How Many Apps Did You Open Today to Answer One Question About Your Organization?

Two weeks ago I told you about the third monitor I purchased. Like many of you, the multiple tabs I have open at any given time (42 currently, including the one I am writing this in) can be overwhelming. Thank goodness for favicons to help me keep them sorted in my brain. This is what my day can look like on a random Tuesday morning:

I open the task board. It knows what we said we would do. It has the cards, the lists, the little colored labels I spent an evening on. It does not know that I have a live demo call with a community foundation next week, because that lives in the calendar, and nobody (me) told the board.

I open the calendar. It knows when my meetings are. It does not know why, or what we decided the last time we met, or that this is the meeting that matters this month and the other four are not.

I open the inbox. It knows what people said to us. Forty new things overnight. It does not know what we did about any of them, or which three are the ones that change the week.

I open the CRM. It knows who we have talked to and where each conversation sits. It does not know what was said in the last one, because that is in the call notes, and it does not know that one of those conversations is the one that turned into next week's demo.

I open the books. They know what everything cost, but they do not know what we decided to stop paying for in August, because that was a conversation, and the conversation is in the call notes.

I open LinkedIn, where most of you are reading this. Two accounts, the company's and mine. Between them they know what we posted, who reacted, who commented overnight, which comments are waiting on a reply from me, and who asked to connect. Nothing else on my desk knows any of that. The CRM has never heard of the person who asked the best question this week.

And so on, down the row of favicons.

Six tabs in, thirty-six to go, and one question: where are we, actually, this morning? Every one of them makes me answer it from scratch, because each one knows one true thing about our company and none of them knows the rest. So I re-establish us, tab by tab. The deadline from here, the decision from there, the balance from the books, the comments that make me think about my next idea. I assemble the picture in my head, because my head is the only place all of it fits.

Every app I open, I explain us again.

There is a cost to that, and it has a name. The reconstruction tax. It is paid in the twenty minutes before the real work starts, every day, by whoever is the one carrying the picture between the tools. It is paid again after lunch, when the picture has drifted. And it is paid in full the day that person is out.

The tools do not talk to each other

I wrote in May that most nonprofit organizations we talked to had fifteen tools and none of them talked to each other. What I did not write, because I had not lived it yet, is what happens instead. Somebody talks for them. Somebody holds the whole picture in her head and carries it from tab to tab, re-establishing it each time, and does it so automatically that she has stopped noticing it is work.

At BeMo, the company my co-founder Lee and I are building, that somebody is us. We are two people building a company on the same tools everybody else uses, and this summer we watched ourselves become the thing in the middle of them, moving what each one knows over to the next. Our own task board could not see a demo that was a week away or an agenda for Tuesday, because neither had been written down where the board could see it. We were the connection. By hand. Two people who build software for a living, being the software.

This could be anyone's day

That is the point. Change the names of the tabs and it is your morning.

The executive director opens the grant spreadsheet, the donor database, the inbox where the funder's last message is, the board folder with the decision from March, and the calendar that says the site visit is Thursday. Each one is right about its piece. She is the only place the pieces meet. The development director does the same with the pipeline, the thank-you list, and the event platform. The program manager does it with the intake forms, the schedule, and the text thread with the volunteers. And if your version of this is a shared drive, four spreadsheets, and an inbox, the arithmetic is the same. You are the only place the files meet.

We see versions of this everywhere. Bigger organizations have more people carrying pieces, so the picture is spread across more heads and meets in a meeting. Smaller ones may have one head. Either way, the tools hold the facts and a person holds the present, and the person pays for it every morning in the time it takes to put it back together.

We are all feeling this. It is not a nonprofit problem, or a size problem, or a technology problem. It is what work feels like right now, in organizations of every size. We just happen to be trying to solve that problem, which means we feel it twice: once as the people doing the work, and once as the people trying to build a better way.

What I want on a Tuesday morning

I spent a career in communications and I have never stopped reading and watching the news. What I want from my own work every morning is a snapshot or a "day-at-a-glance" (do those desktop calendars still exist?). One page that already knows.

Not a dashboard, and not a task list. A page composed from what actually happened this week: what is in play, what is stuck, what went right that nobody noticed, and what needs a decision, near the top where I cannot miss it. The way a front page of a newspaper works. Read it with the coffee, and start the real work at 7:20 instead of 7:40. That is my clock, not a promise about yours. That is what we are building now, and it is the thing I am most excited about from the summer.

Here is the honest part. For a page to already know, it has to be able to see across the places where the work actually happens. The board, the books, the calendar, the inbox. And the tools are only part of it. Half of what I carry was never typed anywhere: it was said on a call, or settled in a conversation nobody wrote down, and it lives in my head with no file attached. Today, the thing that sees across all of it is me. Building the page is the easier half. Building something that can see what I see is the half we are in the middle of.

One thing we will not move on

Whatever we build, it will read everything and propose anything. What it will not do is take a person's place on the signature line. The grant goes out under a person's name. The board packet is a person's promise. A human always holds the pen, and that is on purpose, not a limitation we will grow out of.

The job that should come off the person is the carrying. The deciding was always going to stay where it is.

So, a question for your Tuesday. How many apps did you open today to answer one question about your organization? And who, in your organization, is the one carrying the answer between them?