How Sunrise’s Shutdown Inspired Us To Make Mindful.am

Hey Medium,

Normally in a very first Medium post, we’d be doing everything we can to get you pumped about who we are, what we do, and how we can change your life for the better.

And we promise we’ll get loads of time saving, productivity boosting, community building content to you.

But right now we have something really important to address.

As you can see from the title above, we’ve named the app we’re building “Mindful.”

It’s a reference to helping you remember to do things. You know — keeping things “in mind.”

It’s also a reference to the practice of mindfulness: a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment.

We want to help you increase your awareness and enjoyment of the present moment by giving you a tool to easily keep track of your busy life.

So you can focus on what you’re doing instead of stressing over everything else you have to get done.

One of the fundamental principles of mindfulness is to take a moment to acknowledge negative stuff so you can move on.

So we need to take a moment to address a big, negative event in our world — the same event that brought you our way:

As of September 13th, 2016, calendar app Sunrise.am is no longer.

And that sucks.

Trust us, we understand: we were die hard Sunrise users ourselves.

When we heard that Microsoft had bought Sunrise and was going to shut down our favorite calendar app, we went through all the stages of grief:

• Denial- “NOOOOO! They can’t shut down Sunrise!”
• Anger- “UP YOURS, MICROSOFT!” *fist shake*
• Bargaining- “Well, maybe we should just start using Outlook once they integrate Sunrise.”
• Depression- “Oh, who are we kidding? Even with Sunrise, Outlook is useless. What will we do??” *headdesk*
• Acceptance- “Okay. Sunrise isn’t coming back. We need to move on.”

After we took some time to mourn (and look for alternative calendar apps), we had a moment of clarity:

If we couldn’t bring Sunrise back from the dead, we’d make our OWN version of Sunrise.

Just for us.

So we got to work developing a scheduling and productivity app exclusively for our team to use as we developed other people’s apps.

Here’s the thing about exclusivity: eventually, everyone wants to be included.

Our friends got word of our Sunrise reincarnation and suddenly what we meant as an internal app to help us get stuff done became A Thing To Get Done.

We realized that we had the power not only to finish what Sunrise had started, but also to make our own app something more.

Something that:

• Connects all your calendars, notes, task lists, and social media events in one spot
• Simplifies scheduling events using natural language
• Prevents time zone mix-ups by letting you see multiple timezones as you book meetings
• Eliminates scheduling conflicts and accelerates sales by communicating your availability
• Helps you track down events with a quick search
• Navigates you to events via Google Maps
• Reminds you of upcoming events and deadlines
• Improves your productivity with with the best practices in workflow visualization.
• Keeps you focused on accomplishing your goals with tools designed to decrease distractions.

So that’s what we’re setting out to do.

Think of Mindful as a love letter to Sunrise users, and an invitation to become part of a new way of getting things done: one present moment at a time.

If that’s the stuff you loved about (and always wanted from) Sunrise, let’s work together to make it happen with Mindful:

• Sign up here to let us know that you want to be one of the first people to give Mindful a try: mindful.am
• We’re launching a Kickstarter campaign soon — as in within the next month.
• If you want to make sure Mindful gets into your hands as soon as possible, we need your support.
• In an upcoming post, we’ll give you more details on how you can help — and what’s in it for you.

Until then, keep taking moments to acknowledge and learn from the bad stuff, and turn it into opportunities to make something new.

Yours in productivity,

Team Mindful

P.S.

If you were a Sunrise user, what’s one feature that you simply cannot live without? We’d love to hear about it (and possibly incorporate it into Mindful!). Comment or Email us: hello@mindful.am