WhatsApp? It's a great communication app, but is it a great work tool or just a fast track to chaos?
Are you comfortable giving meta access to your company's sensitive data? How and key
details disappear into endless chat threats of push notifications and chats and chats
and push notifications. In this episode, we dive into the hidden risks of using
WhatsApp for managing projects and teamwork. And we talk about productivity here on
this podcast and we'll talk about productivity and WhatsApp, my favorite chat tool.
Let's go. And here's Magda with me. Hi, Magda. Hello, hello,
everyone. Indeed, this is a 76th episode of our podcast.
And indeed, we're going to talk about WhatsApp versus Nozbe. And that's mostly
because when I'm running my consultations, my demo meetings with potential,
or even current NoSB users, they confess that they came to us or they are still
using WhatsApp for project management. They're often members of 20 or 30 people
teams, and they run their projects in chat application,
which is WhatsApp. And they, And they share with me how stressful it is,
how annoying it is, how counterproductive it is so that we decided to just collect
10 reasons why WhatsApp is cool as a chat but it's not cool as a project
management tool. But before we start, I want to just put a disclaimer. I'm a big
fan of WhatsApp. This is my favorite by far. It's my favorite chat tool on my
iPhone. And to prove it to you, I will show you my, you know, home screen on my
iPhone. And look, just look,
there is, like on the bottom, there is Nozbe and WhatsApp on both sides here. The
WhatsApp icon is on the front very first place on Michael's phone. And I didn't do
it. Yeah. And I didn't do it for this episode. This is how it is every day for
me. I love WhatsApp. Like when we, with almost everyone that I communicate with,
I communicate through WhatsApp. People even don't know that even when they have
iPhones that they have iMessage, they just keep, everybody is using WhatsApp and
especially WhatsApp groups. Like we have groups for almost everything. Like, you know,
my social network that I post most frequently on is a WhatsApp group with my
family. We have a big family WhatsApp group with both of my parents,
my wife's parents, and then uncles. We have a big WhatsApp family group.
And over there, we just share updates. We share like when we go somewhere, where we
eat somewhere, like we share photos. And this way, I don't have to tell everyone,
Tell everyone, okay, we just landed or we just took off or we are just here. We
just arrived Like I can just post on this WhatsApp group and everybody knows So
it's the the best way to to have like a private social network Because I don't
feel comfortable, you know sharing my family photos, you know my kids photos on on
social media and when you check my profiles, there are no kids of mine and I have
three daughters And that's why I prefer to do it this way. And apart from that,
I think you can confirm. Like all the school groups and hobby groups are WhatsApp
groups. - Yeah, it's always okay. Let's create the WhatsApp groups so that we stay
in touch, parents of any kind of kids groups,
class or any like after school, the classes, that's true.
- Yeah, completely. I mean, you know, WhatsApp groups, like everything is just, let's
create a WhatsApp group, like birthdays, like, you know, we are just organizing
birthday for our nine year old and, you know, there is a WhatsApp group for that.
So it's like also friends, you know, and my trick also is with couple friends.
So like couples that we are friends with. So for example, my wife and me, we are
friends of another couple. So we created WhatsApp group for that. This way,
it's more like when we post messages there, then both spouses know, for example,
where we meet, to which restaurant we go, or if we organize something, everybody
knows. Because otherwise, it was like, the wife of my friend would send a message
to my wife, and then I wouldn't know. So like, it's, you know, so it's, it, it
helps with communication. Communication, like quick chat.
Exactly. Also announcements, like there, you can create and, you know, there are so
many cool features within WhatsApp. Like for example, you can create a WhatsApp group
where only admins can post. This way you have like an announcement board, like a bulletin board. So there's, you put updates there,
nobody comments. I think they can only, you can only give you thumbs up or thumbs
down, but other than that, nobody comments. But this way, you can stay in touch. So
groups for everything. So again, I love WhatsApp.
It's on my home screen right there next to Nozbe. But it's on the opposite side of
Nozbe because I believe and we believe that WhatsApp is great as a private
communication tool. And because people have discovered that it has so many cool
features regarding communication, they believe that it can be used for project
management and organizing a team or a company. And we have 10 reasons to prove you
otherwise. Yeah, because the distractor is pretty tricky.
In WhatsApp, Indeed, you have groups, you have the community, which people treat as
kind of project groups or the project. Then you have groups, which people treat as
projects. And then you have chat messages, which they treat as tasks. This three
level structure is kind of similar to, for example, what we have in Nozbe or what
other project and task management applications have. But this is just for chatting.
This is not the structure like this. It's tempting. It seduces people. So they start
to run their companies there. And once they are inside, they, they got used to that
is difficult to run away and they are in the trap.
