16] website and just add them all
[00:23:18] at once. So you, you don't have
[00:23:20] to go and install the extension
[00:23:23] in every base
[00:23:23] that you want to back up.
[00:23:25] You can do it all in one place
[00:23:27] here and add them all
[00:23:28] at the same time now
[00:23:30] and then it, and then it gives
[00:23:32] you a little bit of showcase of how many
[00:23:34] records are in each base,
[00:23:36] how many attachments are in each base.
[00:23:39] And you can actually drill down
[00:23:41] into those and see even
[00:23:42] at the table level,
[00:23:43] how many records in each table
[00:23:46] and attachments in each table.
[00:23:48] And then if you go back,
[00:23:50] this is showing you every time
[00:23:52] it performs a backup,
[00:23:53] you'll see that it was completed
[00:23:55] how many tables
[00:23:56] and the total number of records
[00:23:58] and attachments that, that,
[00:24:00] that have been backed up. So
[00:24:01] great information we do,
[00:24:03] we do have some exciting
[00:24:05] features that will be
[00:24:06] coming out this year
[00:24:08] to enhance the backup experience. But
[00:24:11] definitely worth checking out
[00:24:13] to get your data backed up
[00:24:15] and in a secure place
[00:24:16] outside of Airtable.
[00:24:19] All right, with that, Jason,
[00:24:21] good to have you on the show.
[00:24:23] Second time you were
[00:24:24] one of our,
[00:24:26] one of our earlier,
[00:24:27] you were an early guest
[00:24:29] on our old format
[00:24:30] where we spent an hour drilling you
[00:24:32] and, and learning all about you.
[00:24:35] But that was a long time ago.
[00:24:37] So we want an update. Give us,
[00:24:38] give us the background,
[00:24:40] give us your story.
[00:24:41] I love to learn more about you
[00:24:42] and then also your story
[00:24:44] of how you came into
[00:24:45] Airtable, how you found it and
[00:24:47] what it's done for you.
[00:24:48] Yeah. So, so I'm a full time freelancer,
[00:24:51] I think of myself as a sales and
[00:24:53] influence amplifier.
[00:24:55] So I take
[00:24:55] and, and really focused around
[00:24:57] content marketing.
[00:24:59] So companies that have archives,
[00:25:01] let's say they've got an archive of
[00:25:04] several 100 blog posts.
[00:25:05] And it's kind of sitting there
[00:25:07] collecting dust and they're wondering,
[00:25:08] hey, should I have spent all
[00:25:10] that time creating that content?
[00:25:11] I'm the guy that comes in and says,
[00:25:13] hey, here's how from an S E O standpoint,
[00:25:14] from a email nurturing standpoint,
[00:25:17] how do we take that?
[00:25:18] And so I've been freelancing
[00:25:19] since 2014.
[00:25:20] I owned a marketing agency for about
[00:25:22] seven years before that.
[00:25:23] And I made a transition.
[00:25:24] But when I had my,
[00:25:25] one of the kind of the
[00:25:27] connections to Airtable is
[00:25:28] when I had my agency,
[00:25:29] I, I learned about a lot of
[00:25:31] and created some ideas and
[00:25:32] frameworks and systems
[00:25:34] to really how to operate the business.
[00:25:36] And those are a lot of the things I
[00:25:37] took with me,
[00:25:39] into freelancing, I took those
[00:25:41] business lessons and I applied them.
[00:25:43] and they were hard earned lessons
[00:25:46] because running a business is no easy
[00:25:48] matter.
[00:25:49] But,
[00:25:51] what I, one of the things
[00:25:52] I was able to excel at
[00:25:53] freelancing was because I,
[00:25:54] I operated with a business mindset
[00:25:56] and I think a lot of freelancers struggle
[00:25:58] with that.
[00:25:58] They are more of the technical person,
[00:26:01] they're doing the,
[00:26:02] the work, but they're not necessarily
[00:26:04] thinking of the work that they're
[00:26:05] doing as a business and when
[00:26:07] you're an employee, you don't have to.
[00:26:08] But when you're a freelancer,
[00:26:09] you have to do that.
[00:26:10] So that was something that was
[00:26:12] really impactful.
[00:26:12] Well, a lot of those systems
[00:26:14] and frameworks,
[00:26:15] we didn't necessarily have any
[00:26:16] tools that really allowed us to,
[00:26:18] to, to manage those things.
[00:26:20] So we used spreadsheets a lot of times.
[00:26:23] And,
[00:26:24] so
[00:26:25] I ended up when I started freelancing,
[00:26:28] I built
[00:26:28] in a spreadsheet, I built
[00:26:30] like a freelancing dashboard
[00:26:32] and that allowed me to manage,
[00:26:34] you know, my clients and
[00:26:35] how much work I had.
[00:26:36] And how much I could expect
[00:26:37] and all these different factors.
[00:26:39] So I knew I was
[00:26:40] on track from the sales
[00:26:41] and marketing side,
[00:26:42] but also from delivering for my
[00:26:44] clients.
[00:26:45] And, so I had this spreadsheet
[00:26:47] dashboard and then a friend of mine,
[00:26:49] he stumbled upon Airtable.
[00:26:51] I mean, this would have been
[00:26:53] almost 10 years ago, maybe,
[00:26:56] 2015 or 16, maybe.
[00:26:59] And,
[00:27:00] so I had this, this dashboard
[00:27:02] and he told me about Airtable
[00:27:04] and I was like,
[00:27:05] wow, this is perfect because it,
[00:27:07] the, the limitations of a spreadsheet
[00:27:09] Airtable kind of took that and,
[00:27:10] and allowed me to go much further with it
[00:27:12] and you had the database
[00:27:14] kind of approach. And
[00:27:15] so I, I moved my dashboard over
[00:27:18] and just made my life much easier to
[00:27:21] manage
[00:27:22] and
[00:27:23] and I was able to sort of discard the,
[00:27:25] the
[00:27:26] the spreadsheet
[00:27:27] now funny, funny recent story
[00:27:29] is in that transition process,
[00:27:31] I brought most things over.
[00:27:33] But as my freelancing has evolved,
[00:27:37] there's some systems that I used
[00:27:39] to have on the spreadsheet
[00:27:40] that I forgotten
[00:27:40] that I didn't move over.
[00:27:42] And I've recently implemented a new,
[00:27:44] a new system to kind of measure,
[00:27:46] measure that in Airtable.
[00:27:48] So I went back to the spreadsheet
[00:27:49] a couple of months
[00:27:50] ago to discover that thing.
[00:27:51] I was like,
[00:27:52] I, I used to have, I used to be really
[00:27:53] good about
[00:27:54] this particular thing
[00:27:56] and I can even dive into that in the,
[00:27:58] in the template that I use if,
[00:27:59] if you want to do that.
[00:28:00] So I recreated it and I actually
[00:28:02] made a much, much better version of it.
[00:28:04] So,
[00:28:05] so that's, that's it in a nutshell.
[00:28:07] I, I wrote two books,
[00:28:08] one on freelancing
[00:28:09] that I published in 2017
[00:28:10] and another for small business
[00:28:11] owners in 2019.
[00:28:13] And you can see the on,
[00:28:14] on, on this side, the or the orange,
[00:28:16] the orange book here.
[00:28:17] And then this is the path
[00:28:19] of the freelancer over here.
[00:28:20] So,
[00:28:22] yeah, what else do you want
[00:28:23] to know about my story?
[00:28:24] Looks like you're a
[00:28:25] Star Wars fan as well.
