Launching deepwork.today

Arijit Bhattacharya — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 11:48:45 +0000

TL;DR - deepwork.today helps you to keep a tab on your day. Always know how much time you have to get work done. Decline unnecessary meetings. Sign up to save time and improve your productivity.

I made the app in the open with React and Firebase. I used React hooks. I felt I could express operations like accessing firestore, firebase authentication, using media queries to adapt layout etc. to be quiet concise and readable. I encourage you to check out the repo especially if you are interested in a reference codebase with React hooks and Firebase.

Hello folks!

Our last employer was a large corporate and we recognised our collaboration efforts were unorganised — absent agendas, unclear goals, too many participants. These ambiguous meetings not only came at the cost of productive time but it also informed our disengagement and made us question our own agency to do good work.

I had been using Pomodoro technique for over four years. It made my daily efforts more consistent. But no matter how well I planned my day, ad hoc meetings and other distraction within my organisation left me unfulfilled.

When we quit our jobs, we had some time to ourselves. We did some thinking to improve our personal collaboration efforts.

And deepwork.today is the outcome of these thoughts.

It provides

⏲️ Deepwork clock is aware of your daily schedule. We have experienced that focus cannot be turned on and off like a switch, so we set aside some cool-off time for every meeting. The clock constantly keeps you updated on the time you have left to get work done.
📗 Bite sized guides to help you gauge the importance and relevance of a meeting. And if you find a valid reason to decline the meeting we provide you with a template response.
💁 Tips to help you improve meetings. We read a few articles on how to do meetings better and condensed them to easily readable takeaways.
📈 Meeting Analytics to give you an overview of your meeting habits over time. These figures will help you decide
- whether collaboration to personal work ratio is lopsided
- can meeting durations be made more effective
- busiest day of the week
- top collaborators

Lets open a discussion

This is an early release. We chose to share this first with dev.to community because as programmers we are required to strike a balance between our personal priorities and priorities of our collaborators. So we need interventions to shine clarity on our intentions.

I would like you folks to join the discussion and help me understand

top 2 things that you would do daily to maintain balance between collaboration and productivity
how often do you decline meetings? what are the usual reasons? If you have any polite ways to say no.

Please try out the app. And share your feedbacks.

do you think if we allow you to rate meetings(or a simple 👍 👎), would that be helpful?
if you would like add more reasons to our decline meeting guide
if you would like more tips
any particular meeting analytics you would like to add and why

You can leave your feedbacks here in the comments or DM me on twitter.

Also, if you like the app, please share it with your friends and colleagues. It’s a free app. We want to genuinely understand how to make collaborations more impactful while not trading off personal productivity. If we get more feedback, the app can get better at supporting diverse work life habits.

Thank you.

Illustration Credit - absurd.design

Concurrent Iteration

Arijit Bhattacharya — Sat, 16 Jun 2018 11:16:11 +0000

The concept of iteration intuitively seems to be synchronous — when the iteration completes we will have our results ready.

There are many native array methods which helps us iterate over an array.

Lets say we have an array of student details. Each student has a field which states their date of birth and now we want to calculate their age.

const ageOfStudents = studentDetails.map(({dob}) => calculateAgeFromDOB);

The ageOfStudents will be ready for us immediately.

calculateAgeFromDOB is a synchronous operation. So, we will calculate the age of each student strictly one after the other.

But what if the operation to be applied to each student does not resolve synchronously.

Lets say, we need yearly performance record for each student. And each yearly performance record of a student is a network request.

const studentPerformanceRecordsPromises = studentDetails  
  .map(({id}) => getPerformanceRecordOfStudent(id));

Each iteration will spawn a concurrent task. And these tasks will resolve in their own arbitrary order.

We have to wait for the performance records even after the iteration completes. This is the critical distinction between ordinary iteration and concurrent iteration.

If getPerformanceRecordOfStudent returns a Promise which resolves after a successful network request, studentPerformanceRecordsPromises will be an array of Promises.

We can use Promise.all to wait on an array of Promises.

Promise.all(studentPerformanceRecordsPromises)  
   .then(doSomethingWithPerformanceRecordsOfAllStudents)

Since we are contrasting synchronous and asynchronous iteration, it will be good to have an async counterpart of our Array.map.

We will like to use it like this

Promise  
.map(studentDetails, getPerformanceRecordOfStudent)  
.then(doSomethingWithPerformanceRecordsOfAllStudents)

And here is how a trivial definition of Promise.map will look like

if (!Promise.map) {  
 Promise.map = function(vals,cb) {  
  return Promise.all(  
   vals.map( function(val){  
      // we are expecting \`cb\` to return a promise  
      // even if it does not we are converting it in to  
      // a promise using \`Promise.resolve\`  
      return Promise.resolve(cb(val))  
   } )  
  );  
 };  
}

This thought was spawned while I was reading YDKJS by @getify. Particularly this part aptly titled Concurrent Iterations.

I was scratching my head for a little while. So thought of sharing my resolved understanding. Maybe this will help somebody.

Thanks for reading.

I am a big fan of YDKJS. Highly recommend it!

Resolve your relationship with JavaScript. Sorry!

Forem: Arijit Bhattacharya

Launching deepwork.today

Lets open a discussion

Concurrent Iteration