Launch HN: Routine (YC W21) – Tasks, notes and calendar all in one product
I became an entrepreneur in 2010 and struggled to maintain control of my work environment which quickly became very chaotic with many email/chats to answer, a ton of meetings to schedule and attend, time to find to focus on important tasks and hundreds of thoughts going through my head that I needed to write down somewhere not to forget.
Over the years I improved my own workflow, from sending myself emails, to todo apps, to GTD, to programming my own small tools with keyboard shortcuts.
Talking with many busy professionals (entrepreneurs, investors, managers etc.) we quickly discovered that everybody had the same problems: they cannot stay in control of their time, they rely on manual "hacks" based on a single product (e.g Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion or else) to do almost everything and they hate context switching between apps.
Given how many people are unhappy with their workflow, we decided to build Routine to become a productivity operating system (so to speak) and solve these problems.
In particular, we find it super annoying to be forced to switch between todo and notes taking apps. We believe some information is actionable (tasks) while others are not (notes). We see no reason why they should not be stored in the same system. This is why we decided to include notes (daily notes, meeting notes, topic-based pages etc,) and tightly-bound them to tasks. In Routine, tasks can be enhanced with a media-rich description (i.e a note) but notes can also embed checkboxes which are full-fledged tasks that can be scheduled, delegated and more.
Another problem with existing tools is that they do not take into account your work preferences. Maybe you prefer to concentrate in the morning and take meetings in the afternoon. Or maybe the opposite. Routine allows you to define such time preferences when it comes to deep work, internal and external meetings, administrative work etc. Routine will then take those into account whenever you want to schedule a meeting or block time in your calendar in order to work on an important task. Think of it as Calendly for all the activities in your life (not just meetings).
We also think that existing workflows are just too slow. Switching to your browser to then click on the Google Calendar tab to be able to look at your next meeting is just too much work. Likewise when it comes to taking meeting notes or writing down a task to perform later. Such actions should not take more than 3 seconds, in particular since you perform them several times a day. This is why we've made Routine controllable through a single keyboard shortcut. Just invoke CTRL+SPACE anywhere on your desktop to pop up Routine's console which can be used to capture a thought, create a calendar event, glance at your calendar, take notes and more. This way you do not need to switch apps and lose focus!
By combining these concepts, you can for example turn an email into a task and secure time in your calendar to make sure it gets done; just invoke the console over Gmail and type "... for 1h in Focus" (with Focus being the name of one of your pre-defined time slots).
The app is still in heavy development. For now we've been focusing on having a strong backbone with tasks, notes and calendar. Some of the features above will be shipped in the next release. We have the core concepts but we need time and your feedback to help us find the right direction. So if you feel information is spread between too many tools and that you are constantly wasting time switching between apps, let us know what you think, ideas you have and recurring problems you face.
Feel free to give it a try (note that we are in the process of rebranding and the app is not up to date yet!): http://routine.co/hn
Thanks.