[00:28:27] Yes, a big Star Wars fan
[00:28:29] and grew up with it camped out
[00:28:33] for the prequels
[00:28:34] was
[00:28:34] more of like,
[00:28:36] yeah,
[00:28:37] The Millennium Falcon and
[00:28:38] Star Destroyer.
[00:28:40] I, yeah, I was looking
[00:28:41] at the pattern and I was like,
[00:28:43] oh, what an interesting pattern.
[00:28:45] And then like as soon as
[00:28:47] I noticed baby Yoda
[00:28:49] in the corner, I was like, oh, ok,
[00:28:52] a
[00:28:52] baby
[00:28:53] or
[00:28:53] as he's formerly known
[00:28:55] at first, I thought maybe those
[00:28:57] were your own sketches. I was like,
[00:28:59] wow.
[00:28:59] Now the over here are my own sketches.
[00:29:02] So my degree, I went to the Art
[00:29:03] Institute of Atlanta
[00:29:04] and I got a degree in,
[00:29:05] in animation, 3D animation.
[00:29:07] And that's, that's another part
[00:29:09] of my story is is the 3D animation and the
[00:29:11] artistic side
[00:29:13] done stuff for Discovery Channel
[00:29:15] and PBS and through my uncle's animation
[00:29:17] studio
[00:29:18] before I had the,
[00:29:19] the marketing company. So
[00:29:21] so these are some of the,
[00:29:23] the drawings I I found in my, my
[00:29:25] portfolio that I thought,
[00:29:27] oh, I'll put those up there.
[00:29:28] Something interesting.
[00:29:30] So, so my question for you is how has
[00:29:34] how, how have you seen Airtable
[00:29:36] used in kind of the freelancer community,
[00:29:39] the people you interact with,
[00:29:41] is it something that is
[00:29:42] heavily adopted or what's
[00:29:44] the?
[00:29:45] So
[00:29:46] I think it could be.
[00:29:48] So
[00:29:49] it's it, I would say yes in some ways,
[00:29:51] but not to the degree that I think it
[00:29:54] should be or could be.
[00:29:55] So I definitely like an
[00:29:56] ambassador for Airtable,
[00:29:57] like if you are not using it
[00:29:58] or you haven't heard of it.
[00:30:00] And whenever I work
[00:30:00] with a new client,
[00:30:02] I have a template
[00:30:03] for project management.
[00:30:05] And so most clients I work with,
[00:30:08] I say, do you have a project
[00:30:09] management system? They probably say no.
[00:30:11] And if they don't, then they said
[00:30:13] we're gonna, we're gonna set up an
[00:30:14] Airtable base and we're
[00:30:15] gonna manage it through Airtable.
[00:30:17] So for me as a freelancer, I use it.
[00:30:19] Other freelancers
[00:30:21] once they start to realize the power,
[00:30:24] then they start to,
[00:30:26] to get more and more on board.
[00:30:28] But there is a,
[00:30:30] there's, I think one of the maybe
[00:30:31] one of the challenges
[00:30:32] with Airtable is it is
[00:30:33] kind of a build your own adventure.
[00:30:36] And so having templates and, and,
[00:30:39] and for the ones that they provide
[00:30:40] to you and then the Airtable Universe and
[00:30:42] I've got three templates
[00:30:43] in there that people can check out.
[00:30:45] That definitely helps with
[00:30:46] that kind of that starting point
[00:30:48] of like going
[00:30:48] from a blank canvas
[00:30:50] to something to work with.
[00:30:51] So I think that can be a barrier.
[00:30:53] A lot of people like tools that maybe do
[00:30:55] similar things like a Monday
[00:30:57] dot com or something
[00:30:58] that already has the
[00:30:59] structure implemented.
[00:31:01] But for those that kind of can get,
[00:31:03] get the value of it and realize,
[00:31:05] I think for me,
[00:31:06] one of the big points
[00:31:08] of value for Airtable is
[00:31:10] and kind of build my own app
[00:31:11] without having to be a coder.
[00:31:13] And so I can do so many things
[00:31:16] from an operational standpoint,
[00:31:19] both for me and my, my customers
[00:31:22] that I wouldn't be able to do
[00:31:24] without Airtable
[00:31:25] or I would have to find some
[00:31:26] tool that might be able to do it.
[00:31:27] And I'm the type of person who can
[00:31:29] be the configurable to kind
[00:31:31] of work it out and build the frameworks.
[00:31:34] And so giving me that flexibility
[00:31:36] is a huge point of value for me.
[00:31:38] So
[00:31:40] yeah,
[00:31:42] what would you, I imagine to be
[00:31:44] able to change things
[00:31:45] pretty closely because
[00:31:47] to your, to your point,
[00:31:48] you started off with a subset of
[00:31:51] work flows that you had in,
[00:31:52] in sheets and you move them
[00:31:54] into Airtable and
[00:31:55] then down the line,
[00:31:57] you moved in something else and had you
[00:31:59] built a very complete system
[00:32:02] in something that's more
[00:32:04] code reliant or on a premade
[00:32:07] sort of system, custom built or whatever.
[00:32:10] Your market share is
[00:32:13] adding that other piece down
[00:32:15] the line would have been difficult in
[00:32:18] a
[00:32:19] couple of different ways.
[00:32:20] Whereas an Airtable,
[00:32:21] it's, it's a different
[00:32:21] experience. It's not easy,
[00:32:23] but it's a different experience.
[00:32:24] Yeah.
[00:32:25] And, and I was also sad too,
[00:32:27] like, because I used to use
[00:32:28] Trello,
[00:32:29] but as soon as when,
[00:32:30] when Airtable just pulled in the kanban
[00:32:32] boards, it was like game over for Trello
[00:32:34] and I love
[00:32:34] Trello, but it was like,
[00:32:36] there's just not a reason
[00:32:37] to use it anymore because
[00:32:38] the beauty of Airtable
[00:32:40] is you can look at the data
[00:32:41] in so many different ways
[00:32:42] and it's really grown so
[00:32:43] much and it actually,
[00:32:45] it's grows so much faster
[00:32:46] in functionality than I can
[00:32:47] really keep up
[00:32:49] because I'm not like
[00:32:50] strictly an Airtable consultant.
[00:32:52] I can't like, always know what's
[00:32:54] going on and I'm using it
[00:32:55] more as a tool for,
[00:32:56] for other than
[00:32:56] watching our podcast
[00:32:58] every week? Not enough.
[00:33:00] In fact, I, you know, I've, I've had to
[00:33:02] get to the point where I refer other
[00:33:04] Airtable specialists
[00:33:05] for these advanced projects and
[00:33:07] it just is not, not the, the wheelhouse
[00:33:09] that I'm, I'm playing in,
[00:33:10] but I, but I love it
[00:33:12] and we'll continue to use it and,
[00:33:13] and advocate for it.
[00:33:15] So
[00:33:16] what
[00:33:17] so favorite feature and must have that,
[00:33:21] that you want them to add?
[00:33:25] Yeah, that's a really good question.
[00:33:28] I guess that just thinking about what I
[00:33:29] just said in terms of like,
[00:33:31] there's so many things
[00:33:32] that are unraveling in
[00:33:33] terms of rolling out new functions,
[00:33:36] it would be cool if there was a way for
[00:33:39] like, so we have Air, we have Airtable
[00:33:41] Universe and you got those
[00:33:42] and you have templates when you start.
[00:33:44] I don't know if, if there were like
[00:33:46] micro templates that I could install on
[00:33:48] an existing base.
