My fresh article about the future of productivity tools. Maybe it will spark some discussion 
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Wow, this is such a great article!
I should include it in the first email that a new user receives from Fibery
And it deserves a spot on the home page as well!
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I always enjoy these posts. They do a good job of articulating the pain and frustration of other tools.
What excites me most about Fibery is that it feels like one of the first tools that can truly mix structured (dbs) and unstructured (whiteboards, backlinks) data. Apps like Miro and FigJam donāt go far enough beyond an analog whiteboard, they donāt have the depth that you get from linking to objects/entities
You need these different modes of working/thinking at different times and it seems like Fibery has flexibility to support all those modes.
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A few random reactions
Four starting points
In general, I like this, but I think youāre wrong in at least one important way. I think theyāre at least two other popular starting points: Conversations and āprototypesā
- Conversations or meetings seem like a hugely popular entry point thatās missing here. Yes, a doc or a whiteboard can proxy a conversation, but they arenāt the actual primitive And thereās some seriously lossy compression that goes on when it comes to information exchange. Now Iām personally not the person who wants to dump all of my meetings into repo and have them fully transcribed and AI coded either. I think thereās a loss of agency that comes with that. But if someone can crack this starting point, it might beat all four of your starting points re: its impact on an organizationās ability to do work.
- Prototype (or āmoldā or āproductā or āthing that was shaped with intent, versus one of the general starting points) is admittedly, probably not as popular, but I wonder if that is a function of its utility or its required effort and the latter seems like something that could be solved
- These might have been strategically left off because Iām not sure if fibery has direct excellent support for them
Positioning within bureaucratic education, educational systems?
As a point of feedback, Iām sitting here wondering whether being more powerful and less chaotic and so on is actually a strong positioning statement. Is there actually a market segment thatās sitting in between all four of those things?
And it did get me thinking about IT departments in US public school systems. This is my industry so thereās probably some real bias here, but they do deal with complex networks and rigid hierarchies and a strong need for flexible permission schemes, with staff who are typically overworked and not super technical but enough to be dangerous. I wonder how well fiberyās customer base does here?
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Agreed. Only Fibery and Tana are even close to integrating both of these types well. Although they approach the problem from opposite sides (Tana - unstructured first, Fibery - structured first). Both tools are also at the forefront of exploring AI in this context and doing things that you donāt see anywhere else, imo. Tana again is more flexible and Fibery more rigid with the AI implementation.
Will be fun to see how they each grow and evolve and how similar and different they are from each other. My āperfectā app would be a mesh of the two!
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Isnāt the raw output of a meeting or conversation a set of random, un-structed, scribbled notes (a.k.a. a document)?
What other form would it take?
Not at all, Iād argue.
For that to be true, literally everything would have to be written downāand by everything I mean everyoneās internal agenda, monolog, and emotional journeyāusing ātokensā (isnāt technology cool, how it shapes our metaphors) that every single participant ādecodesā in exactly the same way.
Neither of which, Iād argue, is true 
In fact Iād even go so far to say often the primary output of a conversation has nothing to do what people write down.
What digital form does the final output take?
I like Fibery mainly for this approach of all-in-one productivity tool by taking the structured-first approach (or at least the advanced capabilities to display and explore structured data).
But I think a very important point today for a āall-in-oneā management tool, is the ability to also structure communication. A productivity tool cannot be a personal tool anymore, it needs to be a collaborative tool, merging :
- internal communication tools (like slack)
- and external communication tools (like intercom and email)
- and collaborative features (like comments, sharing, assignment)
And that part, seems to be missing in the article, like in Fibery to a certain degree.
Just my reaction after reading it.
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I can see how you could argue that ācommunication artefactsā (a.k.a. conversations or chats) could be arguably another starting point. And perhaps the fact that Slack is now starting to offer ālistsā suggests that @mdubakovās hypothesis about convergence is actually correct.
But I donāt think it was consciously left out of the article because Fibery lacks great support for communication/collaboration (although this is a fair critique and an interesting topic for discussion).
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Iāve been all in on first Omnifocus, then Wrike, then Workflowy/Dynalist, then Clickup, then SmartSuite (very briefly), then Spreadsheet.com until they shuttered.
