#productity

12.08.2019 - 68/100 days of self-discipline

[] morning routine

[] night routine

() study english

(x) driver’s license

Is it possible to love a product to a point where you absolutely adore it ? That’s how I feel about Evernote.

It’s the first place I go to every time a thought comes to mind or I get inspired by a meme.

If I don’t have my tablet, phone or MacBook Air with me I’d turn to my Moleskine notepad and — at a later time — take a picture and upload the handwritten note onto my Evernote. Evernote comes always first. Before email, before Medium or keynote.

I am in love with 6 products (3 are hardware: iPhone, MacBook Air and Amazon Kindle — 3 are software: Dropbox, Medium and Evernote) — out of these 6 Evernote is the one that puts a smile on my face every single time I open it.

What makes great products ? 

Evernote's essential simplicity is in tune with its very purpose: to Achieve Flow of the Mind. As I type in Evernote I feel as my mind is letting go of the thoughts lingering around.

I have analyzed my favorite products and distilled 3 core elements that yield such a powerful PRODUCT LOVE chemistry:

1. Answers A Primal Need: the product must solve a problem/pain that occurs on a daily basis and that we have an urge to see solved.

2. Zero (or Minimal) Friction: the product must be accessible and feel instantaneous to use as to get us immediate relief or — better — cause joy.

3. Habit Formation: the product must become a daily habit. Something we can’t spend a day without and feel the urge to tell our team members and friends.

Below I describe how these 3 elements apply to Evernote:

1. Primal Need : Evernote solves for a primal need. Our brain has been built to ‘’Lock away’’ memories that aren’t necessary to our immediate survival and store them for future use. Over the last decade we have witnessed a Cambrian explosion via digital devices — > the most immediate result is an overload of information. When we were in the Savannah running away from Lions we built habits to aid our survival (see point 3). The overload of information we experience today is plain painful so much so that we count record numbers of burnouts and ADHD. Evernote soothes this pain by letting you dump your thoughts / likes/ dislikes in a virtual memory residing outside of your brain for you to access anytime you feel appropriate. The green button becomes your Pain relief. Because the product is so beautifully crafted (see points below) you’ll realize it causes real joy.

2. Zero Friction: Wither you are on a a Tablet, Smart Phone or PC adding a thought to Evernote is made instantaneous by the use of Browser Bookmarklets (small button on your browser main bar) or simply by getting to Evernote.com.

3. Habit Formation: All great products strive to become daily habits (checking your email, Facebook, WhatsApp, Linkedin).

Once you have experienced how liberating it is to use evernote to store your thoughts and information clicking the Evernote Green Button becomes a habit.

If you are a super user like me you’ll soon find yourself using evernote to collaborate with your teams. This very act will make it even harder for you to ‘forget’ about Evernote. At least twice a day I receive a notification in my email inbox to check out a note a team member has made to discuss a specific aspect of a product or project we are working on.

If you found what you read useful please like / share.

What’s your favorite product? Leave your thoughts in the comment section, tweet @sal_matteis or email me on [email protected]

Bonus Recommended Reading

Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover (Product Hunt) have written a book uncovering the formula behind habit-forming products. If you haven’t read the book yet get it here

the rise of the single-purpose app is killing the queen of communication. How will email look like in the future?

“tl;dr

Everyone of us spends a minimum of 2 hours a day in email. McKinsey found that email takes up 35% of workers time. The more you dig into the problem the more you realize email is far from being perfect and is perceived as a necessary evil by most.

email is being (and will continue to be) replaced by an array of job-specific apps that are more fit for purpose by either automating the process of sending or completely replacing email. One such app is Slack — which has completely changed the way teams collaborate.

I think that the future of email is in Productivity. More and more I see it as connecting individual notifications that come in from all separate job-specific apps allowing us to consume and produce without drowning into a world of scattered systems.

The first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson to himself in 1971. “The test messages were entirely forgettable. . . . Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar”

In the 90s Email was the Queen of Communication and became synonymous with the Internet, replacing well established in-person conversation, the fax and the mighty telephone . It was the one internet-communication technology that anyone in the mid 90s and early 2000s has become acquainted to. Email was the internet.

Remember Blackberry in mid 2000? Blackberry’s only feature was email. Email was its killer app.