[00:33:50] Like I just wanna kind of
[00:33:51] build out this particular function.
[00:33:53] And I, I don't know if that
[00:33:54] kind of thing exists,
[00:33:55] but that would be one thing
[00:33:56] that comes to mind is
[00:33:58] how you make it easy for me
[00:33:59] to adapt some of these systems.
[00:34:01] Maybe it's the automation tool or
[00:34:03] I've been playing with the interfaces.
[00:34:06] And I think the interface is actually
[00:34:07] a big game changer from when I first
[00:34:09] started using Airtable
[00:34:11] for visualizing data.
[00:34:13] That was always one of my,
[00:34:14] I guess the obstacles I had
[00:34:15] with the dashboards
[00:34:16] I was making is I didn't have a
[00:34:17] way to visualize it now with
[00:34:19] the interfaces that I've been out,
[00:34:20] I don't know what, two years?
[00:34:23] You know, that's given me a
[00:34:24] chance to
[00:34:25] leverage that with both myself or
[00:34:27] some of my clients
[00:34:28] and not have to use a separate,
[00:34:30] a separate system.
[00:34:31] So,
[00:34:33] yeah. Does that
[00:34:34] answer the questions? I had
[00:34:35] them
[00:34:35] all?
[00:34:37] Yeah,
[00:34:37] that's a great call out too. In that
[00:34:40] Airtable has a lot of
[00:34:41] different resources for.
[00:34:43] I'm starting from scratch,
[00:34:45] give me something
[00:34:46] that is sort of prebuilt.
[00:34:47] That's close to what I want.
[00:34:49] But if you've already started
[00:34:51] and you just want one automation
[00:34:53] added to your system, you gotta build it
[00:34:56] yourself and have two screens
[00:34:58] open and sort of look at
[00:34:59] someone else's screenshot
[00:35:01] and then there's
[00:35:02] no easy way to sort of pull
[00:35:04] up
[00:35:04] coping and pasting like pieces
[00:35:06] of it would be nice. Yeah.
[00:35:07] Yeah.
[00:35:10] Yeah.
[00:35:11] Go ahead.
[00:35:12] Oh, I was just gonna say
[00:35:13] to your point for interfaces,
[00:35:15] they're great.
[00:35:15] They're wonderful.
[00:35:16] If you start an interface
[00:35:18] in one base and want to do
[00:35:19] something very similar in a
[00:35:20] different base.
[00:35:22] Good luck.
[00:35:23] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:35:24] Yeah. And that, I, I've seen some
[00:35:26] shifts in the interfaces just in terms of
[00:35:28] making it easier to create them.
[00:35:31] But that's, you know,
[00:35:32] probably got more that they're,
[00:35:34] they're doing,
[00:35:34] but like, it would be just a
[00:35:36] practical example I have
[00:35:37] like in one of my
[00:35:38] bases for my clients,
[00:35:39] I have a calendar function
[00:35:40] for their email marketing.
[00:35:41] And so I built that out,
[00:35:43] but it'd be nice if I could
[00:35:44] just copy that one piece
[00:35:45] into another one
[00:35:46] that I already have instead
[00:35:47] of doing all the stuff you're
[00:35:48] talking about.
[00:35:50] Yeah.
[00:35:51] Yeah, for sure.
[00:35:52] Cool. Awesome. Thank you
[00:35:54] for sharing that.
[00:35:55] If you want to start sharing your
[00:35:56] screen, we'll, we'll move on
[00:35:58] to the next
[00:35:59] segment here. Let's go back to the
[00:36:02] screen, share screen. And then,
[00:36:04] and so yeah, we're gonna check out some,
[00:36:07] some bases that, that you use in your,
[00:36:10] in your world and how they work.
[00:36:13] All right, let
[00:36:13] me
[00:36:13] know.
[00:36:14] OK,
[00:36:14] cool.
[00:36:15] All right. So I want to just start
[00:36:17] with this because I do have
[00:36:18] three templates in the Airtable universe.
[00:36:21] This first one is
[00:36:22] the freelancing dashboard that I made
[00:36:25] and so you can go in there and if
[00:36:27] you're a freelancer play with that
[00:36:29] and I have I actually on this one,
[00:36:31] I have pretty good
[00:36:33] kind of instructions on how it works and
[00:36:36] documentation on it to, to help people.
[00:36:42] The second one is the system,
[00:36:43] it's called Idema.
[00:36:44] And let me
[00:36:46] Idema
[00:36:47] is this five phase process.
[00:36:49] So it's, everything starts with an idea.
[00:36:52] So we I capture the idea,
[00:36:54] we discover the idea,
[00:36:55] we execute the idea we maintain
[00:36:57] the idea and then we audit the idea.
[00:36:58] So it's these five stages
[00:37:00] and this was actually born out of
[00:37:02] a desperate when I had my marketing
[00:37:05] company,
[00:37:06] we were, it was very chaotic.
[00:37:07] It was kind of like the Wild West
[00:37:09] with project management
[00:37:10] and we'd bring in a
[00:37:12] project manager that was
[00:37:13] like really good and organized.
[00:37:15] But the chaos was just so
[00:37:17] much that they would
[00:37:18] leave. They're like,
[00:37:19] I can't handle the chaos anymore.
[00:37:20] So we kind of got to the point
[00:37:22] where like, OK,
[00:37:22] all these people are leaving,
[00:37:23] maybe there's something wrong with this.
[00:37:24] We should figure it out.
[00:37:25] And being entrepreneurial
[00:37:26] and creative
[00:37:27] that's just kind of how I was.
[00:37:28] But I wanted to, I wanted to
[00:37:30] figure out what was kind
[00:37:31] of the life cycle of every
[00:37:31] project. And so this is where the Idema
[00:37:34] came from.
[00:37:35] And so I have this kind of framework
[00:37:38] in my mind whenever I'm doing project
[00:37:40] management or I'm working with clients is
[00:37:42] OK, how do we, you know,
[00:37:44] capture the idea,
[00:37:45] how do we plan those ideas,
[00:37:46] execute them?
[00:37:47] And then how do we have
[00:37:48] visibility in a dashboard
[00:37:49] to be able to see those?
[00:37:51] So that's the second one.
[00:37:52] And then the third one
[00:37:54] is actually
[00:37:56] it's how to find a job
[00:37:58] in the modern era and it's really
[00:38:00] a template for people to
[00:38:03] to, to kind of manage
[00:38:05] outreach. So when I think about,
[00:38:07] when I was, when I shifted
[00:38:09] to freelancing, I kind of realized,
[00:38:11] you know,
[00:38:11] some of the things I was doing
[00:38:13] was similar to like a job search.
[00:38:14] And so I kind of built a,
[00:38:16] a template to help people
[00:38:17] that were in that,
[00:38:18] that process, but I ended up
[00:38:19] going down the freelancing road.
[00:38:20] So,
[00:38:21] so that was one of the remnants of that.
[00:38:24] So, I will start
[00:38:26] with my freelancing dashboard,
[00:38:28] just show a couple of things.
[00:38:31] This, I've got a list of my clients
[00:38:33] here and one of the things that I do is
[00:38:35] I have these different categories.
[00:38:37] As a freelancer,
[00:38:38] there's a lot going on just
[00:38:39] as an entrepreneur,
[00:38:40] creative and we have to
[00:38:41] build our own structure.
[00:38:41] And so having these
[00:38:43] I have a list of all my clients here
[00:38:45] and this is my people tab
[00:38:47] and I have different tabs for different,
[00:38:48] different things,
[00:38:49] but I wanna just show two of the tabs
[00:38:50] today.