We have a structure of projects, tasks and comments. And it's exactly a structure
that, as you said, a little bit resembles the structure of WhatsApp, but it's
different. And we'll talk about it in this episode. And a real -time follow -up, I
just got a message on WhatsApp in my family group that my parents just landed to
verification destination safely. And that's it. They posted one message to this group.
Everybody knows they landed.
- Yeah, that's cool. - All right, so the first out of 10 points,
let's talk about the boring stuff. So data security. I mean, the boring stuff for
private use, but actually not so boring for business use
because WhatsApp is owned by Meta. Meta means Facebook, means Mark Zuckerberg,
a guy who's been proven to be of questionable ethics when it comes to business.
And meta has been proven and caught red -handed of using data in very weird ways.
And even though in WhatsApp, all the messages are end -to -end encrypted,
everything around the messages is not. So all the interactions, they do the social
graph. And even worse, when you, when you decide to use WhatsApp,
you have to basically sign a deal with the devil because you have to give access
to all of your contacts to Meta. All of your contacts, yeah. All of them.
And they also try to make you give you the access, give them the access to all of
your photos, but here you can negotiate. - Yes, so when you're listening to this
podcast, if you have to just take one tip and you're using WhatsApp, please don't
give access to all of your photos because then Meta will download all of your
photos and all of the data about your photos and they will know when you were,
where you were like with everything.
So what you can do is not to give them access to photos, But then, of course,
if you want to share a photo in WhatsApp, you have to do some extra steps, either
you have to give them extra permission for these particular photos, or better yet,
you go to photos, you click share, and then you share with a WhatsApp group or
with a person on WhatsApp. So you have to go from the photos to WhatsApp instead
of from in WhatsApp, choose a photo. Or you can do this because usually I do this,
I don't know, out of habit because I just add an attachment, choose the photo,
then you go to your gallery, but then it's blocked because you didn't give WhatsApp
the access so that you have to press on manage your photos. Then you go and give
the access to this particular one and only then it can be uploaded to your message.
It takes three or four more seconds, but at least you have the satisfaction that
you are not sharing all of your memories with Meta. Yes, completely. And so that I
would do. Also, again, your attachments or whatever you send through WhatsApp is
encrypted. So that's great. But the name of the file, who you send it to,
all that stuff, Meta knows. They know, so that's why it is,
and then of course all this data goes through God knows which servers. It goes
through American servers, I don't know where they have servers, they have proven over
and over that data, they ship it around the world through different servers,
they crunch the data, so you never know actually.
And when When you downloaded WhatsApp, you agreed to terms of service, which are
like this, and this, I mean, thickness when you print them out. Of course,
I'm sure you have read them through.
Contrary to that, Nozbe has a different motivation. For example, any project provider,
but I'm talking about our application, we have a different motivation. We care about
your data in a way that we want this to be safe. There is no other ulterior
motive. We don't crunch your data, we don't go through your data, we've been in
business 18 years and we have this trust with our users that we don't go through
their data and we just keep it safe and make sure that it's there. And we have
all the backup technology. We have servers only in the EU this way, but still
delivered very fast through the internet. So even if you're not an EU user in the
European Union, you can still access your data very, very fast. So we have all
that. So because we adhere to GDPR, which is the most strict privacy policy in the
world. And because of that, our motivation is different. We want to keep our data
safe. So if you want to use a tool for business,
you have a choice between WhatsApp and then giving lots of data to Meta or Nozbe
and making sure that the data is safe with you.
That's right. And apart from the danger coming from Meta and Mr.
Mark, you are also the source of danger. I mean, you're just lack of attention.
For one second, you can think that you are sending a very, very important
professional attachment or message to your professional group. But by mistake,
you tap and it goes to this school group where 60 parents will now see your stop
secret attachment that was directed to I don't know your lawyer or someone when you
have your work staff in WhatsApp. So this is also the problem because it's not your
fault, you know, it's just so quickly the column with the messages that It's
changing because in any time you can receive a new incoming message and then what
you think was at the top one second ago, now it's on the second position and you
tap and that arm. Here Robert, hi Robert, is commenting that the worst part of
WhatsApp is that if someone shares a photo on WhatsApp, it appears in your phone
gallery. There is a setting for that in WhatsApp, but for some reason for Robert,
it doesn't work. So it's even worse. In my case, I had to disable it. I had to
go to WhatsApp settings to make sure that when somebody shares a photo, it doesn't
stay. It doesn't save in my photo gallery automatically. And also to remember that
photos shared via WhatsApp are very much compressed. So they're not the best quality.
