Asana Hopes To End Frustrating Inbox ‘Noise’

Asana, the task-management company, has unveiled a new way for users to deal with e-mail overload in their inbox with their new Inbox feature.

CNet reports that the new feature is designed for those companies who are already using the company’s task-management tool, and makes it so that team members are able to stay up-to-date with the latest events related to a particular task or project, avoiding having to deal with unnecessary e-mail threads.

The company notes that the Inbox feature is a pane, which provides “the entire history and up-to-date status of the work [a message is] about” in each message that is sent between team member. It is also designed so that users can follow particular projects, allowing them to get updates related to that specific task or project. They can follow individual tasks and decide against following others on a specific project.

Venture Beat reports that Justin Rosenstein stated on Tuesday during an interview at Asana’s San Francisco headquarters:

“People spend an enormous amount of time in their inboxes, compulsively checking. And it’s slow, distracting, and inefficient. It’s almost a counterproductivity tool.”

With the new Inbox feature, the Rosenstein believes that the company will be able to help other workers avoid that “counterproductivity tool” by filtering out unneeded e-mails. Rosenstein further stated:

“It’s incredibly satisfying. You have a very real sense of clarity on what you’ve done, what everyone else is working on, how to get to your milestones, how far away you are from accomplishing your project… It makes you calmer and faster, and it emboldens you to take on even more ambitious projects in the future.”

GigaOM reports that Rosenstein spoke with them about companies considered competitors to Asana, like Yammer, SocialCast, and Chatter. He responded by saying that they don’t consider the other companies competitors, or “particularly useful. Instead, he stated:

“They just took something popular in the consumer space and ported them over, but research shows many people don’t see the value in them. We’re about a work graph, not the social graph.”

And Asana’s new Inbox feature is definitely geared more toward the work graph.