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Amir Salihefendic

Twist 2.0 - For teams burnt out by real-time chat, work async, not ASAP

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Twist is asynchronous messaging for the flexible future of work. Break free from the 9-to-5 and the constant meetings, emails, and Slack chats. Join the async work revolution where you — not your teammates — dictate your schedule.

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Amir Salihefendic
Maker
Hi Product Hunters! When we first launched Twist in 2017, no one was talking about asynchronous communication. We built the app because — as a fully remote team spread across 20+ countries — the chaos of real-time messaging had completely burned us out. This year, asynchronous communication has been covered everywhere from the BBC to the Harvard Business Review to The Wall Street Journal. Async work is slowly but surely becoming mainstream as companies wake up to the mentally and emotionally draining consequences of always-on work culture. So we spent the early months of the pandemic reimaging Twist to help teams meet that challenge head-on. In the rebuilt Twist, you’ll find: • A new inbox that makes it easy to skim through threads to see what needs your attention, and what can wait for later. Once you enter a thread, you can focus entirely on one topic at a time without getting distracted by other discussions. • Your inbox (still) only shows the threads you’ve been tagged in, making it easy to catch up after unplugging. Now, you can mark those threads done and reach Inbox Zero (preview testers’ favorite). • The redesign is focused and productive so that collaboration doesn’t get in the way of your creation time. The app is now keyboard-first so you can be faster in your workflows. We’ve made sync much quicker, so you never have to wait. • In revamped Twist, we optimize for transparency. Open-by-default means that you can loop people in to make better decisions with the right context. We link content together by creating bi-directional links between threads, the first messaging app to do this. • Most importantly: Twist will always optimize for trust over tracking, deep work over performative presence. Unlike our competitors, you won’t find any “I’m online” indicators, “someone is typing” dots, or read receipts. 🚫 We built Twist for the companies that trust their people to know where and *when* they work best. For the teams that talk less and do more. For the creators who focus hard and then disconnect to recharge. Will you be one of the teams that ride the async wave into a much better future of work? Give Twist a try — we’re convinced your team will thank you for it. Then let us know what you think! — Amir, Doist CEO
Rucha Joshi
Nicely done! I love the underlying work philosophy of the tool as well.
Deepa from True Sparrow
You are spot-on with one thing that you are building around - trust and 'my' time without distractions. These are very important when the team is working remotely. Will check out Twist for sure!
Simon Barker
Looks good, one of the problems with async I find is the opposite problem - people being ignored and essentially blocked for many hours unable to find a resolution. I assume this is a reaction in many teams to the ASAP issue you mention. Would be interesting to see if Twist helps in that regard - individually urgent things get dealt with while the noise can get pushed back
Amir Salihefendic
Maker
@simon_barker1 one way to combat this is by embracing a more transparent culture, for example: — Most Twist channels should be public, including leadership channels — Having a handbook-first culture that documents things, for example, core workflows. See GitLab's handbook for an extreme example of this — Most services/knowledge should be accessible by default to the team (e.g., access to Github repos, Google Drive docs should be shareable to the whole organization) When you do this, people can unblock themselves. Another critical aspect in async-first is having independent people that can easily manage their work and remain accountable with little or no direction. E.g., if they are stuck on one problem, they will tackle another one.
Simon Barker
@amix3k great points, I think the most important thing is public channels and good docs. I’m trying to bring in both at a place at the moment - so much information is just in people’s heads
Margarita Shvetsova
@amix3k I have been thinking about Twist and the "Future is async" concept, and I got the same question, that is how to deal with people not getting answered on time. I agree that independent people can manage such situations better (in our company culture, that's exactly the type of people we try to hire), but sometimes a colleague needs a reply from me personally, and it may be urgent. Not being able to see whether I'm online or not could be stressful in this case, as my colleague would have no way of knowing the chance of me replying any time soon. This aspect is kind of bothering me when I think of using Twist.
Amir Salihefendic
Maker
@margarita_s88 in Doist, we have the phone number of everyone, and we can message/call them if we really need them urgently. This method is only used a few times in 10+ years. Most things aren't urgent. A core problem is that the current way to communicate is making every message urgent and something you need to look at right away. Urgent communication should be the exception and not the default. That's at least how we think 😊
Margarita Shvetsova
@amix3k Hey Amir, thanks for sharing! I'm a bit suprised you guys hardly ever have urgent requests, but maybe this is something to get used to... and something to be spread through the company culture :) I am curious about this topic now and will keep exploring it :)
Kiran Kanakadandi (yugahq.com)
This is brilliant -- the ideology is rich and the product looks so clean. All the best! I take it you use Twist internally -- how do you handle time-sensitive tasks? Or are you in general deadline free where a day's delay doesn't hurt? A culture thesis I came across recently (Gumroad's): https://sahillavingia.com/work
Amir Salihefendic
Maker
@kirank5a, we expect people to respond in 24h. We have phone numbers and a Telegram group for urgent issues if you need to reach people. In Doist, we optimize the culture towards Deep Work. Check out https://blog.doist.com/deep-work/ for inspiration 😊
Kiran Kanakadandi (yugahq.com)
@amix3k -- sounds very pragmatic. I see there's a lot more interesting things on your blog -- will definitely check out (we're a tiny 100% remote startup building a Future of Work SaaS ourselves). Good luck!
Joan Boixadós
A tool that helps form the right habits and company culture for 2021 :D
Amir Salihefendic
Maker
@mezood merci, Joan 😊
Pedro Henriques
Congratulations Amir and team! I didn't know Twist before, but the concept looks fantastic. Looking forward to trying it out :)
Arda Helvacılar
For all the teams that are scattered through different time zones, wonderful idea
Fatih Buğra Akdoğan
Looks very good!
Ilia Matrokhin
Great work! Two columns really look much more clean, but three column layout was so convenient for switching in one click between threads and clearing up your inbox, for instance. Could you tell us a little bit more why you have chosen 2 columns instead of 3? Thread list distraction doesn't seem a strong argument to me.
Amir Salihefendic
Maker
@new_user_204ae0d6be a huge advantage of 2 columns is that keyboard shortcuts become much more natural, and the new Twist has fantastic keyboard support 😊
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