Dopamine Monkeys 🐵: Conquer the information firehose (and your busy day) with Akiflow.

No, Notion is NOT 🙅‍♀️ your personal single source of truth. Akiflow can be. It beautifully integrates tasks and calendars, acting as your productivity meta layer.

A. Don’t have time? Here’s the TL;DR

• Time budgeting is dope (just like budgeting money)

• Akiflow is a personal task manager and calendar app that will help you keep yourself always organized. Its built to focus on speeding up the fundamentals of productivity: capturing tasks, processing them, and always knowing what to work on

• Yes, it’s available on both Mac and Windows; and it will ensure you don’t have to leave what you’re working on to get your daily stuff done. It is a step up from any to-do app you’re using

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B. What’s the theme for today? Not another boring old to-do app 😴

How do you get your daily tasks done?

Do you cross off a list of to-dos written in a diary/app? OR Do you freestyle through the day, letting notifications and meetings decide what you do?

POV: You’re hastily noting down to-dos through the day. Or just preparing for an online interview. wagmi✨

In the last few years, the number of productivity and collaboration apps you use has skyrocketed. While in 2015 it might have been just Google Docs, Calendar, and some to-do app, today an average stack includes most of Notion, Slack, Gmail, Figma, Airtable, Zoom, and Discord.

Is this the great unbundling? 🤷

And all these apps have their own notifications.

Vying for your attention 😫

And we can’t stop opening these notifications. We get a sense of joy every time we do. We give in to our FOMO. We’re dopamine monkeys

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🐵

The same dopamine hit that keeps us scrolling through memes all-day

What if we had a way to manage our distractions? And protect our most valuable resource: Time.

We don’t have to look far for an answer.

We can take inspiration from another valuable resource: Money. Over generations, we have learned the art of budgeting our money. Listing and allocating income and expenses.

What if we could do the same with time?

Time budgeting 🤔

Now, what’s that fancy word?

Time budgeting/blocking

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in the simplest sense involves noting all your tasks in one place and allocating a time for it in your calendar.

Super helpful if:

• You can’t find time for yourself through the workday

• You find yourself distracted by a lot of mails, meetings, notifications

• You work on a number of different projects every day

The founder of Lambda school is one of the most recent flagbearers of time-blocking

And if we combine time-budgeting with a trusted system that helps us keep track of all our ideas, notifications, follow-ups, and requests then we can rest assured that we won’t miss anything.

No recall burden. No need to reply to anything immediately.

✨ And Akiflow empowers you to do this ✨

Akiflow is a personal task manager + calendar desktop app that will help you keep yourself always organized.

It’s built to focus on speeding up the fundamentals of productivity: capturing tasks, processing them, and always knowing what to work on.

Apart from creating your own to-dos, it allows you to get notifications & tasks from multiple tools together in a single workspace.

I’ve been using Akiflow for a long time. It is fast, reliable, automatic. Let’s see how.

Tweet. Should really get a better handle.

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C. What do we loooove?

Akiflow is not just another to-do app.

It is your productivity meta-layer. It ensures you never have to leave the app you’re working/collaborating in to note your important action items.

1. 📝 Note down tasks anywhere with its universal command bar: Use natural language to capture a task anytime - whether you’re browsing a website, attending a Zoom call, or doing deep work in Notion/Figma. (You don’t need to assign a deadline too; all tasks without a deadline go to your Akiflow Inbox)

   

2. 🎯 Block time for tasks: At the start of every week/day, you can go into your Akiflow Inbox and decide which tasks you want to prioritize for the day (You can also groups tasks by projects and priority).
   Next, you simply drag and drop the task to an open slot in your calendar. This way you always know what to work on 😌

   

3. 🙋 Keep track of events through the day: Once you start your day, you don’t even need to keep checking Akiflow to know what’s next. It’s always present in your menubar. And it helps you join meetings in one click 🙌

   

4. 🤝 Schedule meetings like a pro: You can easily find a meeting time by dragging time slots in your calendar. In 1-click, Akiflow pulls your availability from your calendar and writes an invite email. Goodbye, laborious back and forth when scheduling.

   

5. 🗃️ Get all important notifications in one place: Most notifications are to-dos. So they should be captured in your to-do app. After you’ve filtered them. Akiflow has a ton of integrations with your most-used apps: Gmail, Slack, Notion, Linear, Github, Trello, etc.

   

   And with the Notion integration, you can automatically import tasks from your Board, Table, List, and other databases to Akiflow to stay more organized and updated.

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As Kevin Kwok says in his piece on the arc of collaboration (and productivity):

The platonic flow of productivity should minimize time spent not productive, with collaboration as aligned and unblocking with that flow as possible. By definition, any app that requires you to switch out of your productivity app to collaborate is blocking and cannot be maximally aligned. It’s fine to leave your productivity app for exceptions and breaks. But not ideal when working.

Akiflow solves this very well. You shouldn’t have to switch apps and context to jot down action items. It should stay within the same workflow!

⚡ Pro Tip: Combine this with the universal note-taking capability of Mem (covered on 2 Dec) and the universal search capability of Raycast (covered on 6 Dec), and you almost never have to leave what you’re working on to take notes or note to-dos.

Mem (Take notes) 🤝 Akiflow (Note to-dos) 🤝 Raycast (Search everything)

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D. What’s more?

1. 🏃‍♂️ Here are a few more pro-tips on better time blocking: (via Akiflow)

   • Schedule time for emergencies/interrupts

   • Set realistic timelines

   • Schedule time for recurring tasks. (email, etc..)

   • Schedule breaks as well (lunch, breaks, etc..)

   • Time block in advance to handle your work-life balance

2. 📱Akiflow has a basic mobile interface right now (a dedicated website you can use to input tasks). But they are soon coming up with much more:
   In particular, we are looking at mobile apps and web versions, 2-way sync, more integrations, and some teams features. ~ Nunzio (Akiflow founder; speaking with Francesco D’Alessio)
   

3. 🤯 Collecting all notifications in one place has another benefit: Building a (personalized) history of company records. In the current world of multiple inboxes, your information is dispersed across a dozen different services, and whenever you try looking for something you never know where to find it.

   This aspect feels like a very underrated benefit of a unified notifications inbox. (Source: Julian’s outstanding article on Superhuman)
   

4. 🤔 Here are a few alternatives. But nothing comes close to what Akiflow does (end to end task management geared to save you time):

   1. Sunsama: Similar to Akiflow; lacks the focus on speed

   2. TickTick: Allows ‘time-budgeting’; but not much more

   3. Motion: Covered earlier (If you liked Motion, you’re going to love Akiflow)

   4. Things3: One-time pay; no subscription (Only for Apple devices)



1. Coined by Jake Singer and Tanya in this piece on why we’re so distracted at work. They also talk about Akiflow in the same article.

2. Ali Abdaal also follows time-blocking. But in a slightly different way