WWW… Wednesday! Dewo – Deep Work Personal Assistant

by Taylor Slattery | January 8, 2020

We live in a world full of distractions. The same devices we use to communicate and complete our work present innumerable opportunities for distraction. It can be tough to cut through the noise and focus on what really matters. Dewo is a personal assistant designed to do exactly that.

It seems like the world is obsessed with productivity. Every day countless articles and videos are made sharing life hacks to help you become more centered and productive. Upon reading one of these, we may find ourselves with a sudden burst of energy, motivated to complete our ever-growing to-do list. Unfortunately, the manner in which we’ve grown to consume our media makes us more likely to read another article or watch another video than to put the phone down and get to work. The same tools that connect us to an unlimited wealth of knowledge and resources present an equally vast number of distractions. As our devices become more integrated into our home and work lives, establishing boundaries for their use becomes increasingly difficult.

Recently, smartphone manufacturers have made an attempt to address our so-called “digital wellness” by enabling users to place time limits on app usage. Visual quantifications of our time spent on Instagram can be quite eye-opening, but a simple usage-limit that the user is able to disable just as easily as it was created, may not be a powerful enough tool to overcome such a deeply ingrained habit. Dewo is a personal assistant designed to help you cut through the noise and focus on what really matters.

For most people, the “flow state,” or the mode of being in which we are deeply focused on the task at hand, is not something we can tap into at will. Reaching this point is a gradual process, and once we’re there, this state can be fragile, with a single notification from our phone being enough to pull us out of it. Dewo helps to protect this state by understanding when we’ve entered it and preventing our phones from distracting us. In addition to the automatic silencing of notifications,

Dewo is a great tool for managing teams. In an office setting, it’s not uncommon for a large portion of the day to be spent in meetings or responding to communications. You may find yourself just getting into the rhythm of things, only to have to break your focus and attend an arbitrarily-timed meeting. Without extended periods of focus, it can feel impossible to accomplish the day’s most pressing tasks. By using duo for scheduling, you can ensure that meetings happen at appropriate times, and the workday is optimized for maximum productivity.

On an individual level, Dewo keeps track of both time spent in and out of deep work as well as distractions that pull you out of it. It charts things like time spent in meetings and responding to emails, as well as the locations where you accomplish the most deep work. This information can help you to make any necessary changes to your schedule to better optimize your workday.

Dewo is still being developed but you can request really access to the free-to-use app here.

Taylor is the Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Taylor is a graphic designer, illustrator, and Design Lead at Weirdsleep.

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