Introducing Beams to the world
Jun 30, 2021
We are Jana and Mihri and we are the co-founders of Beams. We met at the beginning of this year and decided to take the leap and start a company together. What has been uniting us from day one is the love for useful and enjoyable software, a common goal of building a company culture where people can be who they are, where they can grow, challenge and be challenged; and lastly, we share a certain level of fearlessness, confidence and inner drive to simply make things happen.
A ubiquitous problem to solve
Having gained combined work experience of over 18 years in Software Engineering and Product Management roles in different startups, we’ve always been frustrated by how the growing amount of work tools controlled our day: Our desktops are full of open windows, we suffer from TMTS — the Too Many Tabs Syndrome, have a habit to check and recheck our email inbox again and again and we get distracted by notifications all the time. All of these tools are trying to fight for our attention, but none of them tries to mindfully lead our attention to the most relevant and actionable things.
A Microsoft study revealed that we switch between windows on average 566 times a day. That is more than once every minute. Let’s not forget that this number has surely increased even more since we started working remotely. It’s not a surprise that this results in a 40% decrease in productivity, due to constant distraction, lack of focus and lost time. Every time we switch contexts, we leave a little bit of our attention behind.
The true costs of context switching is to our mental health
The true cost of context switching, however, is not just productivity, it’s our mental health. We experience higher levels of stress, which is severely impacting our happiness at work and overall well-being. Living in today’s attention economy and in work cultures that reward responsiveness, we feel like we always need to be available. At the same time the little red dots on app icons give us FOMO — the constant feeling that we might be missing out on an important message or information.
When we realized that current productivity tools are designed by default to interrupt and that they aim at instant gratification instead of a sustainable level of performance, we knew that there must be a better way.
This is why we are building Beams
We are building Beams to reduce the number of window switches and to increase focus.
We want to solve a problem for people like us; people who love what they do and want to become even better at it; while keeping their minds balanced. We start with product managers, because they are usually all over the place, using several different tools to chase updates and communicate with stakeholders.
It is our ambition to shape the future of work and to build a product that will remind you of how magical technology can feel.
Join our beta
We are going to use this platform to share more details about what we are building, the processes we are using along the way, our learnings as well as successes and failures that shape our journey.
We will launch a closed beta soon and would love to have you join us. If you want to access the product first and help us shape its next iterations, sign up to our waitlist here.