How a Search for the Perfect Productivity App Led to a Search for the Meaning of Life
If you’re like most people, you’ve probably resolved to make your life easier, more efficient and more productive in 2017. And, as you might imagine, there’s an app for that. In fact, there are a lot of apps for that — if you check out any of the big tech blogs, you’ll find a dozen or more productivity apps that claim to be able to organize your life. (And I’m sure that productivity guru Tim Ferriss’ new book, Tools of Titans, lists plenty more apps and tools to check out…)
So, as part of my search for the perfect productivity app, I decided to check out Notibuyer, which has been mentioned on Product Hunt and has received five-star reviews from users. Notibuyer essentially combines your to-do list with some voice memo features and the ability to connect members of your social network. When you’re making a shopping list for a dinner party, for example, you could connect one of your Facebook friends and make sure that they’re buying the right items (like the perfect bottle of wine!).
But what really fascinated me about Notibuyer was the story of the founder, Eugene Lukyanov, who’s from Ukraine and is now based in Los Angeles. I’ve always been interested in tech startups that have been founded by immigrants from the former Soviet Union or that have some kind of connection to Russia. (Sergey Brin of Google is the example that most people think of, but there’s also Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, who was born in St. Petersburg, and Yuri Milner, who’s one of the top venture capitalists in the world today, and Yan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp, and Max Levchin, one of the co-founders of PayPal.).
So that led me to explore some of the back story of the founder of Notibuyer. I started with Twitter, where Lukyanov shares some of his thoughts on a wide range of tech topics that are on the cutting-edge of innovation — including the blockchain, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, artificial intelligence (AI) and something called the holacracy [the idea that traditional organizational hierarchies can be replaced by loosely distributed, self-organizing teams].
For example, here’s Lukyanov talking about the role that artificial intelligence will play in the future evolution of the human mind:
And here’s Lukyanov talking about the holacracy:
Fun fact: Medium — where you’re reading this story right now — actually embraced the holacracy for several years as a management practice, and companies like Zappo’s have also embraced it.
And that got me thinking even deeper — the search for the perfect productivity app is not just about making our lives simpler and easier and more organized, it’s also about making our lives richer and more complex and, yes, messier. Productivity apps should be about more than just trying to fit each of the mundane tasks we have to do each day into a series of round holes, it should also be about enabling to-do lists to become news ways to catalog all the amazing ideas that exist within our brains (if only for a fleeting second). And they might just be a way to save the world:
The future of productivity apps, then, is really about taking some of the emerging technologies available today — like machine learning and artificial intelligence — and finding ways to help them enhance the capabilities of the human brain in ways we haven’t yet even explored.