It was long before Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Skype, Whatsapp, Snapchat, Frontback or any of the newly born (internet) communication technologies that are making the world more connected and — perhaps — productive.

So what do we use email for in 2014?

Most emails we ever sent and received fall into these 4 key areas:Transactional, Collaboration, Social and Productivity.

Transactional: we have all experienced it. We’d receive a newsletter or a one-in-a-lifetime offer to purchase or trial a product or service or the email of a business development person trying to ‘take 5 minutes of our time’ to tell us about something ‘extremely useful’ for our business.

Collaboration: ‘hey Mark, I have worked on the presentation for the client visit next week. Would you mind going through and give me your feedback’

Social: this is the equivalent of sitting around a campfire and talking about how the day went. What we learned and what got us excited. As well as sharing that the guy in the tribe nearby has shown real strength in killing that mammoth.

Productivity: The (in)famous to-do list. ‘Hey hon, as you go to the super market this afternoon would you mind grabbing product a/ b / c. Sending out reminders to ourselves and colleagues on ‘action items’ is another example.

Some of the Native Apps that are replacing (or automating email)

The table below shows how new apps have replaced email based on the ‘job-to-be-done.

Transactional

While most would argue that email marketing is probably not dying soon you are probably not going to consume newsletters and promotions in your inbox the way you do today. Unroll.me is the perfect example of how an app can take over the email client and replace it for consumption of all email marketing.

The unroll.me client displays your newsletters in an elegant roll up and it lets you unsubscribe from those promotions you don’t care about.

Business deals are the only ones that seem ‘safe’ in this category. While automation can be added, (and in well established sales cycles canned responses used) there is still too much personal touch required to close a sale or partnership. I would argue that in this case though email already divides the throne with in-person handshake.

Collaboration and Social

There is no doubt that email has been displaced by specific apps for both Collaboration and Social (both in private lives and the workplace).

Slack does an incredible job at helping teams manage day to day collaboration with synchronous and asynchronous messaging.

Productivity

I think that the future of email is in Productivity. More and more I see it as connecting individual notifications that come in from all separate job-specific apps allowing us to consume and produce without drowning into a world of scattered systems.

How does the email client need to evolve to address this shift?

Most email clients do not handle email based on job-to-be-done (nor context).

Google has divided our inbox into 3 distinct areas : Primary, Promotions and Social. That’s Google’s attempt at determining context and organize your inbox around it. It helps but it’s not enough. Google is largely limited by what is possible with email (the protocol).

Hack your inbox to replicate jobs-to-do

One hack one can use is to create multiple inboxes and use gmail stars to categorize emails based on type/action required: to do (task reminder to self), delegate (task or follow up action for team member), require response (follow up), scheduled (for events and meetings). A description of how to use this hack was posted by friend Andreas Klinger and can be found here.

I first heard of this hack from Andreas Klinger and found that while it does help it’s still a largely imperfect solution. For starters it doesn’t work on Mobile. You wouldn’t be able to use it on the iPhone mail client and on the native Gmail app.

Spatch and a new generation of context aware Mail

So how do you add context (and context related filters and actions) to mail without working through a manual hack?

A company that is trying to address this is Spatch. Mick and team have embarked on a journey to add context to your mail. For starters it takes the benefits of the ‘stars hack’ but renders it in an intuitive and extremely elegant way in a native smartphone App.

Not only does Spatch introduce context but it also adds interoperability by synching seamlessly with Task mgmt and Calendar apps.

The Spatch team realized that in order to really fix email they had to go beyond the email client. They started working on the protocol.

What Spatch is working on with their ‘email’ client is the ultimate life-productivity dashboard. It’s powered by context and is built for context related actions.

Looking forward to seeing where this takes us.

footnote:

Just Get It Over With

There’s a classic experiment on delayed gratification, in which kids who chose to wait and eat two marshmallows later, rather than eating a single marshmallow right away, tended to achieve more later in life. Discipline in the face of these sticky sugar blobs seemed to indicate some sort of inner strength needed to navigate this thorny world that rapid marshmallow-eaters just did not possess.

But what if those kids hated marshmallows? Would they be lauded for their self-control then? What if the marshmallow was not a marshmallow, but physical pain? Good things come to those who wait, but sometimes, bad things come too.

The busier you are, the more you scramble, the less productive you get, the worse you get.