So if you want to send somebody high quality photos, don't share them via WhatsApp,
share them via different means, you know. So just to also give you a heads up. So
that's why it is tricky, it is tricky with WhatsApp and with the data security, but
there's more.
Yes, so that was about security. The second point that we think should make you
avoid WhatsApp for work is the fact that Although there is this structure that we
mentioned at the beginning, this structure is tricky and it definitely doesn't scale.
The scalability here is a problem because when you start and you have indeed three
charts with two people, you think it's going to be well because you have three
charts dedicated to different aspects of your small company or business or something
that you want to do, but then you add more people, there are more messages.
You add one more thing, you have more groups, every group, even if I think of it,
I get a stomach ache. It's so dangerous for my, you know, for our well -being.
Completely. And the thing is that
Also, if, you know, if a message, let's say, is a task,
like somebody on the message writes that he or she wants you to do something. Good
luck finding this task after a day or two, let alone, you know, like, you know, a
month or four months, or four months, whereas in Nozbe, you know, there is a
structure of project tasks and comments, So you can find these tasks, the old tasks
and everything, very, very easily.
Because it doesn't move so quickly. Of course, people can add new comments in
particular tasks in Nozbe or in other applications, but it's still there. It doesn't
change very quickly, and you can easily find it because you know that this thing
was in this project, in this task, and then you just scroll or look for it.
- Yeah, but even better, like in Nozbe, the task can be seen in many ways,
not only in the project, like this is the big structure, projects, tasks and
comments, but a task can have tags, can have a due date. So if it has tags,
you can see it in the tag view. If it has a due date, you can see it in the
calendar. If it has a somebody's responsible for it, you can, you know, see it in
somebody's task. Yeah, if it's your task, you can just go through your tasks and
you'll find it there in a calm environment without the stress that it will disappear
in a second, that it will just get lost in some tones of other messages.
Let me catch this task. Oh, it's, it's, it's stop, stop, stop. Sometimes even when
I try to find something like searching conversation, there is this option, which is
really practical, but not for work reality. And sometimes I find this phrase that I
want to find. But then when I tap on it,
it scrolls automatically, and I try to tap on this to read it what I wrote three
months ago. But then it's, I don't know, it like moves and it's crossed
automatically. And Yeah, maybe there is some small bag, but it's not comfortable. And
you shouldn't do this at work, because at work, you should have reliable things, and
you should be able to find your archive, find the stuff that you need for your
work, and then resources, extra files, without any problem, not in stress.
So exactly, so the structure is lacking, and the scalability, if you have just more
people, it doesn't work. And you've had demos with bigger teams using WhatsApp and
they are going crazy. That's why they talk to us now, because they're going crazy
and they cannot manage it all. So number three that comes a little bit from that
is that there is no planning, no priorities. How do you know that this particular
task in a chat message is a priority for you? Like, how do you know?
How do you get it? How do you know that it's for you? And how do you know when
you should do this? How can you memorize, like, tens of messages that you are
assigned to? Assigned. I mean, someone says, please do this, but you don't have any
trace of it. Yeah, this is again, this is the way it wasn't designed for this kind
of thing. Again, let's talk about this. WhatsApp is a great chat program.
But chat programs have a different motivation. They're motivating to keep talking, to
keep chatting.
Whereas-- well, we'll get to that, but not to be about to keep doing things. But
we'll get to that.
Exactly. Number four, WhatsApp doesn't lead to action. It doesn't,
you know, it doesn't, you know, the idea, like the motivation, the design is to
keep having the conversation. Meta, Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg,
they are motivated so that you keep using WhatsApp, that you don't leave WhatsApp,
that you don't even call it WhatsApp, which means
- Yeah, so they just want you to keep the water cooler there and then just to have
a general conversation, not assign tasks, create deadlines,
add tags, have serious planning going on in this application.
It's impossible just out of the design of
And we always have been, you know, on this show saying that Nozbe is, it's not, I
mean, it is a task manager or project manager, but it's basically task doer. The
idea is that Nozbe wants to push you to get tasks done. So you get them done
because you discuss in the comments of the task to make sure that you reach the
point where you can get it done. Like just today I was reviewing several tasks
before this show and it gave me so much satisfaction to review tasks in my incoming
for today that some of them are already done. They were like, you know,
I just caught up with the discussion and everything, but they were already done.
They were already accomplished. And this kind of sense of satisfaction of getting it
done, moving things forward is a bit different then the sense of where is this?
Where is this? Why is everybody so loud? Why is there so many messages? Yeah, it's
kind of misleading. Again, I will get back to this tricky interface that is created
out of community chats and then messages.
