USING AIRTABLE AS A DIGITAL BULLET JOURNAL

In our first 2020 Spring Series, we are bringing back an episode from Season 3 of the podcast. This week we revisit Ash Forrest, a freelance artist, and techie from St. Louis, Missouri. Ash has always been a lover of art and has worked as a photographer, artist, in marketing, and has been a live streamer on Twitch. After graduating college with a degree in printmaking, Ash got a job as the Director of Marketing but eventually moved on to becoming a full-time photographer. After a few years, she made the switch from photography to painting full time. While painting is still her full-time job, she still has her hands in a lot of creative buckets. Ash works with a lot of different types of art from large abstract pieces to digital pieces.  

Ash discovered Twitch, a live streaming website, a few years ago when a friend recommended it because they had just launched their new creative section in honor of Bob Ross’ birthday. Ash loved the platform and immediately dove into making Twitch videos that live stream her creating her artwork. Ash sets up two different cameras during each live stream to showcase her and her art-making process. She loves that Twitch provides an interactive aspect into her creative process. Ash actually met her partner through Twitch when he raided her live stream video one day. The two since have worked collaboratively together and even put on a 24-hour charity stream for Save the Children where they raised five thousand dollars. 

While working a side project for marketing support for a podcast, she discovered Airtable because her client was already using the platform. She immediately fell in love with the tool because of its great organizational capabilities. She began re-organizing everything her client had within Airtable to make workflows more efficient. She now uses it for tons of different projects, mostly personal, like a bullet journal, meal tracking, recipes, bill paying, personal and business accounting, as a music records library, a Rolodex, content creation library for her artwork and much more. In her words, “everything can be Airtabled.”

Demos:

Bullet Journal

• A bullet journal is traditional a physical journal with beautiful drawings  
• People typically track their mood, workouts, habits, etc. 
• For those that can’t stick to a physical journal, Airtable is always with you and makes tracking your habits easier. (on your phone)
• Uses emojis to label fields with the actual name in the description (energy level, water intake, medication, etc) 
• Uses it for notes, for example, she has an ideas notes section with a view to show all those notes and ideas
• The primary field is the date
• Daily, Workouts, Meals, To-Do List tables 
• By utilizing the views, she can meal plan for the month (drag and drop recipes that she has already added into the base to plan out the week/month) 

Content & Marketing

• Geared toward content and marketing for blogs but could substitute videos, youtube, etc. 
• Two tables, Blog Posts, and Social Media
• Different views, the most exciting is the SEO checklist
•  Main View
  • Fields for: Title of the blog post, Stage, Link, Images, Focus Keywords, copy for article, Tags, Published checkmark, social posts, publish date
• SEO Checklist View
  • Helpful for anyone that publishes copy on the web, this view gives you a super simple checklist to make sure you are optimizing your content for SEO. The description on each field helps you check to make sure your titles, images, keywords, etc. are all optimized for SEO. 
• Publish Date View (Calendar)
  • Visually lets you see your content layout and make sure you aren’t content heavy one week and low on content the next.
• Social Media Table
  • There is linked to record to blog articles from the Blog Posts table since you may have several pieces of social media linked to one article. 
  • Allows you to create multiple social media posts (and see where you are marketing this content) for one blog article
  • Simple but very effective

Ash’s bases are incredibly useful and really showcases Airtable’s super organizational powers even in the simplest of forms. If you don’t know code or don’t want to use formulas, you can still use Airtable to fit your needs. In Ash’s words, “The cool thing about Airtable is that it is such a versatile tool. You can do simple things and you can do really extravagant things.” 

You can check out more from Ash on her website here. 

See her Digital Bullet Journal and Podcast Content & Marketing bases along with a great video tutorial from Ash herself on how to utilize them.

Watch the video below for the full podcast visual, including more of Ash’s story and the live walkthroughs of the bases described above.

Episode Video:

Here’s an audio version of the above, with links to download or share if desired:

Episode Audio

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