Vivek and I (Prashanth) have spent all our careers making digital products. Building products requires team effort. Team effort means collaboration. Collaboration needs communication which takes various forms such as Zoom meetings, Slack threads, emails, comments on Google Docs, Jira tickets, etc. The list is endless.
As much as we loved building products, we resented the quantum of communication needed to get things done. As we transitioned from executor roles to leadership roles, the communication part of our daily jobs exploded!
The many roles that a manager has to play at work leads to more communication channels.
*(Source: The state of manager [study](<https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/glint/pdf/glint-the-state-of-the-manager.pdf>) by Linkedin)*
We were spending more and more time reading and responding to messages rather than doing actual work or finding time to even think deeply before responding to them. This took away the joy that our work gave us. We spoke to many of our peers, internal and external, and found majority of them struggling similarly.
That prompted us to start Zivy to discover potential solutions to address this problem which is so prevalent in today’s workplaces. We understand the need for effective communication — it’s like salt in a dish. If used in the right amounts, it enhances the taste but it can also be used too much.
The current ways of consuming messages and notifications is rudimentary and has not changed much in the last few decades. The goal of messaging and collaboration tools (even the most innovative ones) so far has been to make communication instantaneous and 24*7. This gives a false sense of productivity. In reality, productivity needs a rested, focussed mind first and foremost. Our goal is to help people achieve higher productivity even through a busy day by identifying urgent and important tasks and keeping unimportant chatter at the back.