[00:38:52] But
[00:38:53] I order this, these clients.
[00:38:54] So I have clients,
[00:38:55] I have eight clients and this
[00:38:57] normal client
[00:38:57] and then I have this day
[00:38:59] complete grouping
[00:39:01] and I group them this way
[00:39:02] and I do it in order.
[00:39:04] So I essentially work through
[00:39:06] my clients based on this order.
[00:39:09] So in terms of priority
[00:39:11] and I my, I do an hourly,
[00:39:12] I do batches of 10 hours with my clients.
[00:39:15] And so I, I identify how many hours,
[00:39:17] you know, I've been approved and invoiced
[00:39:18] and then how many potential new hours that
[00:39:21] that are on the horizon this month
[00:39:23] and then it calculates that
[00:39:25] and tells me how many hours
[00:39:26] I need to work per day,
[00:39:28] per client in order to
[00:39:29] finish those hours.
[00:39:31] And then I have an adjustment
[00:39:32] column that I can use and then I have
[00:39:34] different columns
[00:39:35] for the status so I can change
[00:39:37] the group the invoice status
[00:39:39] that they paid. If they, if they,
[00:39:40] if I invoice them yet or not,
[00:39:42] do I invoice them
[00:39:43] before or after what kind of
[00:39:44] thing project, then I,
[00:39:46] I have them all on another Airtable.
[00:39:48] So they have, I have a link to
[00:39:49] their Airtable project management.
[00:39:52] And so now I can just easily access
[00:39:54] their Airtable with one click and go
[00:39:57] into their spot.
[00:39:58] So, so I have all my clients here
[00:40:01] and then I organize them in this priority.
[00:40:03] And so
[00:40:04] that way, you know, if I have one
[00:40:06] that I have a client that's like an
[00:40:08] important, I put him in an important
[00:40:10] column and it'll move it up.
[00:40:11] Or I have a client that's urgent
[00:40:13] needs something right now and then it'll,
[00:40:15] it'll go up. So I have a hierarchy
[00:40:17] that allows me to figure out
[00:40:18] what to focus on.
[00:40:19] And then I have the,
[00:40:20] the columns to figure out
[00:40:21] how much to, to do that.
[00:40:23] And So my focus metric is
[00:40:24] really time like number
[00:40:25] of billable hours per day, per week,
[00:40:27] per month, per year.
[00:40:29] And so if I follow this column,
[00:40:30] you know, I'm gonna hit my goals
[00:40:32] assuming I've got enough
[00:40:33] client work to do that.
[00:40:34] So.
[00:40:35] The new one that I added
[00:40:36] is this thing called Daily Tracking here.
[00:40:39] And
[00:40:40] this is where
[00:40:42] I have, let's see,
[00:40:46] some of these real quick.
[00:40:50] So these columns,
[00:40:52] so I have that really,
[00:40:54] it's each day I put in,
[00:40:56] you know, these different check marks here
[00:40:58] and then how many
[00:41:01] hours, my goal is to log four hours
[00:41:04] and 20 minutes available time each day.
[00:41:07] And so I'm actually tracking
[00:41:09] that throughout each month
[00:41:10] and I can see the
[00:41:11] pattern. So if I got 4 of the hours,
[00:41:16] and then have I gone over it
[00:41:17] and have I gone extra hours? And I,
[00:41:19] you know, do I, sometimes I might work in
[00:41:21] this case on the 11th,
[00:41:22] I did over five hours, 48 minutes.
[00:41:25] So I'm tracking this and the reason
[00:41:26] I'm tracking it is I'm tracking it against
[00:41:28] my goals. So this month I've logged 40
[00:41:32] hours billable hours
[00:41:33] and my goal is 43.
[00:41:34] So I'm a little, I'm at 93% so I'm a
[00:41:36] little bit behind.
[00:41:37] So then I, I can adjust, you know,
[00:41:40] today or tomorrow or this week,
[00:41:41] you know, work a little bit extra
[00:41:43] to kind of make up the difference.
[00:41:43] But ideally I would be
[00:41:45] pretty consistent. But,
[00:41:46] that doesn't always
[00:41:47] happen with being married,
[00:41:49] having five kids
[00:41:50] and all the, all the life things,
[00:41:52] getting injured,
[00:41:54] all the kinds of things. So
[00:41:55] this is a cool system.
[00:41:56] I just, I built, this is the thing
[00:41:58] that I realized I kind
[00:41:58] of lost in my spreadsheet
[00:42:00] was I didn't have a way
[00:42:01] to really motivate me on a daily basis
[00:42:03] in terms of really tracking how I was
[00:42:05] doing going throughout the day.
[00:42:06] You know, if I'm halfway through the day,
[00:42:08] I need to make sure that I'm kind of
[00:42:09] pacing myself so that I can adjust for the
[00:42:11] second half of the day
[00:42:12] if I'm missing my, my
[00:42:13] mark.
[00:42:15] So
[00:42:15] any questions on that before I move the,
[00:42:18] the jump to the next one?
[00:42:21] I don't think so. No.
[00:42:23] Yeah. So
[00:42:24] I'll jump. This is a client of mine.
[00:42:27] The
[00:42:28] this is the going back to this template.
[00:42:31] This is the Idema
[00:42:32] template. I've made
[00:42:33] some adjustments to it.
[00:42:35] But I essentially I take that Idema
[00:42:37] framework and then I create these micros
[00:42:39] stages within that.
[00:42:41] So all of these groupings here
[00:42:44] are within one of those areas you have to
[00:42:47] maintain up here and then the done.
[00:42:50] And so,
[00:42:51] you know, these are maintained items,
[00:42:53] these are things I need to do on a regular
[00:42:54] basis.
[00:42:55] It might be in this case,
[00:42:57] I, I don't have a, a pacing
[00:42:59] but in some cases I
[00:43:00] might put, you know,
[00:43:00] this is a weekly thing or a monthly thing
[00:43:02] or trigger based.
[00:43:05] I have a done this done thing
[00:43:07] and then I also have an archive column
[00:43:09] and the reason I do that is so
[00:43:10] I put everything in the done
[00:43:12] when I'm done.
[00:43:12] But then I can do, I can report
[00:43:13] with my clients
[00:43:15] on, you know, what's been done
[00:43:16] and then I'll archive it.
[00:43:18] So it kind of gives
[00:43:18] me a process for reporting.
[00:43:22] But I can go, here's the things
[00:43:23] I'm stuck on. Here's the things that are
[00:43:25] active. And again,
[00:43:27] I, I order these hierarchically
[00:43:29] from top to bottom
[00:43:30] based on what to focus on.
[00:43:31] So
[00:43:32] I, you know, I need to knock out
[00:43:34] the stuck thing before
[00:43:35] I work on the active
[00:43:36] things.
[00:43:37] So in this case,
[00:43:38] I need to figure out
[00:43:39] how to get access to the,
[00:43:40] the Facebook page for this client,
[00:43:42] but I'm stuck because
[00:43:43] they haven't provided that and,
[00:43:44] and they don't necessarily,
[00:43:45] you know,
[00:43:45] it's kind of a lost page.
[00:43:47] So we're trying to recover it.
[00:43:49] With active, these are things
[00:43:51] I'm currently working on projects that I'm
[00:43:53] currently working on.
[00:43:54] And then in this case
[00:43:55] I'm using um Airtable's recently,
[00:43:58] you know, it's formatting
[00:43:59] to do a checklist inside of it.
