It seems like every two weeks lately we see a new app or something that promises to revolutionize the way we organize our lives. And I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to salivating over (alleged) high-potential organizational miracles.
The problem, however, is that adopting most of these apps is an organizational obligation in and of itself. You have to import your information, learn a whole new system, and spend tons of time perfecting your fancy new framework – setting up the structure, categorizing things into appropriate folders or tags, and whatever else the service needs to achieve this elusive state of organizational nirvana.
The climax is different. The new service, created by a pair of buddies named Sam and Samiur, aims to act as your information-organizing assistant, never requiring any deliberate effort on your part. It simply displays next to the content you’re currently viewing and gives you a smart overview of related information you’ve viewed before, in any app or service, and anywhere on the web.
“So many tools in the productivity space are designed for people who almost enjoy organizing things,” says Sam DeBrule, one of Heyday’s co-founders (in a comment that could have been absolutely aimed at me) . “We thought, ‘Okay. If we were to create a product that was really meant to help people who want to take advantage of automatically organizing things for them, what would that look like? »
Ultimately, it would look a lot like the tools you already rely on, from Twitter to Google Search and even your existing messaging, word processing, and note-taking apps. That’s because Heyday is less of an app, in the traditional sense, and more of a lying down. And within that positioning, it seamlessly integrates with all of your other stuff instead of requiring you to learn something new.
The missing layer of the web
DeBrule and his Heyday-building partner, Samiur Rahman, met while working at a machine learning-based data analytics company called Mattermark. Both quickly realized that they were overwhelmed by the amount of information they received day in and day out, and even more overwhelmed by the systems they depended on to organize everything.
“Everything should just be connected,” Rahman says, “without you working.”
So they brainstormed together to come up with a better answer. First, they created a product designed to act as “your personal Google”, a standalone app that you open to find and organize all your information from all the productivity services you use. But they soon realized that it was a miss, but the real answer they were looking for was much simpler.
What they wanted to build was something conceptually akin to “[putting] about augmented reality glasses around the content you’re watching,” says Rahman. “We’re just improving your experience around it – resurfacing old stuff for you, giving you context on everything you read, making you feel more prepared and able to access your memory. without having to do a lot of work.”
On the desktop, it’s all done through a browser extension – available for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave and Vivaldi – on which a little green tab automatically appears whenever you view something that relates to the material you’ve seen before. . All you have to do is click on this tab, and you see a panel with all the related information right there.
“It’s very familiar,” DeBrule says. “Heyday is just there working in the background for me on this laborious task of trying to educate myself or trying to learn a whole new system.”
Heyday also works similarly on iPhones and iPads, via the Safari extension, which is available as part of its iOS app. Although the iPad experience is a bit buggy and incomplete; Rahman tells me it needs an overhaul and the current focus is on the desktop side of the equation, where he and DeBrule have found that most of their current users are doing their jobs the most. heavy.
But Heyday isn’t just about Google. It works anywhere on the web, including with other search sites, and displays information from emails, documents, and even Slack messages, in addition to your past search activity.
Some specific examples:
- When I opened an article I wrote about a time-saving hotkey tool, Heyday surfaced in one of my recent email newsletters in which I had mentioned this same tool. it also brought up a tab with other related articles from all over the web.
- When I Googled ‘Heyday’, Heyday offered me a selection of related pages I had recently viewed while researching the service, as well as the Calendly interview I had scheduled with the founders of company for this story.
- And when I searched for “HP LaserJet Pro” Heyday popped up to remind me of all the other times I researched my damn home office printer and what I found while trying to troubleshoot previous.
And all of this is just the beginning of how Heyday hopes to help you without ever getting in your way.
The tacky glue philosophy
The second half of the Heyday puzzle is how the service works to bring the different parts of your web browsing experience together into a single, cohesive whole. To that end, the desktop extension lets you highlight text on any web page and then save that specific snippet in a special section called, rather aptly, “Highlights.”
Highlights are still accessible on the Heyday website, which acts almost like a bloated version of your browser’s “History” section. It shows you the topics you’ve searched for, the content you’ve viewed, and the sites you’ve visited, which also makes it easy to find or navigate through all your recent documents. You can even add different snippets of information in topic-specific “spaces” if you really feel the need to do your own categorization.
But you absolutely don’t have to. In fact, Heyday makes it particularly easy to avoid having their site opened by sending you a daily “Flashback” email, which resurfaces on the topics you’ve searched for as well as important information you’ve read recently. This all plays into the idea that Heyday clings to whatever is important to you and brings it back to your attention when you probably need it.
“The long term [vision] for Heyday, it’s being that layer of glue that allows people to say to themselves: “I never lose context, I’m always able to come back to what I need, I always have a view of together,” says Rahman.
Part of that vision is to make privacy a top priority. Heyday promises to protect all your data, encrypt it every step of the way, and never share it, sell it, or use it to show you ads. Instead, the service charges $10 per month after a two-week free trial and makes its money solely on those subscriptions.
And that, the service’s co-founders hope, will make Heyday stand out not just as another demanding productivity app, but rather as the missing link that connects everyone. other apps together.
“Each individual user can use whatever tool they want, but they still feel like it all works together,” Rahman says.
