Launch HN: Akiflow (YC S20) – Bring your tasks and calendars together
For people who like to plan their time, it is tough to be realistic about what work you can get done without a calendar showing you how much time you can invest in your tasks. But it is hard to organize this because there is so much context-switching due to tasks coming from different apps—not to mention "unstructured" sources like email, notes taken during a meeting, a message on Slack, etc..
I’m that type of user—for me, my calendar has always been the ‘primary source of truth’. But the user experience was terrible. I had to keep to-do lists on the side of another app and manually turn my tasks into events to see them in the calendar. Tasks were scattered across messaging apps (emails, Slack), project management platforms, video calls, the web, etc., forcing me to jump between tabs, tasks and tools. I had to manually turn emails or Slack messages into tasks on Asana and always remember to push new tasks into my task lists.
We originally started Akiflow with a narrower idea: a command bar, similar to Alfred, to create tasks on Asana, Trello, etc.. or add events on the calendar. After a while, we learned that what our users really wanted was to have everything in one place. Once we understood that, it was obvious that we should pivot to building that one tool: a tasks+calendars app focused on making people faster.
How it works: most people start their day by checking outstanding conversations on their emails or Slack from mobile or desktop. There are two types of conversations—those that can be answered right away (in which case just do it!), and those that generate a task. The latter are what you save into Akiflow. Once you’re done processing your emails, Slack, etc., you open Akiflow where you find all your tasks coming from your various conversations and tools.
Once in Akiflow, you can organize each task quickly—you see all your to-dos and can drag and drop them into your calendar between events already scheduled. Alternatively, you can snooze a task for later if you need more time, or snooze it for someday if it isn't actionable yet.
Now you have a complete list of your tasks for today and can hunker down to work. As your day goes on, Akiflow sends notifications on what you should be working on, based on your calendar events and tasks. We make this easy—for example, when it is time for a call, you can join right away with a click or a shortcut.
We have integrations (via APIs) with multiple sources of to-dos (Gmail, Slack, Todoist, Notion, Asana, Trello, ClickUp, and anything else via Zapier and IFTTT) to consolidate tasks in a single inbox. We added a lot of keyboard shortcuts and a command bar (we had this ready from Akiflow #1) and built a desktop application that manages all this information and helps schedule it.
The calendar works offline and supports both events and tasks; it's built for time blocking and gives a comprehensive view of your day, week or month with features that make everyday actions much faster (join a call, share calendar availability, meet with, review your days). We integrate with your Google Calendar with a two-way sync, and we support working entirely offline. We also have a mobile app currently in beta to add and manage tasks on the go.
The desktop application is built using Electron and React. We use some native node modules to use a local SQLite database to store all the information and provide offline support. Our desktop app is in sync with our cloud, so multiple desktop clients will be kept in sync.
If you're interested in trying the product, we have a free 7 days trial available; after that, we have a basic SAAS pricing model (https://akiflow.com/pricing/).
We would love to hear your feedback and ideas—thanks!