Aerotime
YC '21
Sculpting a new era of productivity: essence of time management re-envisioned for peak efficiency.
Aerotime is a modern calendar that helps people prioritize their work by goal setting, time blocking, and reducing fragmentation created by randomly placed meetings and distracting Slack messages.
The project was done through Clay Gorilla with my co-founder, Rithwik Jayasimha.
How do you ensure people work in flow?
On a mission to allow people to live their best days, Aerotime wanted to let people prioritise individual focus time and streamline teamwork. Frequent meetings are the death of productivity. Aerotime stacks meetings to waste minimal time and let’s you set focus hours when you don’t want to be disturbed by meetings—minimising context switching.
Reducing friction
In the search for a time management solution that did not force you to context switch constantly to get work done, we came upon the idea of the Magic Bar—a way for users to quickly take tasks and set reminders for later without having to break flow.
One of the more cool features of the Magic Bar was that it was capable of automatically adding context to your tasks—if you were on a webpage and you launched it with Option+Space, it would capture the url and any highlighted text and save it to the context, dramatically reducing user effort.
Since most of our users collaborated on Slack with their teams, we also built a Slack tool that let’s you add tasks by simply bookmarking a message and have it automatically appear in your feed. The slack bot would also inform you teammates that you’ve acknowledged the task.
How do you create a task list that doesn't discourage?
One of the issues we discovered with almost every task management application was how the open task list becomes utterly unusable within a few days. You miss closing an issue for one day, but the inflow does not stop, and before you know it the list is completely flooded with unachievable goals.
This was an issue that we set out to fix. We tried to make the process of going through your inbox a more mindful one, choosing to retain a simple pin feature alongside the task rearrange option.
Prioritisation
We noticed that people would try to re–arrange items on their inbox view constantly (an interaction that did not exist) and realized that this was indicative of a bigger problem.
This led to us deciding to simplify the interface drastically, reducing it to a two pane interface that would allow users to mindfully make the choice, and reduce distractions.
The Priority View would reset every day, ensuring that it never became unmanageable
Typography
Streamlined Onboarding
One of the first challenges we were presented with was the difficulty in getting users onboarded. We quickly noticed that retention numbers for users who downloaded the macOS application was 5-10x higher than the browser users. Talking to users revealed that this was primarily due to the tight integration with macOS.
It’s really tough to make a good onboarding. We had to temper our enthusiasm to talk about all the things that Aerotime did differently, opting only to show off two fundamentals that we noticed users found the most useful:
The Magic Bar — Add tasks from anywhere on your laptop and automatically pull context from any application you were in, by simply pressing a key.
Slack Connect — Add tasks by simply bookmarking a message and have it automatically appear in the calendar.
Easy Discovery
We noticed new users starting to become a little overwhelmed with all the options they could choose from, and at a similar time also realized that the settings pane had grown too large and fragmented.
We went through every interaction a new user would have with Aerotime, and tuned it to reduce the cognitive overload on first load.
We eventually prioritized only introducing basic features that had a direct impact upon user retention and tucked all the rest away within the settings panes along with short videos and descriptions.
Features like Holds, Quick Glance and all the other integrations were hidden away to allow users to discover them at their own pace.
Next project:
WifiDabba (YC '19)
