Meet Rise: the calendar that works for you. We’re launching the Public Beta today.
Over two years ago we started building Rise: a calendar that helps teams get more out of their time. Today we’re launching our Public Beta and we’d love to hear what you think. Get started here.
Managing time, or managing life for that matter, did not become any easier in the past couple of years. And whether you want to simply get more done or spend less time at work — it all requires a lot of juggling of time.
And the numbers don’t lie that we need help when it comes to how we spend our time: we’re overwhelmed, distracted and we have a hard time making time for things that really matter. One billion knowledge workers* (that probably includes you!) are able to spend just 39% per week on their real work*. No wonder we all feel like we’re in survival mode.
When we started building Rise, we quickly discovered that there is a big gap between what people say and what they do. The intentions are there and we know what a good schedule looks like, but we simply don’t turn those feelings into actions. Which makes sense — work is hard enough as it is.
“We want to eliminate the need to think about systems for work, about focus time, about priorities.”
So we decided to twist things around: instead of introducing a complex new system that promises you the perfect way of working, we want to remove them. We want to eliminate the need to think about systems for work, about focus time, about priorities. Whatever we build and introduce, we want to deliver results with No Habit Change Required. Think about it as the difference between driving a stick-shift or automatically switching gears: one requires you to think and master a process, the other simply takes care of it on its own.
With this insight, we went from a product with a ton of inline messaging and suggestions to improve things, to features that help you have better days, with the flick of a switch. And since that shift, things have really clicked for our Early Risers. Flexible events and FocusGuard — features that help you optimize your schedule — are good examples: after enabling them they will silently help you have better days, without having to think about it anymore.
Today we’re launching the Public Beta of Rise. It’s the smartest calendar in the world, helping you schedule, optimize and protect your day to give you more time for what’s important.
We actually have seen this happening: Rise can have a big impact on teams. Here’s Johan, Co-founder at Brainstud, who has been using Rise with his entire crew:
“With Rise our schedules just flow better, I no longer have to think about double bookings and finding time with both the team and external customers has become super simple. And the team is having more focus time in their calendars, without having to think about it at all!”
We have been crafting and improving Rise over the last 2,5 years, based on a ton of user feedback from a growing group of brilliant Early Risers. We have been chipping away at our vision for work, as we wrote about it in our manifest back in 2020. We’ve been focusing on three of the five items on there (so you know where we’re headed too):
We believe that everyone benefits from longer stretches of uninterrupted time to work and think
Having more focus time blocks in your week feels…fantastic. Especially if you no longer have to think about it. To make this happen we’ve built a Scheduling Engine that we leverage all over Rise. The biggest one: Flexible Events. In Rise, you can turn static meetings into events that our Engine can move around to optimize for focus time. We’ve been iterating on this for over a year and we have optimized thousands of hours, and can’t wait to see what it can do for you.
We believe that finding time is faster, smarter and better when it’s done by software
This Scheduling Engine mentioned above is used in a ton of places. We leverage it to give you Best times to meet, right when you’re viewing one or more calendars of colleagues. Those suggestions are selected based on their calendar fit, focus time and a bunch of other signals.
Even better: with Meet and Reschedule, you can simply instruct Rise to find you the best time for a new or existing meeting. With one or two clicks.
We believe setting and keeping boundaries for work should be effortless and guilt free
Guarding your time is hard — there are always others that need you for something, and there are never enough hours in the day. We put a lot of effort into subtle features that will help you keep those boundaries: FocusGuard tracks how much time for deep work there’s left and will automatically block off the remaining time if needed. You can set up your working times which is respected by all scheduling features in Rise, including Flexible Events. When you’re out of office or when your working time is up, colleagues will see that at a glance. And if you’re working across timezones, we even highlight local times.
We deeply care a lot about the quality of what we build. For a product you use every day, the details matter. A lot. We can’t wait to hear what you think, and we’d love to see all of you become Early Risers too and help us shape a next generation worksuite to do your best work.
