Crafting a better work experience

According to this piece from Wired, a modern smartphone user receives around 73 notifications per day. It also states that people receive more than double the amount of pings they think they are getting.

But as much as we all try (or not) to limit the number of notifications that come through our phones and computers, we just can’t shut them all off. It’s an intrinsic part of modern work life.

What we can do is manage them better.

In this straight-to-the-point blog post, I’ll share three ways to take control of your notifications with Missive.

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Snooze with rules: Restore work/life balance.

Rules in Missive can help you automate many things, including getting some downtime.

Turning off notifications is an excellent way to reduce stress, rest better and be more present when in the company of loved ones or friends.

It may soon be a matter of legality like in France where employees can’t be emailed outside of business hours.

With Missive, you can create rules to snooze incoming emails to work on them later. You can get very creative and finely tune the rules to only let extremely important or personal messages go through.

Here’s a sample setup for snoozing all incoming emails arriving before and after business hours + weekends.

Unwatch: Call me when you’re done.

This is probably one of my favorites, it lets you see the level of granularity that Missive offers you to focus on your work.

Let’s suppose you’re in customer support and there’s a new email about an urgent feature request from an important customer.

Without the ability to unwatch you would have endured a steady stream of notifications for something that is not within your scope of work. This allowed you to keep responding to other customers without any noise in the background.

Read more about this feature.

Team Inbox: A manager’s dream.

This new feature is great for businesses receiving a lot of emails that have dedicated teams (e.g. sales, support, finance) tackling them.

Previously in Missive, incoming messages could be handled in two different ways:

• Unassigned flow. New messages appear in the Unassigned mailbox of everyone receiving the messages.
• Inbox flow. Everyone has their own unread and archived state. New messages will be added to everyone’s inbox.

With this third new flow, new messages appear in the Team Inbox. The team inbox is shared among its team members, meaning that whenever a message is assigned / archived / closed, it will be removed from the Team Inbox for everyone in that team.

So how does this reduce the amount of notifications?

When creating a team, you can define two types of users:

• Active members. They receive notifications for all new messages.
• Observers. They do not receive notifications. This is perfect for managers who want to monitor the team inbox instead of actively engaging with messages.

The examples above are rather broad and may not apply to your current workflow. But Missive is very flexible and a wide array of setups can be achieved with a little tweaking.

We went on a week-long work retreat in Italy.

Last month we decided to give ourselves a break from our co-working space and went on a week-long team retreat in the beautiful countryside of Charlevoix, Québec.

We set out to the Petite-Rivière-Saint-François village on a grey Sunday afternoon and arrived in a beautiful log cabin perched above the Saint Lawrence River. The view was stunning.

A change of pace

We knew from past retreat experiences that breaking the routine can be beneficial for productivity and new ideas. From way back into our client-work era, to building Conference Badge and Medali.st, we always got something big out of team retreats.

No specific goals were set for this one. We simply wanted to work more, with fewer distractions and more time to discuss. We firmly believe in work-life balance, but sometimes it’s just good to go all out for a few days. The key benefit was constant focus… with a view.

Working with a view 🌄 #missiveRetreat pic.twitter.com/iPUCwfnUpc

— Missive (@missiveapp) November 11, 2015

In between all the hard work we took the time for good food and relaxing spa sessions. Add a few refreshing runs rewarded with drinks and pool games and you get the dream retreat (let’s not forget Etienne’s classic late-night LoTR viewing).

Sharing the fun

Since the Airbnb “cottage” had enough space to house 12 people, we thought it’d be good to invite friends to come work with us for the week. It was a win-win situation: they got to spend a week in a nice spot and we got to have feedback on various aspects of Missive. Getting raw feedback from people you trust outside the bubble of your team is very important and surprisingly hard to get.

Late night dev is best dev 🤓#missiveRetreat pic.twitter.com/HRU1NsxxdV

— Missive (@missiveapp) November 11, 2015

All in all, going on a team retreat is like changing the tires on a racing car. You come back thirsty for new challenges with a refreshed view on your next steps and memories of good times spent together.

With Dropbox announcing they are sunsetting Mailbox, people are getting upset by the volatility hitting the email space.

The most upvoted comment on the HN thread crystallizes this frustration:

Ugh. Yet another intriguing email startup being acquired and killed off by a more-established tech company (see also: Sparrow). It’s 2015 and I still bounce around email clients every couple months because all of the major options have substantial flaws.schneidmaster

Email is rock solid. It didn’t change much over the past decade and stayed ubiquitous. However, the apps we use to consume it evolve at a frantic pace.

Is this a recent trend? Were email companies bought and sold in the past too?

We thought it might be interesting to visualize the history of all those email clients on a timeline: their start, acquisition, and discontinuation.

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It seems that each time a new platform is released, there is an influx of new email apps released to conquer the new market (web, iOS, Android). Then, big players start to acquire the winners to become the instant frontrunners in those new markets.

In 1998, Microsoft bought Hotmail and Yahoo bought RocketMail. More recently Google bought Sparrow, Microsoft acquired Accompli and Dropbox grabbed Mailbox.

The combined valuation of those last three acquisitions, $320 million, is probably another reason why so many apps are being developed since 2013.

What are your takeaways?

Notes

1. The timeline is undoubtedly incomplete; we probably have forgotten many apps, especially older ones. If so, go ahead and hit the comment section below to suggest missing ones, or open an issue on the Github repo.
2. We took inspiration from the team at sameroom.io and their Brief History of Chat Services.