Your meetings deserve an Inbox, not a Calendar.

The conclusions are gloomy so far! Fortunately, we can leverage a well-known pattern to take back control on our meetings.

What else do you do every day, that needs context, follow-up and triage?

Email. The not-more-loved cousin of meetings, that you get everyday.

The similarities between emails and meetings are unsettling:

• You have a flow of incoming emails requiring your attention, like meetings.
• When preparing an answer to an email, you look at what has been said in the thread or your recent interactions with the recipient, like preparing for an upcoming meeting.
• Some emails need follow-up, you need to make sure some things get done. Many meetings lead to next actions.
• When you’re done with it, you archive your email knowing you can find it back anytime. I wish it was the same with your meetings…

Unlike meetings, emails have benefited from substantial improvements over the past few years, well embedded in modern email clients like SuperHuman or Hey:

• Your inbox is centered around what you need to do.
  The inbox is as uncluttered as possible.
• You can snooze emails until you can effectively process them.
• You can use canned responses for your most frequent use-cases.
• When you answer an email, you are in a Thread, which means you have the full lifecycle of the email at your disposal.
• You can tap into past emails using search to get the right context to answer a new one.

These improvements are making it way easier to stay on top of emails and actually use these emails to get things done.

Do you see where it’s going?
There are no reasons not to bring these improvements to meetings.

I believe that integrating the entire meeting’s lifecycle in an inbox-oriented product would help us achieve more with fewer, shorter meetings, while reducing the induced mental fatigue.

Coincidentally or not, Louise and I are building a product to make this a reality for everyone!

We are building this missing piece in Hera

You can use Hera to take control back on your meetings.

Here is what our core loop, i.e. what our users do every day in Hera, will look like in 6 months:

The Inbox will serve as the operating and triage system for your meetings. The inbox is complemented by a meeting-centric writing experience to capture the key outcomes of each meeting and a quick add module for you to add context to a future meeting from anywhere, at anytime.

You get an Inbox for your meetings

When you sign-up in Hera for the first time, you land in your Inbox, with your meetings for the day.

You don’t need to onboard your colleagues, you can start processing your meetings right away.

We believe you should have a strong single-player experience in Hera and we want to provide value from Day 0.

With your Inbox, you get a clear view of what needs to be done:

You get to do two things in Today view:

• Join the next upcoming meeting in one click
• Check-in, i.e. prepare, future meetings. Check-in is not a big deal, it can be just jotting down 3 bullets points about the topics you want to cover or the person you are going to meet. It makes a great difference though.

We know how hectic days can be. If you’ve left a meeting in a hurry, you’ll find it back in Work in progress view, where you can export the meeting outcomes or just archive the meeting.

Speaking of archive, at anytime you can search into your past meetings in the Archive view. The search is contextualized. You don't get a meeting title in result, you get threads of meeting outcomes that you can consult or re-use as a preparation for a new meeting.

Never join a meeting without context

Most importantly, when a meeting lands in your Inbox, you automatically get a head start in terms of context: Outcomes of past related meetings, interactions you had with the attendees.

Said differently, your meeting now lives in a Thread!

The good news is that your meetings follow not so chaotic patterns which will enable Hera to proactively suggest you ways to fast-track your preparation.

Capture the key moments of your meeting

If you have the right context when joining the meeting, you will have a productive discussion.

If you have a productive discussion, your meetings will lead to outcomes — highlights, next actions.

We are obsessed with providing you the simplest writing experience to take notes during a meeting. You only write bullet points, that you can optionally mark as highlights or next actions.

These highlights and next actions then serve as a snapshot for this meeting, in your archive.

Like in any modern email client, you can use templates for recurrent meetings.

You can export the meeting outcomes to other tools — knowledge management, task management, where they will have impact, hopefully as easily as forwarding an email to someone else.