[00:44:01] So I do like that.
[00:44:02] What I'm gonna work on next.
[00:44:04] What are the top ideas
[00:44:05] that then follow that.
[00:44:06] I also have a templates here
[00:44:08] because these are tasks
[00:44:09] that I do every month
[00:44:11] for this client. So what I'll do
[00:44:12] is I'll just copy, I'll make duplicate the
[00:44:14] record and then it has my checklist
[00:44:16] inside of it, of what to do.
[00:44:18] And then I'll move it up to
[00:44:20] one of these other stages.
[00:44:22] And then I there is another big thing
[00:44:24] that I do on all my Airtables is I
[00:44:26] have an idea repository.
[00:44:27] So whenever I'm working with clients,
[00:44:29] I see opportunities for improvement things
[00:44:30] we could do
[00:44:31] where they have suggestions.
[00:44:33] And so we're just capturing
[00:44:34] all the ideas here.
[00:44:35] So we have a place
[00:44:36] and they don't get forgotten.
[00:44:37] So that's a big thing.
[00:44:39] A couple other things
[00:44:41] I added on this base
[00:44:42] is I have an email tracking system.
[00:44:45] So we use mailchimp and
[00:44:46] help them run their campaigns. And so I,
[00:44:48] I put them all in here.
[00:44:49] One of things I like about
[00:44:51] Airtable is the ability to
[00:44:52] both track data and then be able to,
[00:44:54] to look at it in different
[00:44:55] ways that might,
[00:44:56] that might not be possible
[00:44:57] in the tool of which we're using.
[00:44:59] So in the case of mailchimp,
[00:45:00] so what I'll do is I'll
[00:45:02] I can see then I can put
[00:45:03] in the, the time I sent
[00:45:05] the day, the time
[00:45:06] AM PM,
[00:45:07] number of sents opens, clicks
[00:45:10] what type of email it is.
[00:45:11] So this is the chronological view
[00:45:13] and then I have a calendar view
[00:45:15] where I can actually, you know,
[00:45:16] move things around this way
[00:45:18] and see where they
[00:45:18] are.
[00:45:20] And this is something I can share
[00:45:21] with the client
[00:45:22] so they know what's going out
[00:45:22] when it's going out.
[00:45:24] And then I have this,
[00:45:25] what I, this, I call it a stat slicing.
[00:45:27] And this is where I can,
[00:45:29] I can, I can sort
[00:45:31] or group by different factors
[00:45:33] in order to kind of get an
[00:45:35] idea of like what time
[00:45:36] is the best
[00:45:37] or what day. So,
[00:45:39] you know,
[00:45:40] in this case, I can,
[00:45:44] you know, pull up the day
[00:45:45] and go OK for the normal emails.
[00:45:50] and it looks like these
[00:45:51] are not loading for, oh,
[00:45:53] I'm missing the data now.
[00:45:56] So it'll show me, you know,
[00:45:58] what's the open rate and the click,
[00:46:01] the click rate.
[00:46:02] So I can go which day is the best?
[00:46:04] And I can actually
[00:46:05] identify that real quickly.
[00:46:06] Or I can do a,
[00:46:08] I can also group by AM or PM
[00:46:11] and go which you know,
[00:46:12] is it better to send in the,
[00:46:13] in the morning or the
[00:46:14] afternoon?
[00:46:15] And I
[00:46:15] can get
[00:46:16] you give, do you
[00:46:17] give access to your clients,
[00:46:19] like read only access or are they in here?
[00:46:21] How much time do they spend in here?
[00:46:23] So with this, I,
[00:46:24] I'm open to giving as much
[00:46:26] or as little access as a
[00:46:28] client wants,
[00:46:29] most clients
[00:46:33] are gonna be just read or
[00:46:35] commenting. Not even commenting,
[00:46:38] I would say read is probably
[00:46:39] the most common.
[00:46:40] Some will do commenting.
[00:46:41] I've had some clients and some projects
[00:46:44] where they're actually will project,
[00:46:45] manage together through the,
[00:46:47] you know, they'll,
[00:46:49] we'll have a column here,
[00:46:50] which I've got hidden,
[00:46:51] I call it passengers,
[00:46:53] you know, I'm working on this.
[00:46:55] So and so is working on that
[00:46:57] and we can actually
[00:46:57] have different views
[00:46:59] for the different people.
[00:47:01] But what I've discovered is
[00:47:03] that most people
[00:47:04] don't necessarily do that,
[00:47:05] but I've had teams
[00:47:06] often I'm managing a team
[00:47:08] of freelancers and so sometimes
[00:47:09] there's like three or four
[00:47:11] of us working on the same client.
[00:47:12] And so we'll use Airtable
[00:47:14] together and I'll,
[00:47:15] I'll project manage and,
[00:47:16] and they'll participate.
[00:47:18] But for the most part, clients are pretty,
[00:47:21] pretty hands off. So,
[00:47:24] so,
[00:47:25] but there is a, I think a big part
[00:47:27] of it is a reassurance factor.
[00:47:29] The fact that it's there
[00:47:30] and that they have access to it,
[00:47:32] it, it kind of just
[00:47:34] helps build trust.
[00:47:37] And so that seems to be more
[00:47:39] valuable than actually them,
[00:47:41] like reviewing things
[00:47:42] in it.
[00:47:43] So it tends to be more for me
[00:47:45] and then in some cases I have clients that
[00:47:47] they, they're so kind of like
[00:47:50] maybe just just disordered or in chaos
[00:47:53] that
[00:47:54] instead of even sending
[00:47:56] and sending them to Airtable,
[00:47:57] I'll like send him an
[00:47:58] email with like kind of a summary
[00:47:59] of things and then
[00:48:00] a link to the Airtable if
[00:48:01] they want more details.
[00:48:02] So trying to translate it for them
[00:48:05] makes sense. So,
[00:48:08] this one is another thing
[00:48:10] I've been kind of experimenting with,
[00:48:11] this is another client.
[00:48:12] Some of the S E O stuff
[00:48:14] that I've been doing.
[00:48:15] I'm or I've got in this case,
[00:48:17] I've got all their pages listed in here,
[00:48:20] the URL S
[00:48:21] and then I've got different columns
[00:48:22] for different things.
[00:48:23] But the big thing that
[00:48:23] I'm doing
[00:48:24] is S E O
[00:48:27] change tracking.
[00:48:29] So we might make a change to a page.
[00:48:34] So this might be, you know,
[00:48:36] a title change or a content change.
[00:48:38] And so I've got a column for that
[00:48:40] and
[00:48:41] and then I date,
[00:48:43] I have the upgraded and updated
[00:48:45] and then I started doing
[00:48:46] a change date column as well.
[00:48:48] So we have more precision.
[00:48:51] But from an S E O standpoint,
[00:48:52] we can change the title on a page.
[00:48:54] So we might change this page
[00:48:56] and I can look, I did that on March 31st.
[00:48:57] So this was almost three weeks ago.
[00:48:59] So now I can look on Google
[00:49:01] and see in the search
[00:49:02] console that they have or in
[00:49:03] our keyword tracking.
[00:49:05] And I can see after I made
[00:49:06] that change, what happened?
[00:49:07] And so this log, lets me do
[00:49:10] that and then it, it links back,
[00:49:12] this column links back to the pages
[00:49:14] so I can also look at a page
[00:49:17] and go okay,
[00:49:18] this page has had three changes.
[00:49:20] These are the three changes here
[00:49:22] and there's two title changes,
[00:49:24] one and one URL change.
