12 Ways I Use Airtable
Over the years I’ve referred 68 people to Airtable and with their generous referral policy I’ve been able to have a pro account for free. Sadly I recently ran out of credits and while I use hardly any of the real pro features I do enjoy the extra colors and a few of the apps.
If you’ve never tried Airtable and you spend any time at all with spreadsheets you should sign up for an account using my referral link. They do an amazing job of onboarding new users and the free account has pretty much all the functionality you need. Plus I’ll get some more credits so I can keep using the larger color palette.
Maybe I can inspire you by highlighting some of my own use cases.
Shareholder Poker
I ran a year long “season” of poker for my shareholders and tracked all the winners to see who won the most over 2020.
This was a fun Airtable that I never quite perfected, but did a lot of math for me. I made a little video about how it worked asking for some advice but I was maybe trying to do a little too much with it.
Press Clippings
I update this Airtable whenever I get mentioned in the press, and in addition to a nice scrapbook it is useful if I’m launching a new project to have the contact information of people who wrote about previous projects.
Quarantine Drink Tracker
During the pandemic I was worried I was maybe drinking a little too much, so I started tracking in a nice little calendar that helped me see the larger picture. Definitely noticed that once I had a single drink it was much easier to have a few more!
Coffee Blends
I had a Trade Coffee subscription for a long time and I enjoyed getting a sense of the craft coffees all over the United States. (The “emergency blend” was whatever beans were left over and stored in a mixed bag in the freezer. I always felt a little shame about it but the coffee was good every time.)
K5M Shareholder Conference
I found Airtable was super helpful in organizing the K5M Shareholder Conference and the assets and organization of schedules I needed. And it’s about time to start on this again!
Charitable Giving
I helped a few friends build out Airtables to track charitable giving and as i looked back at my own giving of the year I liked being able to add tags to find what aspects of giving really pulled me in. By looking at what I tended to give I’ve been able to be a little more proactive in my giving and not just responding when it feels like their is an emergency.
Television
For a while I was tracking all the TV and movies I watched but it became more of a chore than enjoyable. But the framework I built for that was easily adapted to tracking the televison I now watch with shareholder approval.
Internet Speed
I’ve been tracking the internet speed at various locations since 2018. This is one of my most useless, but also favorite Airtables. That reminds me I should update it again right now…
Alternative Investments
I love alternative investments. I especially love the platforms that allow fractional ownership of collectibles, where for $100 or less I can own a piece of a painting or a pair of sneakers or a comic book.
Social Database
I keep trying to make this work, and it’s been off and on over the years so there is quite a bit of information in here but I haven’t quite been able to make the personal CRM work for me. I am still in love with the idea.
Sandwiches
My brother and I tracked all the sandwiches we ate for a year. While this is no longer updated it’s still a great resource I return to when I want to check out a new place because I made a long list of “aspirational sandwiches” I haven’t tried yet.
Progress
This is my daily tracker over many categories that creates a weekly dashboard for me. I’m tracking my mood, physical activity, sleep, and food as well as a loose sense of “project progress” by assigning points to various tasks.
Peter Drucker said that “what gets measured gets managed” and I think this applies to one’s personal life as well as business (but being a publicly traded person I’m probably a bit biased in my thinking).
Other Stubs
I made a little video of all the other experiments and stubs of ideas I’ve built out in Airtable.
Basically I’m always tinkering and trying new things. The templates and examples that Airtable highlights make it easy to play around with ideas and mix and match concepts as well as learn how the formulas work and how to best arrange data.
So that’s a little tour of my years of using Airtable. You can do pretty much everything I’ve shown here with a free account, which is amazing. And there is a pretty amazing community of people sharing tips and tricks and helping solve problems.