And it's, Nozbe is very similar. Yes, I also, we also have projects which are like
big folders for stuff. Then we have tasks that are smaller drawers or smaller
folders like you have on your computer. It's the context. This is the, to help you
find the keep and organize things. And then you have comments. And these comments at
this place, Nozbe becomes your WhatsApp, but only here, when you are supposed to
exchange messages, information to discuss the topic. Here you can treat Nozbe as
WhatsApp, because it's very quick, our engine is really quickly synchronizing.
So when I mention someone or when I send a message to someone, it will go very
quickly. If they have the notifications turned on on their phone, they will be
informed right away, like on WhatsApp. The difference is that here, everything is
well organized. It stays in a safe place in the context. Yeah.
Completely. And the cool thing is that even if a task has many,
many comments, it doesn't
Like, you know, I mean, the task next to it can have just two comments, and that's
fine. Like, you know exactly which comments, I mean, the comments, it's like,
I checked recently when I was doing my weekly review, I realized that there were
only two or three tasks that I found where the comments kind of derailed.
Like, they were like, you know, about something else in the end. So we actually had
to create a new task for because the comments, task because the comments went off.
But other than that, normally, it doesn't happen. Normally, the discussion is very
focused. Normally, the discussion, the WhatsApp discussion in the comments, in the
task, in Nozbe, is very focused because it's about getting this particular task done.
Everything turns around this core thing, which is the task that should be done by a
particular person in particular time. - Yeah, I mean, you know, we have this joke
because we are also using, you know, for chit chat in our company,
we are using the free version of Slack and we're using the free version of Slack
because there is, you know, after, you know, three months we don't have the, you
know, the one month I don't remember. History, the chat history, but we don't care
because the important things are in Nozbe. So we don't care about chat history
because we want the history to be in the comments to the tasks. Yeah,
but still we are now going away from Slack because we have messages in Nozbe. So
it's more and more rarely that we use it. Yeah, we keep using it less and less
now. And the idea is this, that because we have messages in Nozbe, we have moved
basically, for example, one -to -one messages, like most of I'm sending through,
through Nozbe. But what I'm saying is that we had this, when we were using Slack a
bit more, we were always laughing that in Slack, the thermodynamics of Slack,
the law of thermodynamics of Slack means that every channel, doesn't matter what's
the name of the channel, at the end is a random channel. At the end, we're talking
about random stuff. Like, even though The chat in the beginning, the channel is kind
of focused for this particular thing and in the end it goes to random. So that's
why it's very similar in WhatsApp. When you chat about stuff,
the important information goes away so quickly because there are chats that give...
There's this signal versus noise ratio. There is not much Well, lots of noise. And
at work, and we have talked about this here on this podcast. We want to promote
deep work, focused work. We want to promote signal, not noise.
Yeah, as like an interesting thing to say, Michael and I,
we recently heard that in one of Polish hospitals, the team,
the hospital team, I mean the surgeons, the nurses, the staff, they are using
WhatsApp for communication. So I thought that probably they have many communities in
WhatsApp and then they have many dedicated groups, like the group chats. No,
they have just one group chat where Everything is like you can find the special
photos with the preparation for very, very serious operations. Some information that
someone has birthday or the information, yeah, in one conversation.
And they are just using it for work. This is their main communication channel for
the serious hospital. And they're like the photos of some for operations with some
horrible stuff. They are mixed with some responsibilities given to the nurses or to
other staff. And I was asking, okay, the lady who is a member of this group chat,
like, so how can you cope? And she said, oh, I just, I got used to that. She's
like the person, not the Gen Z, but probably older person.
So they just, I just remember, I don't have problems with remembering all that
stuff. So really respect. But yeah, that just made us create this particular episode
of our podcast even more. Yeah, I mean, we've been talking about this,
like, if you're trying to remember things, keeping things in your mind is not
getting things done. It's not productivity, like you have to have them in your
trusted system and if your trusted system is a chaos and you have to remember you
know distinct messages from one message thread then it's weird.
Yeah I thought like if I if I if someone made me to use WhatsApp for for work I
would probably have to have another tool for noting those things if someone assigned
something to me through WhatsApp, I wouldn't be able to create, as we said, a
deadline or write any notes about it. So I would have to note it in other tool
anyways, to plan and to have the strategy and deadline and all the needed
information for that task. Anyways, this is just me complaining, I'm sorry. - Okay,
so let's, before we move to number six, which is very, very important. Let's hear
from one of our NOSB users why they also choose NOSB. Some sort of project
management software they can help me have a bit of really trusted system.
JJ Robertson, I'm on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I am a holistic health coach focusing
on weight loss and fat loss. And I've used every day of my personal life and in
my business life. So Nosebe really helped me out with organizing my life and keeping
me focused. And in the past, with different businesses, I've used everything, Trello,
Asana, you know, all the major getting organized things. And I've always come back
to Nosebe for my own personal use whenever I had a chance. I've always introduced
Nosebe to different businesses because it just works.
