You work at a desk, at an office, or from home (like us). You spend your day in the browser jumping from one tab to another. Those tabs might be communication tools (Slack, Teams, email), documentation tools (Notion, Confluence, Drive), or tools optimized for your line of work. We like to call these operating tools.
Operating tools? 🔨
It's a fancy way of categorizing tools that are unique to your job and daily work. If they're built well, you look forward to using them. Maybe you write code. Some of your operating tools might be GitHub for version control, Linear for issue management, and Sentry for error tracking. At least those are our operating tools.
Active vs. reactive work 🏗️
Your interactions with these tools can be active or reactive. Active work is writing a Notion doc, pushing a new feature to GitHub, or planning a roadmap in Linear. Active work is noticeable. It feels good. It brings value to your team or your users.
Reactive work, on the other hand, follows a trigger. Reactive work is responding to a comment in a Notion doc, reviewing a pull request in GitHub, or sorting a Linear ticket. Reactive work feels distracting from your core focus. It's work, but it's not moving the world forward.
The case for notifications 🔔
Today, a primary trigger for reactive work is the notification. We see and hear pings across our email, Slack, and even mobile. We spend our hours grabbing at the wind, reacting to the work thrown our way, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer information overload.
Our way forward 🚵
A neat way to manage notifications. We like to think of notifications as checklists. Some require us to drop what we're doing. Others only demand a quick reaction or reply. Starting with GitHub, Neat lets you do this and more in a streamlined way. Neat provides deep integrations with your work applications for a fine-grained notification experience.
The end? 🖼️
Optimizing GitHub notifications is one piece of the puzzle, but our end goal with Neat is a feed of information that tracks your applications in the background, gives you greater control over how you respond to updates in the workplace, and gets you closer to active work.