Why I created Conoto.
(short for contacts, notes, todos,
… and more)
(short for contacts, notes, todos, … and more)
Forgetting information about other people, both professionally and personally, make interpersonal relationships less effective.
In a professional setting, forgetting important details about clients or colleagues leads to misunderstandings and a lack of connection, which hinders collaboration and productivity.
In a personal setting, forgetting important details about friends and loved ones comes across as disinterest or a lack of effort in the relationship, and makes it more difficult to communicate and connect with those individuals.
To improve interpersonal relationships, both professionally and personally, it's important to make an effort to remember details about the people we care about and to show interest in their lives. By actively listening, asking questions, and making an effort to remember what we are told, we can strengthen our relationships and improve communication with others.
The problem with the current tools is that either they are:
- too complex (who likes to use a CRM?),
- too expensive,
- too dependent on an internet connection (too slow to open, data saved on servers, thus privacy/security not guaranteed),
- or you have to juggle between different apps and put information in multiple places.
Using apps like Apple contacts + notes + reminders + iCal
The major drawback is that you must put info everywhere, and it is very difficult to connect these pieces of information. You want to be reminded to send a document to these 3 related persons? How do you go about doing that? You make a reminder in the reminder app or a calendar entry in the calendar app, then enter the names of the people in the note field. However, if you later check the contact cards of one of these people, you will have no way of remembering this past action unless you have entered the past actions into the note field of each card. Not to mention that you can't really connect the contact cards. Too much work equals not doing it.
Using a CRM like Pipedrive
I tried several CRM (even Salesforce, can you believe it!). However, a CRM is too focused on business, with no effective ways to record people's personalities and physical characteristics (having bad memory for name, I like to search by physical traits and place where I met people). In addition, everything is saved on the cloud and is subject to a monthly fee. It entails disclosing highly personal information to a company. I was never a fan of the idea.
Using a “second brain” tool like Obsidian
Knowledge tools are great to organize projects, ideas, and so on. So I tried to manage my interpersonal relationships with them. Obsidian was my top pick. It is extremely simple to use and link various types of information together. However, advanced searches were not possible in the way I desired. "Show me all the journalists in the Bay Area writing about productivity tools who I haven't contacted in the last year," for example. I mean, you can do it by using tags and organizing your files in folders, but it's a lot of work and lack dimensions.
Using a workspace like Notion
I love Notion, Trello, and Airtable. They are excellent productivity tools. They don't work well when I need to record information from my phone on the fly though. This 2-3 second delay in launching their app is enough to discourage me. Then, their off-line synchronization and conflict resolution result in unstable.
Again, everything is stored on-line by default, with an off-line capability. You must pay a monthly fee. You give these companies very personal information. Not suitable for managing interpersonal relationships to my opinion.
Using a notebook (yes, paper!) or a virtual notebook
My artist brain enjoys physically writing. I still use Moleskine. I also enjoy my iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil 2. I occasionally make notes on these. But let's be honest. It is messy. You write pages of information. I tried using these to manage my contacts, but each time there's a new note or action item, you're basically linking different pages. It is unsustainable. Complex searches are impossible.
I decided to create the ideal tool for myself (and hopefully for you too).
Conoto helps me in remembering what is meaningful and improving my professional and personal relationships.
Conoto app addresses my concerns and meets my needs:
- Developed to operate off-line at the core (i.e. private, safe and secure)
- Lightning quick (no need to connect to the internet, no need to load heavy files or media)
- Optional free backup and synchronization via Apple iCloud. (You don't have to trust me or any other company; just Apple. And if you don't trust Apple's infrastructure, I'm afraid I can't help you.)
- A central location for my contacts (with more details than any other app (such as physical and personality traits, notes, todos/reminders/action items, and relationships between my contacts).
- Very complex searches that I can save and reuse at any time.
For all of these reasons, I made the switch and now handle everything about people (including my personal notes and tasks) on Conoto.
Conoto has undergone extensive testing on iPhone 14 Pro/iOS 16.2 and macOS Ventura 13.2. If you have a different setup, please let me know if you find any bugs.
If you made it there, I appreciate your help. Follow me and Conoto on Twitter for updates.
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