Exactly. And actually JJ mentions, how did he know that we'll be talking about the
six points, which is personal and work messages all mixed together. And this is like
the crucial, like what we mentioned, you know, there's already in the, you know, in
the point number one about data security, but it's even worse. Like, if you have
Like if you are like me, a father of three, you are in countless WhatsApp groups,
like countless, so many. So like you are being bombarded with messages all the time.
And I remember I had this lapse of judgment that I actually volunteered you know,
in our school, you know, in the parent's association, which was interesting.
It was an interesting experience. Yes, because I thought we were there as parents to
help improve things at school for our kids. But in the end, there was lots of,
you know, nano politics, small politics. And I wasn't, you know, I didn't sign up
for this. But anyway, I remember that period of time. So we also had, you know,
vibrant WhatsApp groups, and I had to be in these groups because of my position. I
was the secretary of our parents' association. And I remember they were like the
president of our association, was talking to me and what was talking to me,
was talking down to me, saying, "Michael, you're not responding to my messages. And
I'm like, yeah, but you're sending them at like, you know, at one p .m. At one p
.m. I'm at work. I will not be responding to your messages at one p .m. You know,
I can respond to them later, you know, after work. And she didn't get it. She was
like, yeah, but you know, you have your phone all the time. Like, why don't you?
Again, is the well, I could tell her the whole thing about context switching,
whatever, like, I was like, come on, man, I'm at work. After work, I will get to
that. And I remember how hard it was for me to create this boundary and just think
about it. If you are like me in these groups and then you still use the WhatsApp
groups for your work, like how can you focus to do anything, to get anything done?
- Yeah, it's having everything in one place, especially with the notifications on.
And with many groups, as you said, coming in, messages coming in, people who are
some of them have strange communication culture. And for example,
instead of giving reactions underneath the message, they create a new message with a
thumb, which also makes the the noise, the notification sound coming if you don't
set the notifications, we will continue talking about it later on. It creates such a
noise and such a stress that it's impossible.
And also we have this danger that we mentioned in the point number one, that you
can confuse by mistake and send something private to the work -related group,
which is so not very good for productivity and data security. - And that's why,
for example, in Nozbe, we have spaces, workspaces, where you can have your company
workspace and your personal workspace. And many, still many of our users don't know
about it, we'll be redesigning a little bit the main screen on Nozbe in the future
update, because we want to promote, so you've heard us here first, if you are not
using it. Everybody who is in a premium space or is an owner of a premium space
or is participating in any workspace, you know, by their company or team or
whatever, they can have, they can add their private workspace for free. And again,
and this private workspace, this one private workspace is free for up to three
people, three projects and three project sections in these projects. So it's perfectly
fine Perfectly fine to invite your spouse or your partner to that space and get
your private stuff organized, get your family chores, your vacations,
get everything like this organized in the same app, in the same structure of
projects, tasks, and comments. It's a bonus from us. If you are a part of a
premium space, every user of the premium space can create a free space.
With some limitations, but as Michael said, it's really convenient for small stuff.
It should be enough to run a regular household or-- - Oh man, and then you have
unlimited, I mean, you have three projects and three project sections, but you have
unlimited tasks. So it's really for private use, And, you know,
for the families that I've heard use NoSpeed, they love it, they love it because
it's in the same app. So the app, they know, they know how it works. They know
how, how all the structure works, like, setting deadlines, delegating a
task to a spouse, like it all works and way, and it's there,
and it's in a different space. So there is no way for you to confuse if you're
creating a task for your wife or creating a task for your business partner. Yeah,
that's right. Our next point is notification nightmare.
And this is what I started to talk about. The team that I've been recently giving
some small demo and training on Nozbe,
they are a 20 or 30 people team who for the last two years,
they've been running their business in WhatsApp. And one of the ladies,
it was really like auntie. She was very rebellious. She didn't want to move
from WhatsApp to Nozbe because she was finding many reasons
that were not in favor of Nozbe. Yeah, but yeah, but then her friend,
she told her, but Verota, listen, if you send the message asking about something
random, not related to my work, to Tom, and then Tom replies you in our main
conversation where we all are in, I keep getting ping, ping,
I keep getting the notifications and I cannot turn them off because maybe my boss
will want something from me. So I have to be vigilant and I have to be stay tuned
all the time. So how it's counterproductive. I'm really tired with that.
Yes, but you can ignore it. Probably if someone wants something from you, they will
write a private message to you. But she said, no, most of the stuff we are
doing in the main chat group because everyone should have access and should be able
to see what's going on.
