Peak provides team ambient awareness without interruptions

One of the biggest time wasters at work is status updates. The most pernicious version of that is status update meetings, where each participant updates everyone on their status. Yawn. Thankfully, those are being replaced in most forward-looking companies with something less annoying, and hopefully asynchronous. But making people write status updates also wastes time that could be used more productively, and that pattern is based on the premise that others will read the updates, or why do them at all.

The smart folks at Metalab have a different take on this whole can of worms. Instead of making people create status updates, they have built a tool — Peak — that integrates with tools that people use in the course of doing their work, and it aggregates the activities associated with those apps, and posts that information. Here’s a timeline:

Screenshot 2015-02-19 08.33.21

As you can see, Peak is integrated with tools like Basecamp, Harvest, Google Drive, Github, and Gmail. Along with the activity stream/timeline, Peak offers up ‘Insights’ — analysis of the data:

Screenshot 2015-02-19 08.35.51

And a ‘People’ view allows users to zoom in one each user’s activities, as well as for admins to manage users.

As the Metalab folks point out, interrupting people leads to bigger impacts on productivity than just the initial time spent on the interrupt. It can take as long as 30 minutes to get back into the flow of where you were before. Add that up for all the interrupts for all the people in the business, each day, all week, and days of lost productivity is flying out the window. And interrupting for status updates is the worst time waste of all.

Peak is a great example of an app that exploits ‘ambient awareness’ — that sense of knowing what others are up to by social indicators, but without actively inquiring, like the way that I know where my closest friends are based on their Twitter feeds. We need more of these tools, and less interruptions for status updates.

Relevant Analyst
Stowe Boyd

Stowe Boyd

Lead analyst Gigaom Research

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