[00:49:26] And
[00:49:27] and so then that, that's another thing
[00:49:29] that I'm, I'm doing just to see how that
[00:49:31] changes are,
[00:49:32] are affecting things and then
[00:49:34] be able to either reverse course or,
[00:49:37] see that it's a positive change.
[00:49:39] So, does that make sense?
[00:49:41] Yeah, I think I, I heard that
[00:49:45] on the startups for the rest
[00:49:47] of us podcast, I think,
[00:49:48] I think they were talking
[00:49:50] about that the strategy of
[00:49:52] keeping track of marketing log of changes.
[00:49:55] And so it makes it really easy
[00:49:56] and then it's also a value because of the,
[00:49:58] the ups and downs of
[00:49:59] whether the change makes
[00:50:01] a difference on Google.
[00:50:03] So,
[00:50:04] I got one other base,
[00:50:06] I could show you real quick.
[00:50:09] Yeah, maybe a minute. Ok.
[00:50:11] All right.
[00:50:11] So this is just a personal base.
[00:50:13] So I'm me and two of my kids are
[00:50:14] going to
[00:50:16] Honduras this summer
[00:50:17] to serve the community in,
[00:50:20] in
[00:50:21] on
[00:50:21] in a
[00:50:22] valley. So we're actually doing
[00:50:24] a fundraiser
[00:50:25] to help raise for the service trip
[00:50:26] and we're doing it through our church. And
[00:50:28] anyways, it's
[00:50:30] it's a lot of work to,
[00:50:31] to do to a lot of people
[00:50:33] that we're reaching out to,
[00:50:34] we're sending letters,
[00:50:35] we're emailing them.
[00:50:36] We're hand mailing some or snail mail.
[00:50:39] And then we also have like
[00:50:42] who's donated, you know,
[00:50:43] so I have these different groupings
[00:50:45] just to help me track, like,
[00:50:47] OK, who have I sent? You know,
[00:50:49] because there's like almost 300
[00:50:50] people that I reached out to,
[00:50:51] who have I sent it?
[00:50:52] How have I sent it?
[00:50:53] How have they responded?
[00:50:54] Who's donated?
[00:50:55] Who's committed to donating?
[00:50:57] Am I in track?
[00:50:58] You know,
[00:50:59] and so
[00:51:00] I use Airtable both personally
[00:51:02] and professionally and,
[00:51:03] and I just wanted to
[00:51:04] give a quick example.
[00:51:06] You know, I have a goals and plan
[00:51:08] and then I have the people tab is really
[00:51:09] the main one I use for tracking,
[00:51:13] you know, who's giving and,
[00:51:14] and what they're giving.
[00:51:15] And
[00:51:17] and I, I went to Mexico last year
[00:51:20] and I kind of built this system and,
[00:51:22] and used it again for this year.
[00:51:24] But me and my oldest daughter
[00:51:26] just went last time.
[00:51:28] But we were able to raise
[00:51:31] within two weeks, we raised all
[00:51:32] the money we needed
[00:51:33] and we ended up raising a
[00:51:34] lot more, which helped some of the
[00:51:36] other teams members that weren't able to.
[00:51:38] So the system worked pretty good
[00:51:40] and I would like to add template
[00:51:41] this and add it into the Airtable
[00:51:43] universe in case anyone
[00:51:44] is there,
[00:51:45] but it's just a simple
[00:51:47] way to track, to
[00:51:48] track what I'm doing and what I
[00:51:50] on a personal level. So,
[00:51:52] wanted to just
[00:51:53] mention
[00:51:53] that,
[00:51:54] I hope that Airtable doesn't lose
[00:51:57] sight of that overlap between using it for
[00:52:00] your personal life and business.
[00:52:02] You know, as they focus
[00:52:04] more on the enterprise,
[00:52:05] I hope they don't lose.
[00:52:07] That's a good point.
[00:52:08] I, I do hope that as well because,
[00:52:10] as a, just a freelancer and a small,
[00:52:13] a small guy who's not a big deal,
[00:52:15] obviously
[00:52:16] it's from a financial standpoint
[00:52:18] and that's kind of one of the things
[00:52:20] that's happened with hubspot.
[00:52:21] Unfortunately,
[00:52:22] I, I work with a lot of clients
[00:52:23] that use it and help them
[00:52:24] with their hubspot
[00:52:25] systems but they kind of made that
[00:52:27] shift towards enterprise
[00:52:28] and kind of left the
[00:52:29] rest of us
[00:52:30] staying.
[00:52:31] So,
[00:52:33] yeah, for sure. I'm sure. I
[00:52:35] I would imagine most people
[00:52:37] that use Airtable
[00:52:38] in their, in their business world
[00:52:40] also find a use case for it in person.
[00:52:42] Yeah.
[00:52:43] Yeah.
[00:52:44] And a lot of people start with a
[00:52:46] personal use case
[00:52:47] and move it to their business.
[00:52:48] Yeah. Yeah. Good
[00:52:49] point.
[00:52:50] Yeah. And I have a personal,
[00:52:52] I use it personally
[00:52:53] for other things like tracking
[00:52:54] our savings and giving and
[00:52:55] budget stuff and,
[00:52:57] yeah. Yeah.
[00:52:59] Awesome. So people can find
[00:53:01] you on your website Jason Scott
[00:53:03] Montoya
[00:53:04] dot com.
[00:53:05] Yeah. So, jasonscottmontoya.com
[00:53:07] if you type in and if you're in the
[00:53:08] Airtable Universe and you want to
[00:53:10] search for the templates,
[00:53:11] just type in my last name Montoya.
[00:53:13] On my website, I've got tons
[00:53:15] of blogs on personal development,
[00:53:17] entrepreneurship, leading others.
[00:53:18] I've got a podcast
[00:53:19] called the Share
[00:53:20] Life. It's called Share
[00:53:22] Life systems and stories
[00:53:23] to live better and work smarter.
[00:53:25] And and then I've got, yeah,
[00:53:26] everything's on Jason Scott
[00:53:28] Montoya dot com. If you need
[00:53:29] or want to explore any of that.
[00:53:31] Thank you. Thanks for coming on.
[00:53:33] So
[00:53:33] I
[00:53:34] think it's safe to say that
[00:53:36] your business is very
[00:53:37] dependent on Airtable.
[00:53:39] Yes. Yes, I couldn't do
[00:53:40] what I do without it. And
[00:53:42] and hopefully,
[00:53:44] I've made some many
[00:53:46] Airtables over the years
[00:53:48] to help them grow as well.
[00:53:50] Awesome. Thank you, Jason.
[00:53:52] OK. A quick shout out to
[00:53:54] join our community and in particular,
[00:53:57] subscribe to our youtube channel.
[00:53:58] We're trying to get that up to 1000.
[00:54:00] We're in the pushing 800 range.
[00:54:02] So we're hoping to get
[00:54:04] to 1000 here this year.
[00:54:05] So tell your friends join us
[00:54:07] in the community
[00:54:08] builtonair.com/join
[00:54:10] that gets you into the Slack community
[00:54:12] where there's thousands of other
[00:54:14] Airtable fans
[00:54:15] converse conversing and whatnot.
[00:54:18] So we'd love to have you
[00:54:19] join us there.
[00:54:21] Let's move on to scripting
[00:54:23] time with Kamille.
[00:54:24] Gonna show us some
[00:54:27] cool scripting go for it.
