As an engineer and manager of teams for years, it’s gotten continually harder to manage incoming distractions from Slack messages.
I constantly get pinged in the middle of an important Zoom call, or when I’m deep in the flow working on some complex code refactor. Yeah, I could shut down Slack entirely - but it’s a negative signal to my team and I like popping into conversations when I’m taking a break. Slack Do Not Disturb should solve my problems, but I always forget to turn it on.
So, I built a way to do it all automatically.
Holopod (https://holopod.com) is a Mac desktop app that detects whitelisted Mac and Web applications and triggers a status change based on the current app you are using.
To signal you’re ready to work and online you are marked as “At My Desk”. Other statuses are “On Call”, “In the Flow”, or “in a meeting”. These are all customizable.
To pre-answer some questions you might have:
- We don’t track time on specific apps, only status changes are submitted up to Slack.
- We are free for now, as we’re still learning how best to deliver value.
- Yep, we are Mac only but are looking for early testers on Windows or Linux.
Would love your thoughts!
We joined the Holopod beta to see if we could reduce the anxiety people had of being "away" without it being correlated with not working.
So far we like it. It helps people feel more comfortable being unreachable for a period of focused work. As a founder, I get a sense that it can help make people do the stuff that matters, vs. wasting time chatting on Slack.
We'd still like to see more features around supporting different time zones (we're spread across 9 time zones, so it can be easy for people further east to just keep working when getting pinged by people further west).
