Clew

When we started working on Clew, from day one, we wanted to prioritize building a product that enabled deep work.

Most workplace productivity tools claim to save time, but all they really do is enable asynchronous work. While this may be a key step in giving back knowledge workers more of their time, if implemented wrong, it ends up coming back at you as endless pings and notifications that can have a negative effect on one's focus and efficiency throughout their day.

It's unfortunate that the underlying success of most productivity tools today are essentially tied to the time your spend on them. They are designed to hijack attention. Passing along notifications and reminding you to act on things. It’s unproductive, and annoying.

It's no wonder most people resort to extremes. They turn off their notifications, turn on ‘DnD’ mode, put on headphones or working from home. But what's the real solution to the core problem?

The ideal productivity application would be one that makes the user feel like they're the absolute center of the universe. But achieving that without costing anyone else is almost impossible. Our goal is to build something that gets as close to this ideal as possible.

What is Clew?

Clew is where work comes together—work sprawled across disparate tools, work lost in chat threads and emails, work floating around with no context or home. Clew is the traditional knowledge management tool, wiki, and what have you, reimagined. It’s a better way to organize work for the individual and the team. For any thought or project, Clew captures the context, surfaces what’s needed, and preserves what’s important.

Clew's system creates a central source of truth that's highly searchable and easy to navigate. The relationships between pieces of content and people may be rich and complex, but a user’s experience creating, sharing, and finding information is designed to be effortless and delightful.

Why Clew?

Over the last decade, our work has moved to the cloud. Alongside the benefits, we see work happening across a growing number of disparate, sometimes redundant tools. Files and data have gotten siloed, adding an additional layer of complexity to collaboration. Today, we write documents in one tool, track projects in another, communicate on Slack, design in Figma, and the list goes on.

Remote work (as much as we love it) has amplified the problems we have with today's digital workspace. Without a robust organizational system, having to collaborate across the boundaries of different tools and content created by different people, induce friction on all our workflows. It's no surprise knowledge-workers are estimated to spend upwards of 20% of their work hours just looking for information.

You’ve likely felt, first-hand, some of the shortcomings from this style of work:

There's no easy, straightforward way to organize and utilize different types of information, from multiple sources, in one place.
It's hard to trace work to the context in which it was created, either as an audit trail or for future work.
It's impossible to retain context across different work that reuses some or all of the same knowledge.
It's impossible to search across all knowledge, from one place.
We pay for these shortcomings by wasting time hunting for what we need and relying on people to give us context or to point us in the right direction. This is a leading cause of information overload and stress at work.

Passive by default

This is what we think most apps in the productivity space should do by default. Let the the user come to you for updates or have them explicitly define time periods for when they would like to see notifications.

The unfortunate result of todays 'always online' work culture is that it's easy for people to always reach you. It's also almost too easy to be inconsiderate about other people's time when you need something. Yes, you get the flexibility of defining where you work, when you work, and leave. But, someone else may need something from you outside of your usual schedule. Does that mean you need to respond to them on their schedule or do we need better processes for handing such async work?

Reducing cognitive load

Turns out knowledge workers are pretty good at prioritizing. As long as they have the right context and clear direction they know what works best for them. Obviously, in a big organization managing context and direction is an ongoing challenge, and the solutions are generally the source of most distractions.

Most teams settle on over communication as a solution. Ideal solutions exist, but they're almost impossible to reach, partly because people are lazy. Imagine a scenario where everyone wrote a perfectly uniform update every morning. Should I have to read fourteen updates assuming that some of it might be relevant to me? Or would I rather just ping someone when it's an actual problem to me?

Less process, more tech

Clew is more than just a place to store your work, it's a realtime knowledge graph used to organize work, updates, conversations and context. Our vision is for software to understand how your work connects so that the tools we use for work can serve us better.

Focus on inbound

People recognize when they need new information. Pining folks with updates is only necessary for a narrow set of actions like to tell you that a piece of code you deployed is failing or some other time sensitive thing. Not to notify you every-time some one posts

“Time management isn’t just a personal-productivity issue over which companies have no control; it has increasingly become an organizational issue whose root causes are deeply embedded in corporate structures and cultures.”

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/making-time-management-the-organizations-priority

Process highlight: Designing in code

Being a person that thinks very visually means I try to imagine and sketch out a lot of the general, zoomed-out aspects of a design pretty early on. Once I know all the pieces, it's quite easy for me to picture how all of the componenets play together to create one unified experience. Years of going from raw designs to coded experience has made me pretty fast at taking these general ideas and going straigth into writing the code based on how I visualize them.

It helps a lot that designing in code feels more precise and pays off on the other end when I have to implement it. One of my biggest pet peeves with todays design tools is accurate positioning; in the few times I've actually used design tools like Sketch and Figma, I've always had to visually center things by eye. Whereas in CSS, I can use any number of properties like vertical-align: center or justify-content: space-between to precisely center elements or spread them out evenly without stressing over having to do it by eye. The idea is to get it right once, in code.

I still use Sketch and Figma for things like creating icons; but, they all use confusing half-pixel measurements and wonky zoom levels that make it harder for me to visualize an overall design in a tangible way. They also make me feel like I'm doing double the work by doing so.