I really felt sorry about those people. How stressful every day has to be for them?
Completely. And for example, one of the pro tips of using WhatsApp is whenever they
add you to a group (because people don't ask you for
permission to add you to the group. They just add you to a group. So, yeah, I
mean, there is no, again, in Nozbe, if you create a project within a team,
then also people add you to the project. But if people from the outside want to
invite you, they have to invite you, they have to accept the invitation. Here, there
is no invitation. You are being just added randomly by random people to random
groups. And whenever it happens, the first thing is that I check if the group is
relevant to me, and then I go to notifications of this group. It's like settings,
notifications, mute all, always. Like you have to do all these steps,
like five taps, to make sure that you will not receive push notifications from this
group, because things can get out of hand quickly.
- That's true, but then you are out of control here. If there is something really
important, if people start to decide on something that you want also to decide on,
but then you miss it because you didn't have your notifications on, then you feel
sorry and then you feel that WhatsApp is really a nightmare for some of the stuff.
- But I go to WhatsApp every few hours. So then I review these groups and check
the messages. Of course, if I see a group with like 50 messages, I'm like, okay,
I'll do it, you know, in the evening. So maybe then I miss on like an important
decision that has been decided while I was ignoring this thread.
But that's true. Like, but that's the sacrifice. I mean, that's the trade -off I
have to take, you know, otherwise I would go crazy. But this is the trade -off that
you can do with your school-related
mothers and fathers talking about what present we should give to our tutor, but not
with your work stuff. You shouldn't turn off notifications for your work stuff. And
if you have several or even like, I don't know, dozen of of group chats, then it's
a nightmare. Yeah, I mean, I mean, you told me about this, you know, the other
day, when you were talking to this other team using WhatsApp, that at some point,
one of the managers left the group some of the groups because she couldn't bear but
she went when she left the group she didn't know what was happening and that's the
that's the difference you know when you leave the group you don't know what's going
to happen and then when you come back to the group you have missed that part
because WhatsApp will not show you the messages that happened in between it's like
you're being freshly invited to an empty group basically so it's it's it's it's it's
completely different to when you know when You have a project in Nozbe and you can
follow it with one tap. You can unfollow it with two taps, just settings, unfollow.
That's it. There is no more steps. And even if you go to the project later,
you will be able to see what's going on, what happened, what were discussions, which
discussions you did see and which you didn't see with the blue dot we show you.
So you are on top of things. So you can have much more fruitful and much more
less noisy work with Nozbe where you get notifications only with the important stuff,
delegation, you know, incoming. And you can choose, yeah, you can choose, you can go
to settings, notifications and you can toggle
And for the tasks for today, the assigned to you,
the reminders, mentions, group mentions, you can decide for which you want to receive
push notifications and have the sound on your computer or on your phone. And yeah,
you can't choose that in WhatsApp. completely.
So,
you know, notifications, nightmare, like with WhatsApp, it's, you know, it's a, you
know, it's a fight. So, but there's more. And this point,
like it's number eight, but it's really important to our hearts, and very important
to our hearts, is that we have been promoting on this podcast from the day one,
from the first episode, asynchronous work. Asynchronous work means, you know,
I do some work. I send you Magda, my task and my comments. And I know,
and I trust you that at some point you will get to it. And the same goes back.
You write some comments and you trust that at some point Michael will eventually
reply to my comments and will tell me, you know, and will give me his feedback.
Or if not, then I will just go forward with it. But anyway, it's asynchronous work.
And for that, I don't need to disturb you. I don't need to actually even mention
you much. Like, I can just write a comment. Very often, I write the comment without
mentioning you at all if this comment is not really important. Like, if you ask me
for feedback, then yes, I mention you. Magda, this is my feedback. But I'm just
giving you a random, unsolicited feedback to a task that you've been working on, I
don't even mention you there because I just trust that at some point before you get
this task to done you will read my comment and that's it. So it's very calm, very
thoughtful. Of course it's not possible in all of the workplaces to have this kind
of communication asynchronous one because in some places the temperature is higher and
maybe the action has to be quicker, but whenever and wherever it's possible,
we try to promote it. And this is not possible in a chat application. This is
possible in a tool that is designed for that as Nozbe, because this asynchronous
communication, the micro set is our favorite thing. And we think this is like one
of the pillars of productivity. It lets people focus, stay focused,
which is difficult nowadays. So, yeah, it protects our attention span.
And yeah, but also it's not so, okay, in Nozbe we will have asynchronous work.
