Yelling Across Cubicles in Makers Festival 2018
For this year’s Makers Festival I noticed Remote Work was one of the categories. At SoFriendly we are a mix of remote and on site team members but even with our office, we still tend to work remote about 50% of the time.
I’ve always had this desire to either emulate on site office conditions or somehow give remote workers the social aspect of working in an office. We all love the freedom and ability to work from home but there’s just something about working in an office and the camaraderie that comes with that.
So for Makers Festival this year, we decided to build Y.A.C, or Yelling Across Cubicles.
YAC simulates what it’s like to shout across the room, sneak up behind someone at work, or just in general be in a noisy office filled with distractions. Ok, that doesn’t sound like the greatest work environment, but hear me out.
At SoFriendly we are big on efficiency. In fact, @jordvnlwalker just gave a talk at our last event entitled “How to work less.”
We all love Slack, and we use Skype (notice the difference in tone there), but very often we will dial and dial and no one is picking up. Maybe they have it muted, maybe it’s not up, maybe they stepped away for a bit. There’s also an additional stress on that person to pause their music, stop what they are doing, put on pants, and pick up the ring in time. This causes slow downs in our flow and work and also stress. When you’re in an office however, you can simply just waltz over to said person’s desk and ask them the question you have. This is a critical missing piece in a remote setup that hurts efficiency.
With YAC, just press and hold on any contact’s name and boom, you’re connected. There’s no dialing or picking up, and the person on the other end doesn’t need to worry about any noise coming from their side. Each button press is 1-sided, just like a walkie-talkie. There’s also no pressure to even reply that way. It might just be as simple as yelling “hey check your slack. it’s urgent” and that’s the end of it. YAC isn’t meant to facilitate long conversations or meetings.
Skype or Hangouts are for long form conversations, and ultimately aren’t efficient. There’s 5 minutes wasted getting everyone into the meeting, messing with mics and putting away their food. There’s 10 minutes of banter and catching up, and then way way way too much back and forth throughout.
With YAC, just say what you needed to say and get off. There’s no pressure to hangup or hit the full 1 hour or 30 minutes for the meeting time. It’s a few seconds to ask a question, get a reply and maybe that means hopping on a call or replying in a Slack channel, that’s ok. YAC is meant to facilitate that initial ask and nothing more.
YAC lives in your Mac’s menu bar and is completely free of distractions or extra useless features (cough cough Skype). It’s there when you need it and hidden when you’re not using it. You can YAC one person, or you can YAC everyone on your team at once. It works best in spurts of back and forth and each conversation is private, even Group YACs.
Maitrik Kataria asked me why not just use Discord for something like this. For me, that answer was simple. In most cases, I only need to distract 1 person most of the time, not my whole team. Discord would allow for an open channel, but they would hear all the noises I am making throughout the day (unless I muted myself) and then on top of that when I’m asking Hunter McKinley a question about an upcoming ad campaign, no one else on my team needs to be interrupted by that.
YAC will hopefully be ready by this weekend, and we’ve released this Upcoming page so you can sign up to be notified when it launches.
https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/yac-yelling-across-cubicles
