Hey all,<p>As an engineer and manager of teams for years, it’s gotten continually harder to manage incoming distractions from Slack messages.<p>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.<p>So, I built a way to do it all automatically.<p>Holopod (<a href="https://holopod.com" rel="nofollow">https://holopod.com</a>) 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.<p>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.<p>To pre-answer some questions you might have:<p>- We don’t track time on specific apps, only status changes are submitted up to Slack.<p>- We are free for now, as we’re still learning how best to deliver value.<p>- Yep, we are Mac only but are looking for early testers on Windows or Linux.<p>Would love your thoughts!
I run a company with 20 remote team members. There's a weird perverse incentive to "show face" and be available when working remotely vs. making yourself unreachable so you can focus on things that matter.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).