Spreadsheet.com closing was just a total disaster for my business. Iām still recovering. But I came back to Fibery this year, after initially rejecting it about a year ago. Iām so happy I tried it again. Nearly daily I create a new system that clearly solves pain points Iāve struggled with for a long time.
Itās not as super simple to whip something together as Notion, nor is at as pleasing to write in as Workflowy (man, I love that app). But it gets the basics right.
If you all shutter, Iām just going to sell my businesses and give up. haha. KEEP ON BEING AWESOME.
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There is something about Workflowy that nothing else can match.
I donāt know how I missed this! Indeed Slack/Call/Meeting can be a starting point. I will incorporate this into the next version of the article
These might have been strategically left off because Iām not sure if fibery has direct excellent support for them
This is not exactly the case, we did spent a lot of time discussing how to do chat in Fibery and even released Threads as an experimental feature. However, it is true that this theme is not in our focus right now
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Very good additions that are indeed missing.
Organizational Networks without communication are dead.
Iād say internal communication in Fibery is very good now (still not as good to replace Slack for all use cases), external communication is very limited (some email support, but not great), and sharing is the most problematic area (canāt share View, no real Guests users, etc).
Right now we are focusing on the latter two
- Better email communication
- Sharing and collaboration with external users
I hope in the next 2-3 months you will see the difference.
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I finally got around to reading this. Maybe itās just because none of it was new to me as a daily Fibery user, but I honestly found it a little flat and ācoldā as an article. Which is not usually the case with Fibery articles! Admittedly there was less of the signature Fibery āsassā/playfulness (though some), maybe thatās part of it, and maybe itās a conscious choice to tone that down a bit. But I also think it could do a better job of not just explicating but viscerally demonstrating why this interconnection and excellent support of hierarchy is so great. Why will I feel good using Fibery? Maybe itās not intended as that kind of article, but it is a marketing piece, and as such I found it not visionary or exciting enough to connect with me in that way, and not compelling and clearly communicating the feature benefits enough to connect with me in that way. 
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In this article, I saw you mention hierarchy vs network. Is there any plan for network in fibery, which means graph view to find orphan things and the relevent between unlink nodes
We still did not find useful cases for a graph view.
Great article. I noticed for some time as well this convergence of tools, where everyone was copying everyone else (Atlassian was copying Miro, Miro was copying atlassian, everyone was copying Notion, etc) and converging into this one workspace solution to rule them all.
One part that Iām still ruminating over is this one:
I think Tasks as a starting point is a dead-end. Conceptually, Tasks are just Database records, so Task lists have to evolve to become proper Databases.
The reason why Iām still thinking about it is that Iām not fully sold on tasks as databases. Although we use Fibery for work, I use Notion in parallel for personal and some project management purposes and even though I experimented with many databases for managing tasks, I often default to plain old checklist.
Sometimes you just want the most easy and intuitive way to capture something.
The same dilemma I face in Notion reflects in Fibery. There we have Task entities with all sorts of properties, but managing them brings a lot of overhead, from all those micro-interactions that you need in order to manage them.
Something that we have experimented recently is simple checklists on entities and tracking how many of them are done.
For example for a recent product demo we made a list of all the little problems we wanted fix. The problems were cross cutting, covering multiple features and developers. We could have made each of them into a separate DB entity but that would have been a lot of busywork.
The solution we opted for was a simple checklist, with headers per feature and mentioning every developer that needed to be involved.
This allowed us to have a clear list of remaining issues, which was about as easy to update as possible (literally one click)
ps: thanks again to @Chr1sG for the āprogress barā script which counts how many of the checkboxes are checked
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ālet Fibery become your companyās operating systemā
This is why we chose Fibery. We want it to be the hub that helps us bring all the other specialist bits of software together to a central point, not to try and replace all of them.
Having deeper and better existing integrations with Slack, Intercom, Zapier, GSuite and ability to connect to new key things like Xero, Esignatures, ChatGPT would allow us to achieve more of that āhubā without having to use too many workarounds or fickle Zapier connections that are easily broken.
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