[00:54:30] So
[00:54:33] this is something that comes up,
[00:54:36] I think a lot when you have a
[00:54:39] one or more columns that contain data and
[00:54:43] it's easy to know when a value
[00:54:46] has changed because Airtable has a last
[00:54:49] modified by and last modified
[00:54:52] time
[00:54:53] field types that tell you when
[00:54:55] something changed, but it doesn't tell you
[00:54:57] what something changed from
[00:55:00] to what. So if you look at
[00:55:03] the
[00:55:06] activity log or any particular record,
[00:55:09] you can see this information here,
[00:55:11] but that's not really
[00:55:13] shareable to people outside
[00:55:15] of your base or if you want
[00:55:17] a weekly sort of email that lists
[00:55:20] out in plain English,
[00:55:22] what things used to be
[00:55:23] and what they are now,
[00:55:25] it's sort of difficult to achieve.
[00:55:27] So I wrote a script
[00:55:27] that is
[00:55:29] pretty extensible that
[00:55:31] gives you an overview of
[00:55:34] how data changes from blank to blank.
[00:55:37] So I'm going to
[00:55:39] make a test
[00:55:40] and sure hope that the script
[00:55:42] hasn't broken since
[00:55:43] the last time I checked it.
[00:55:45] So I've just changed that date
[00:55:47] from the 27th to the 28th.
[00:55:48] After a couple of seconds delay,
[00:55:51] I see Airtable is still saving.
[00:55:54] Yeah, so an automation will run
[00:55:56] and it will output that today's date
[00:56:00] is the 18th. So on the 18th,
[00:56:03] the field due date c
[00:56:07] went from the 27th to the 28th,
[00:56:09] which is a positive difference of one day.
[00:56:12] I'm going to stop here in preface that
[00:56:15] while I'm comfortable giving
[00:56:18] this base and script out to people.
[00:56:20] I'm not gonna answer
[00:56:22] questions about it because
[00:56:26] the reason I built this was for,
[00:56:28] you know, my current position,
[00:56:29] there are two different teams that wanted
[00:56:31] effectively this, but they wanted
[00:56:33] this output in two different
[00:56:36] sort of formats. One of them wanted the
[00:56:39] number of days difference in
[00:56:40] parentheses and the other one
[00:56:42] wanted it grouped by
[00:56:43] field and not by the date
[00:56:45] on which the values changed,
[00:56:48] that affects how the script is
[00:56:49] ultimately written.
[00:56:51] And everyone is gonna want
[00:56:52] this sort of thing
[00:56:54] formatted slightly differently. So
[00:56:57] I'm gonna give you what
[00:56:59] you see as is and then,
[00:57:01] you know,
[00:57:02] it's
[00:57:02] up
[00:57:03] to,
[00:57:04] it's up to you. You've gotta,
[00:57:06] there's things in here like you'll
[00:57:08] see the, the text is bold here and
[00:57:10] I here, I'm not gonna customize
[00:57:12] that for you. You're on your own.
[00:57:15] But what you don't see
[00:57:16] is this
[00:57:18] field that outputs
[00:57:20] a bunch of JSON again,
[00:57:22] we're, we're back at JSON
[00:57:25] where effectively I have an object where
[00:57:30] the key of that object is the day
[00:57:33] that the values were logged.
[00:57:35] And then
[00:57:37] its value
[00:57:39] is another object for
[00:57:41] each of my fields that I'm tracking
[00:57:44] and then what the value is on that day.
[00:57:47] In this case, the 15th and then
[00:57:49] the second batch of dates
[00:57:51] is today the
[00:57:53] 18th when I change the value
[00:57:55] from the 27th to the 28th.
[00:57:57] Now I'm logging the value for all
[00:57:59] of the fields that I'm tracking.
[00:58:01] Not just the one
[00:58:03] that was changed.
[00:58:04] And the reason is
[00:58:06] if I want to go back and change the value
[00:58:08] of another field, let's make due date b
[00:58:12] the fifth, what I want it to do,
[00:58:14] I don't want
[00:58:16] changes made on the same day
[00:58:18] to be logged as like completely separate
[00:58:21] changes. I want them to be grouped
[00:58:23] by the day. And that's what happened here.
[00:58:26] You know, that date B came
[00:58:28] above due date C
[00:58:29] and that has to do with how things
[00:58:32] are ordered in the script itself.
[00:58:34] So
[00:58:35] with that
[00:58:38] sort of
[00:58:39] all in here, I will note
[00:58:41] that the reason
[00:58:43] this isn't counting the way I want it
[00:58:46] to is because this
[00:58:47] is a different list type.
[00:58:48] This is sort of a defect in
[00:58:51] Airtables markdown.
[00:58:53] I think if I do that, yeah,
[00:58:54] that's the, that's the problem.
[00:58:56] It's not really a
[00:58:56] script thing. It's the,
[00:58:58] the chosen method of formatting,
[00:59:00] which again is why I'm
[00:59:01] not gonna answer any questions
[00:59:02] about
[00:59:05] how this thing is is ultimately written.
[00:59:07] But if I look at it,
[00:59:10] I'm going to start by
[00:59:12] going with a very simple
[00:59:13] when a record is updated.
[00:59:15] I'm watching three fields
[00:59:17] then a script is run.
[00:59:19] I'm gonna explain in plain English what
[00:59:21] the script is doing. I'm gonna have to
[00:59:24] zoom out just a little bit
[00:59:25] in order to do that.
[00:59:27] I'm pulling in the record ID
[00:59:29] of the record that was just updated.
[00:59:32] I am pulling in the table.
[00:59:34] In this case, I only have one table.
[00:59:36] It's called projects
[00:59:37] the
[00:59:38] JSON
[00:59:38] field. That is the long text field
[00:59:41] that you can almost certainly hide 100% of
[00:59:43] the time that just lists
[00:59:45] all of the values on every date
[00:59:48] that a value possibly was changed.
[00:59:50] The summary field.
[00:59:52] That's the one that's formatted
[00:59:54] for people to actually
[00:59:55] read
[00:59:56] and then the watched field I DS
[00:59:58] in a perfect world, I would be able to
[01:00:01] say any field that is currently
[01:00:03] visible in this particular view.
[01:00:05] I can't do that in an automation script,
[01:00:08] but instead what I'm doing is
[01:00:11] getting an array of different field names.
[01:00:14] Now, in practice in the solutions
[01:00:16] that I've actually built,
[01:00:17] these are all I DS,
[01:00:18] the id of the table,
[01:00:20] the ID of these different fields.
[01:00:22] Just because that's
[01:00:23] more sustainable. If someone changes
[01:00:26] the name of any of these due dates
[01:00:29] fields, then the script will break.
[01:00:31] So if you're going to adapt this process,
[01:00:33] all you would do is instead of
[01:00:35] putting in the name of the field,
[01:00:36] you put in the id of the
[01:00:38] field
[01:00:39] just as a warning,
[01:00:40] then I'm getting the actual table
[01:00:43] itself and I'm pulling in all the details
[01:00:46] about the record, not just the record ID.
[01:00:48] When I'm passing that
[01:00:50] I only need to get the
[01:00:52] JSON
[01:00:52] field, the fields that I'm watching
[01:00:55] for changes that's at array here
[01:00:57] and then the summary field itself.
[01:00:59] So I'm not pulling in
[01:01:00] every single column that has
[01:01:03] to do with this record,
[01:01:05] then I'm just getting for
[01:01:07] what is today's date.
[01:01:08] And I'm converting that
[01:01:11] date time into a string.
