Stunf

For people interested in the Getting Things Done (GTD) method, the In-box is probably already a familiar concept. The inbox is a place where you collect all your “stuff”: thoughts and tasks which need further processing.

When we designed Thymer, we made sure adding new items to your list is fast and easy. This also makes it easy to dump your thoughts onto your task list. Some of those are not actionable tasks yet. For example, you might have added some items you need more information about, forwarded some emails into your Thymer account, or entered items you don’t know yet when to do (if at all).

If you are used to getting things out of your head this way, you might have run into the problem where your Today section becomes cluttered with thoughts or non-actionable items. For our users who prefer to collect their stuff before organizing it further, we have added the Inbox feature to Thymer.

The Inbox works like any other separator (like Today or Week), which divide your task list into different sections. Once enabled, all items you add, through the Add bar or by email, are automatically added to the Inbox. Items with a deadline, however, are still automatically added to the corresponding date section of your task list. Like any other separator you can also collapse the Inbox section. This way, you can add as many thoughts and unorganized items without cluttering your schedule of actionable tasks.

Once you have collected “stuff” in the Inbox, you can process the items further. Either:

• Do – GTD suggests to do tasks that take less than two minutes immediately
• Defer – Drag your item somewhere on your schedule (e.g. Today, Monday, or Someday)
• Delete – The easiest way to get  rid of a task!
• Delegate – Click the edit icon and re-assign the task to a team member

You can add the Inbox separator by clicking on the + icon on a separator, select the Inbox option in the menu, and click Apply (see the screenshots below).

We hope you find it useful!

For those curious why we build Papyrs and not some other product, here’s our reasoning:

The problem

Collecting, sharing and finding back all your information is painful. Even with our little startup we already bumped into this problem. First we only had some notes with ideas (e.g. for new features), screenshots, drafts, discussions and design documents. Then, feedback from users, press clippings, etc. As we got more users we got more business data: instructions, receipts, invoices, that sort of thing. The more data we needed to share and keep track of, the more time it took to file them and find them back.

We figure every company must run into this problem, so we decided to check out the software packages out there.

Enter Wikis & Intranets

We tried some wiki-like software. Wikis can be light-weight but they don’t really fit our style of working. We don’t want to use those weird markup languages just to write a document. It’s too difficult to add a bunch of files or an image gallery. You spend too much time messing around with the Wiki itself and it’s all a huge distraction.

We tried some other apps that promise to address these problems but they turn out to be too limited in functionality or every task takes a dozen clicks.

Finally we tried some bigger intranet software. They offer all of the features we need (and then some), but unfortunately “enterprise” software takes ages to install and it costs and arm and a leg. Besides, because those enterprise solutions try to do everything they don’t do anything well. The user experience is lousy, and sometimes even requires programming to get something done! For software you need to use on a daily basis we want something that makes us happy using it.

Not only did we need a solution for ourselves, but we knew from experience other businesses and teams also waste time (and money) by inefficiently managing their information and documents. Not just documents but they also manually collect data in Excel (for example time sheets, customer surveys, expense reimbursements and leave of absence requests). Works fine for the first week, but as time passes those Excel files become more and more cluttered and unusable.

We couldn’t find any solution that would solve all these problems in a friendly manner and without requiring technical knowledge. This seemed like a perfect opportunity for us to build an app that would solve these problems for good!

Making Intranets cool again

When we see the word “intranet” big companies come to mind, armed with an army of consultants hired to install and customize the intranet. But after we put further thought into it we realized that an intranet is exactly what we were looking for after all: we want to build up a knowledge base, share documents, files, add forms, discuss ideas and collaborate with team members and clients. We just want it to be user friendly. No markup languages, no programming. Just drag & drop. That’s why we developed Papyrs.

We have been using Papyrs internally for the last couple of months and it has completely transformed the way we work. We get email updates whenever pages are updated, we can now find the information we’re looking for in seconds instead of minutes, we no longer have to email Word documents back and forth or copy/paste data in Excel, and we can access everything from anywhere. Our hope is that it’s going to have a similar positive effect on the companies of our customers. It’s going to be exciting!