It requires some agreements like between team members and some like introducing some
communication policy. First, we have to agree and promise to each other that we will
go to Nozbe, especially to the incoming view regularly. Once we are done with our
focused work, we have to go there just to make sure people who are waiting for our
response will get them eventually. Because if not, if you, from one focused task,
you will move on to another block of deep work, there are people waiting. So that's
unfair. Yes. So you have to promise to each other that you will regularly go to
incoming if you don't want to be disturbed by WhatsApp messages or by phone. But
think about it. Like what what you're asking, you know, me to do is to go to my
incoming section, which usually has between like every day, more or less, it has
between 10 and 20 tasks where that need my attention. And not hundreds or hundreds
of messages that I have to go through. It's a different beast altogether.
There are some people that I really like, but I don't like their way of
communicating.
It's not their fault. Sometimes it's just the fault of the chat program is that
because there is just a a small window when you hit enter, the message is sent. So
I get this thing like, hey, enter message. You're there,
message. Got a second? Message. I have a question, message. So I got four messages.
- And 4 ding, ding, ding, ding. And I have no idea what they want from me.
I'm like, come on, man, let me know what you want. Yeah, but it's a chart.
They have right to do this. Exactly. That's why even in Nozbe messages, when you
think about it, when you look at Nozbe messages, we have designed them like this,
that we are using the same comment field as in comments to tasks,
because we want the messages to be more thorough.
To send a message in Nozbe, you have to hit command or or control in Windows
Enter, and when you hit Enter, you just move to a new line. Next line. Next line.
It doesn't work like that. In WhatsApp, when you press Enter, it just goes,
so it's being sent, so it motivates people to send numerous short messages.
Just like you mentioned, somebody instead of giving a thumbs up, they thumbs up, you
know, message. So it's like, you know, creating lots of noise. So that's why what's
up really is not for asynchronous work. And Nozbe is in that sense, because, you
know, this is how what we believe in, this is what we think. And again, that's
great. Like, WhatsApp is for communication, different motivation. And it's great.
It's a great application, but not for work. Yeah, again, this is like the,
the, the motives of the creators, as you said at the beginning, that the authors of
the developers of WhatsApp, they want us to stay there as long as possible and chat
as much as possible. While we, designers of Nozbe, we want you to write and then
move on to getting things done. - Exactly. - That's the design.
So number nine, we are getting very close to the end of this. But as you see,
it's a very complex problem when you talk about productivity and an app like
WhatsApp.
File management. I mean, again, the good thing is that the files are encrypted on
WhatsApp servers. But the name of the files, the type of the files, Meta knows
about them. They know all. And then again, how do you know which file is the
latest version? Which one you should work on? How do you find the file after
it has been sent and there will 100 messages after that? Like how do you manage
files in WhatsApp? Do you? It's really difficult and indeed they have this search in
the conversation or search for files and then you have the separate view with only
graphics or pictures that has been sent there, but yeah,
that's not enough for work, in my opinion. Yes, completely. And they have this very
cool setting that when you go to a group, you know, to a chat thread, you can see
which files have been sent there. So it helps. We're actually working on a similar
feature in Nozbe, so you could see. Yeah, that's my dream. Many users the users and
me are waiting for it, but it will be in some some day.
It's coming, it's coming. So we're working on it right now.
So that's, you know, that's that's a good thing. That's a good thing. But otherwise,
otherwise, it's really hard. And in Nozbe, because again, this is the structure,
projects, tasks and comments, in the comments, there are files. And just by seeing
which file was added the latest, you know that this is the latest version. You
don't have to guess which one you should be working on or which one you should
update. And if you have your OneDrive or Dropbox and soon Google Drive integration
turned on, then the problem is even smaller because the versions are updating within
the file because they are being changed on Dropbox or on OneDrive. - Exactly, so you
can just attach the file once and you know this is the latest version because if
you update it on Dropbox or OneDrive. - It will be updated in NOSB. - Exactly, so
this is again very, very useful and very, very productive.
Okay, so Let's go to number 10. - Yeah, the last point, we are coming to an end.
It's related to reporting, analyzing, tracking progress. In WhatsApp,
there are no options and features for that because it's not created for working and
progressing. It's for chatting. It's difficult even if someone asks you to do
something or informs you that now you are responsible for something in WhatsApp, it
will be impossible for them to check how you are doing, what's the status, what
have you done so far, unless they write a question in the group chat or in a
private message, but that's such a waste of time. The advantage of Nozbe is the
fact that we have projects, preferably the projects to which everyone who needs the
access, they have the access and at any moment they can go and check how you are
doing on the task they delegated to you. Yes, that's created for that.