[01:01:13] Something I learned in
[01:01:15] version two of the thing
[01:01:17] that I built in practice,
[01:01:19] I want to make sure that a change
[01:01:21] is logged according to my time zone,
[01:01:23] which is America Los Angeles.
[01:01:25] Because if you make a change
[01:01:27] at like five PM
[01:01:28] my time it gets logged as a change
[01:01:30] made tomorrow when that's
[01:01:31] a little bit confusing
[01:01:32] when you're actually trying to
[01:01:34] get a running history of changes.
[01:01:37] Next thing, I am getting
[01:01:41] the value of all of the
[01:01:44] history for that
[01:01:47] For that record that's in that
[01:01:49] Json field.
[01:01:50] I'm parsing it out. It right now
[01:01:52] it is just plain text,
[01:01:53] but I wanted it in true
[01:01:54] json
[01:01:55] to give it a
[01:01:56] a workable object in javascript
[01:01:59] from there.
[01:02:01] Each key of
[01:02:05] each key of that outer object
[01:02:08] is going to be the date
[01:02:10] that a change was logged.
[01:02:11] And then
[01:02:13] I'm building a new set
[01:02:15] of objects for what are the
[01:02:17] current values.
[01:02:18] So some value just changed because
[01:02:20] it triggered the automation
[01:02:22] what are all of the values now
[01:02:24] and I'm overwriting any log
[01:02:27] for today that's already in there.
[01:02:29] That's why I made a change to
[01:02:32] due date c
[01:02:33] it logged the change.
[01:02:35] I then made a due date change for date B
[01:02:39] it logged the change again,
[01:02:40] but it didn't show up as two different
[01:02:42] groups. It all came in under today,
[01:02:45] April 18th.
[01:02:49] I'm combining that together.
[01:02:51] What is my current history
[01:02:53] plus all of the values
[01:02:54] from today? Making that one new object.
[01:02:57] And then this is the part where
[01:02:59] things get very specific
[01:03:01] to how you want things
[01:03:02] arranged. But generally
[01:03:05] speaking, I'm taking each
[01:03:07] day of history that I have
[01:03:09] and then for each field on those days,
[01:03:13] I'm checking, does this value equal the
[01:03:16] same thing as the value from the next time
[01:03:19] the
[01:03:21] history is logged.
[01:03:22] If it's exactly the same,
[01:03:24] then I don't need a summary.
[01:03:25] Nothing changed.
[01:03:26] If something is different,
[01:03:28] then
[01:03:29] do both of those values exist?
[01:03:32] If so what is the difference in time?
[01:03:34] And then format it, however,
[01:03:36] this particular implementation,
[01:03:38] once it formatted, that's
[01:03:39] a nested bullet.
[01:03:40] That's why there's all these
[01:03:42] spaces and then an asterisk,
[01:03:43] the name of the field
[01:03:45] went from blank to blank.
[01:03:47] Then I want to check if
[01:03:50] I have added,
[01:03:54] I'm gonna back up and
[01:03:55] just give this as an example
[01:03:57] right now, I'm checking three fields
[01:03:59] if I want to suddenly track due date D I
[01:04:01] can do that but there's no history
[01:04:04] for due date b in any of this.
[01:04:06] So the next time
[01:04:07] I add a value to due date D
[01:04:10] I don't want it to say it went from
[01:04:13] blank to whatever it is now
[01:04:16] because it might not have
[01:04:17] actually been blank.
[01:04:19] I don't wanna log that as
[01:04:20] a change and that's what that
[01:04:22] last if statement is doing. It's saying
[01:04:24] do you have history
[01:04:25] to compare for this field?
[01:04:27] If so compare it.
[01:04:28] If you don't have history,
[01:04:30] then don't compare it.
[01:04:32] If I have history and it really
[01:04:33] was blank the last time I checked,
[01:04:35] then say it went from blank to this.
[01:04:38] That is the explanation of this
[01:04:42] implementation.
[01:04:46] Again, I, I don't wanna answer questions.
[01:04:50] I will have pressed,
[01:04:51] I don't want to answer questions.
[01:04:53] Yeah,
[01:04:55] that's awesome.
[01:04:56] I mean, this is such a useful
[01:04:58] use case. Comes in handy quite a bit. So,
[01:05:02] yeah, lots of things you could do.
[01:05:04] You could also log,
[01:05:06] you know, like you were saying,
[01:05:07] if there is no history,
[01:05:08] then maybe you want to
[01:05:09] that, that was the first entry
[01:05:11] or you know, it was created or whatever,
[01:05:14] first set.
[01:05:15] Yes,
[01:05:16] that is, that's something you could do
[01:05:18] and you could do that pretty easily.
[01:05:19] But again, you get in and change the,
[01:05:21] the if statements and all that
[01:05:23] and there's nothing that says that
[01:05:25] you have to log date field.
[01:05:27] You could do this with any field type.
[01:05:28] It's just that they particularly
[01:05:30] wanted to know the difference
[01:05:32] in days and that
[01:05:32] only really
[01:05:34] for date fields if you wanted to
[01:05:36] track text fields,
[01:05:37] changing from when to when
[01:05:38] or who was assigned to a task.
[01:05:40] But with a collaborative field,
[01:05:42] you could do that with this
[01:05:44] script as well,
[01:05:45] modifying the formatted tasks a
[01:05:46] little bit
[01:05:49] and there is a limit 100
[01:05:51] 100,000 characters to a long text field.
[01:05:56] So we have a ton of history. Then you
[01:05:59] might need to add some
[01:06:01] some archiving or
[01:06:03] some removing older entries.
[01:06:06] I would not advise tracking more than
[01:06:10] real realistically, more than
[01:06:12] five different fields
[01:06:14] in one implementation.
[01:06:15] You could
[01:06:15] chain these together and have multiple
[01:06:18] JSON
[01:06:19] and summary fields. And I wouldn't
[01:06:23] recommend doing this for fields
[01:06:25] that are literally constantly changing.
[01:06:28] It's more for like,
[01:06:29] you know, the due date
[01:06:31] of an overall project
[01:06:32] that's probably gonna change. Hopefully,
[01:06:35] I don't know your process,
[01:06:36] hopefully, only a couple of times
[01:06:38] it's constantly changing,
[01:06:40] then you're gonna run into a barrier
[01:06:42] and then you might want to log
[01:06:44] every change its its own record.
[01:06:46] Yep.
[01:06:48] Awesome. Thank you Kamille
[01:06:50] for sharing that.
[01:06:51] We'll put the link out and we'll
[01:06:53] put a disclaimer.
[01:06:55] Do not contact Kamille.
[01:06:57] No,
[01:06:57] don't, don't
[01:07:01] buyer beware.
[01:07:03] Yeah.
[01:07:03] Buyer
[01:07:03] beware. You gotta Yeah.
[01:07:05] If you're gonna,
[01:07:06] if you're gonna start going into
[01:07:07] that world, you gotta be OK.
[01:07:09] Tinkering with the scripting
[01:07:11] or like Jason said,
[01:07:12] throw it in the chat GP T and
[01:07:14] say, how do I change this to
[01:07:16] do what I want?
[01:07:19] Well, Jason, thank you again
[01:07:21] for coming on the show.
[01:07:22] Always appreciate it.
[01:07:23] And good luck with your
[01:07:25] trip to Honduras. And
[01:07:28] that's awesome. And
[01:07:30] yeah,
[01:07:31] and Kamille, good to see you again.
[01:07:33] We will be back next week with the new
[01:07:34] episode. Take care everyone.