Admit it — Your Coworkers Are A Nuisance
Review by Keith Liles // Also shared on Startups.co.
They don’t mean to be. They’re just doing their jobs, same as your are. Probably, you’re bothering them as much as they’re bothering you. So let’s be honest. What we often term communication might more appropriately be classified interruption.
Email notifications, chats, texts… It’s enough to stop there. If you work online, you don’t need to be told how often these intrusions can disrupt your work. Sure you can take measures such as muting channels, pushing notifications until a later time, or simply not answer calls. But no one wants to be rude or to miss something important. It’s just that we seldom know when the time is right or what the other person is in the middle of anymore when initiate a back-and-forth exchange.
Catch is new mobile app (available for iOS or Android devices) that aims to keep teams focused on their work and let individuals catch up when it’s convenient. Don’t freak out — updates aren’t going away. It’s just that Catch repositions them so that everyone can stay in their groove.
How does Catch accomplish this? By people recording short video updates that others view as time allows. These videos are organized into a series called stories. Hence, Catch, “stories for your team.”
For the moment, Catch concentrates on two types of stories, Daily Team Updates and a Personal Log. Replacing the cumbersome status update meetings, the daily updates remind everyone to check in at a certain time every day. This provides continuity and constant communication, but causes less disruption to each person’s schedule.
The Personal Log is for team members to share progress updates whenever they want, but without disturbing the others. The idea being that you catch up when you can.
Catch neatly shifts the time-consuming text-based communication that has taken over our days to video. Hard to say how comfortable of a fit that shift is for different teams, but it’s certainly a proactive approach to stop interruptions.
In the comments on ProductHunt, Catch Co-Founder Ryan Dewsbury points out the difficulties that teams have aligning their vision and sustaining a culture in today’s environment of distributed offices with remote staff stationed in different timezones. Catch provides companies organized in such fashion with the means to stay in synch without distracting one another, while also fostering real human interaction (albeit via video.)
Working online shouldn’t feel like navigating a minefield of schedule interruptions or necessitate setting up elaborate systems for handling daily communication. Find out if Catch should write the next chapter in your team’s communication story by visiting the Catch website here.
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