Francesco D'Alessio
Productivity app reviewer and creator of Bento
Welcome to the sixteenth edition of Async Chats! This letter is all about candid conversations with people like yourself. If you’d like some more context see this letter. Otherwise, let’s get into this.
Francesco is a productivity app reviewer and creator of Bento. He lives in the UK – the South West of England. He has been a remote worker since 2015.
Why remote work?
I started working remotely largely since 2015 and loved it. The flexibility it gives you is something of a hinderance, but the positives far outweigh any flaws with remote.
What are your interests outside of work?
As a small family, we love to go for walks and to new places locally. For myself, I love watching Formula 1 and have been a Ferrari fan since 1994 — as a passionate Ferrari fan, I rarely miss a race — I also love running, boxing and Yahtzee with my wife.
What are some of your favorite digital or physical tools?
There are so many, as somebody that reviews so many - I get to see them all. I personally love tools like Sunsama, Superhuman, Mem and Notion — the vast majority of these help me get work done. Physical tools — I love Apple, so the system is all iOS/macOS and my favourite work/offline tools are Kindle and reMarkable 2. Super units!
Do you prefer to work/ communicate asynchronously or synchronously? Why?
I've been pushing people towards a-sync ever since I discovered it and only take around 2-4 meetings a month, but the world calls for sync sometimes, so you need to adapt to the context of the project or need. But largely I love communicating slowly over a-sync tennis match, it provides much more opportunity for projects to be focused on too as I'll time-block station to work on said projects.
Questions of the week:
Based on this edition of The Gray Area.
In your opinion, why do we chase productivity?
Like athletes, we try to chase every second. In our case, it could be how to save 5-minutes here or there, or maybe whether a tool streamlines what you do. The practice is healthy done in the correct way, and unhealthy in many cases, but our objective is to progress ourselves forward, as our predecessors have done before us.
It feels like people are addicted to the idea of productivity, rather than actually being productive. The tools, systems, methodologies, etc. Have you noticed this?
People love being more efficient for efficiencies sake. People love spending 1hr on a Notion workspace's emoji and cover choices, this is all perspective. Our objective at Keep Productive is to help people to find the perfect productivity tools for them, but our underlying rule is simple. Rules over tools. It rhymes, but explains that our frameworks and foundations of productivity matter more than the software in front of us, so building healthy practices means better results versus the tools and excessive output, that's my view.
Do you have any recommendations to actually be productive, rather than optimizing for it?
True productivity is striking balance. Balance is different for everyone. A balance for one person will be different for another. Most importantly it is about feeling confident and comfortable with your decisions day to day, productivity helps to give you that confidence, however it is perceived.
My personal recipe is spending less than 15-minutes a day administrating tools and eliminating your perspective on how much time something takes so you focus better and get quality work done. We are the creators of something called the Bento Methodology - a system focused on doing less, something we typically don't see in productivity today - helping you focus on 3 tasks — a large, medium and small task combined with energy workflows - it is a simple way to embrace doing less.
Since you focus on learning and reviewing tools, what is a tool that you love that is highly underrated? Why?
Aha. This is a good question. I largely think tools like reMarkable 2 tablet is one of those tools that has a marmite audience — but the ones who have used it love it and I truly think it is underrated and will become even more relevant in the next few years as we try to get away from being all in social media and technology.
What is something few people know about you?
I have a super fear of sharks - even stopping me from swimming in the UK (I know!). I can also do a decent LOTR Gollum impression.
Anything new or important you’d like to mention to the readers?
I am always putting out new content on the YouTube channel where we cover plenty of productivity apps and best practices. I’d appreciate if they checked it out!
Links
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