This is a now page, inspired by Derek Sivers — a nearly-always updated page of what I’m up to these days. Let’s get to it!
What I’m doing now
Along with David Hawkins, I’ve been heads-down building a new product. This is the product both of us have always wanted but never existed.
Whenever you’re working with other people, you’re always going to run into communication problems.
Slack changed the game years ago, moving teams away from endless email threads and towards real-time communication.
But once the pandora’s box of constant access to YOUR time was open, it could never be closed.
Years later, conversation threads are endless again. Interruptions rife. Endless, low-signal communication is constantly breaking your flow.
We’re back to square one. Not knowing what the hell is going on and feeling like we never get a chance to actually work.
This is where cushion.so is different.
Essentially still a communication app for teams, we’ve introduced some new primitives and hard rules to help keep the team focused whilst protecting you and your time.
👉 Posts: Instead of endless chat windows, everything is organised by posts. Posts are short/medium form content that sticks around. Just like posting on LinkedIn. Posts are a more thoughtful way to communicate than chat, but less cumbersome and daunting than a fully formed doc.
👉 Notifications you control: Notifications suck your time. So we have a global ‘snooze’ button to turn EVERYTHING off. No little red dot. No @channel bullshit. No ‘Just a quick one…’. Everything is off until you say it’s not. It’s hard to state how transformative this has been for focusing and getting work done.
👉 Checkins: Status updates are usually a huge waste of YOUR time. They are a blocker to the actual work. But they should be a chance to plan or reflect on the stuff you’re doing. We have ‘Checkins’. Regular reminders to write a short update on what’s going on. You send it once and it’s shared with everyone. We’ll pull in what work you’ve done from Github, including your PR’s and issues automatically (more integrations soon!)
👉 Make clearer decisions: Collaborating with your team is all about making progress. To do that you need a clear way to make decisions. Countless times I’ve lost what was said in an email chain or Slack thread. In cushion.so, you can mark posts by the state they are in. Come to a resolution? Mark it Resolved. Need urgent feedback? Mark it urgent. Blocked by something? You get the jist.
Also you can direct message team mates, create issues from posts, search your entire information stack, and loads more.
This is just the first mile in the marathon of trying to build a communication app that works for the modern, remote workplace.