A year ago, I set out to create something that would make the lives of software engineers easier. A productivity tool that would reduce the tedium of daily work.
There were four sources of inspiration: multi-platform mention fatigue, daily standup activity log recitation, remembering my tasks, and remembering what I did.
Multiplatform mention fatigue
My coworkers would scatter mentions of my username to the four winds. It was as if they were actively seeking out harder and harder places to places to mention my username and ask for critical information. I was mentioned in Slack, Jira, Confluence, Google Docs, and GitHub, sometimes in old and/or resolved tickets. I tried to use my email inbox as a task management system, deleting notification emails as I resolved them, but it was challenging to keep my inbox pristine enough to see the lingering tasks.
Daily standup activity log recitation
For every standup meeting, my manager would ask us to recite what we had done and what we needed to do. This information exists in GitHub and Jira. It was hard to find and correlate, but it existed. It felt like such a waste of time.
The most valuable part of standup is to help each other overcome obstacles to achieving sprint goals.
Remembering my tasks
It was challenging for me to remember everything that was on my plate. I wrote notes in a digital note-taking app but it felt so manual, especially since many of my tasks existed in digital platforms.
Remembering what I did
Even harder than remembering what I needed to do was remembering what I did, something I needed to do for every standup meeting as well as retro. What kind of software engineer can remember everything that happened in the past two weeks? Somebody with superhuman memory abilities, that’s for sure.
The answer
My answer to all these challenges was creating the BeyondDone app. It’s an app I keep open literally every day and has been a real game-changer for me. The BeyondDone app has solutions for all of these things.
I hope you’ll give it a try. There’s a 30-day free trial, and no payment information is required.