#10 Spinning too many plates

Every Friday we get together to discuss what we've been working on and what we should be working on. Keeping this pattern allows us to work remotely effectivly yet stay on the same page about the mission.

Last Friday we realised just how many things we are working on. Many of these are experiments. Having experiments is a good thing we are trying to build something new and we need to explore to discover what that looks like.

To demonstrate just how many plates were spinning here is our list:

• Smart message composer
• Link previewer
• Receiving and processing incoming email
• Action first inbox
• Bouncing email with a form
• Direct messages
• Updating our landing page with our refreshed message
• Investor relations

Divergent vs Convergent thinking

The creative process involves exploring lot's of new ideas, but to actually finish something you must kill off most of the ideas. Divergent thinking is the process of generating ideas and Convergent thinking is the process of reducing the ideas.

What we realised, with our big list of plates in the air, is that we have enough ideas. We have come to the end of a period of divergent thinking and we now need to switch modes.

Prioritising ideas

Thinning out our list of ideas should be a ruthless process. To keep us on track we have one simple goal: to use fewer messaging services.

Like most of us, we use too many messaging services. There is email, WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal and more. Our idea is to pick one, and implement what ever features we need in Plum Mail to allow us to stop using that service. Then repeat.

What does this change of focus mean? Well not too much, we're still working to the same Goal. Hopefully we're just one step closer to the day when we can all stop using the attention grabbing message services we do today.

Cheers, Peter & Richard

p.s. If you have a friend who you think would be interested in our journey, please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)