Exactly. So like in WhatsApp, there is no way to track accountability to see,
you know, what's going And in Nozbe,
we have so many tricks that you can do, that there are just reminders, that you
can have a reminder on a task to see if, when it pops up, that if somebody's
working on a task to see how it's going, you can just click on a person to see
their tasks and see how they're progressing. You can-- Create status tasks as we do.
Create status tasks, which we discussed in one one of the previous episodes of this
show, you know, use tags, you know, as something that, you know, as a way to see,
you know, how things are going. So there's so many ways to do that, so many ways
to track it.
And in that sense, reporting is something that we've been working on, and we keep
on working because our clients demand it, they want it, they want more reporting.
And we have some cool ideas how to make it even better. We already have cool
functions and features like statistics in every project. You can go to statistics and
check what percentage of task has been done.
You can activate your email reports, productivity reports, that will be sent to you
regarding your individual productivity. If you are a space owner or space admin,
you can activate and order the weekly or daily productivity reports for your whole
team. So there are ways to see how people are doing, how was their productivity
rate, and to see how many tasks were started, were done,
How many projects were created? How many projects were completed? It's all possible
because Nobby's for doing things. So probably managers wanted to see how things are
being done And yeah, WhatsApp? It's just impossible. There are no features for that
Because the the developers didn't think people would use their tool for Managing very
important projects in big companies. Again, it's not for that. Like this is
completely not the use case. And that's why it's so weird for me also when people
use Slack or Microsoft Teams as a way to, you know, as a hub of communication.
Because again, it's unstructured. And WhatsApp is just even worse.
But these other tools are not much better. And, you know, we will talk about them
in the future, but probably at some point. But In that case, the WhatsApp is the
go -to especially for mobile phones and speaking of mobile phones,
WhatsApp can be used only on one mobile phone. You cannot use it if you have two
phones, for example, a company phone and your private phone. You will have to be,
you know, because two different WhatsApps with two different numbers. There is no way
to install up the same WhatsApp on two phones. You can install WhatsApp now on the
iPad and on the Mac and Windows. I have installed on my iPad and I'm starting to
regret it. So I will probably-- - I can imagine if the number of groups you have
it. - Exactly. - And iPad is your work tool. - Oh yes, completely. And I'm thinking
of moving the first step. I'm gonna disable the badge for notifications and just
disabled notifications for WhatsApp on the iPad. So this way, you know, I don't get
the FOMO there, but I get the benefit of opening WhatsApp and just typing faster.
So maybe that we'll see, but probably after a week is gonna be gone. But anyway,
so what I said, it can be used on no one phone and many people have two phones,
but it's even worse. Here, our listener, Angie, she just wrote that,
"I just have a new phone, and super stressful that WhatsApp didn't save any of my
client messages."
Everything's blank. And in WhatsApp, there is a setting. Again, if you know,
to enable, you know, for example, on iPhone to have iCloud backup of the messages.
And when I was moving my parents, so even,
So even when I was moving my parents' WhatsApp to a new phone, I had to make sure
that I have the backup up to date. And then when I logged into the new WhatsApp
on the new phone, I had to restore from backup to make sure that I can restore
from backup. So this can be done, but it's very tricky. And so Angie,
if you have access to your old phone, you can try to see if there is a backup,
or if you can still perform a backup. But probably, it's been already days, and you
have new messages coming in. So yeah, it's stressful. In the Nozbe's case,
you have a new phone, you log into your Nozbe account, you have access to
everything. You have access to your projects, you have access to your tasks,
everything is up to date. And Nozbe syncs automatically between all of your devices.
So it's all very well integrated. And the cool thing is that you're not gonna lose
anything. And again, if you have two phones, you have the company phone and private
phone, you can still use one Nozbe account. And for example, on the private phone,
have the private workspace open and on the company phone have the company workspace
open and you can use Nozbe like this without creating an additional Nozbe account or
whatever. So it's much better and it's much more structured this way.
So Angie, I'm really sorry for that, but yeah, this is why these kind of tools,
I I mean, who has oppressed some of these features that, you know, Robert and Angie
have been complaining in this episode, but you have to find them, you have to make
sure that they work and sometimes they don't. So it's like, you know, again,
for them, these were not priorities. Priorities for them is to keep the chat going.
That's what, that's, and that's the metrics. And then, and if you follow, you know,
Meta and Facebook, for them, the engagement is the number one metric. Everything else
doesn't matter. In our case,
in our case, we have a different motivation. We are motivated to make sure that you
have access to all of your data. We make sure that you have client messages or
messages from your clients in the tasks that they are syncing and that you have
access to them. And we want to make sure you are taken care of while I imagine
that the support in meta. There is no support to do with it. So even if you lose
everything that you collected and that you worked on with your clients, they will
just not give an attention to it. And I'm thinking how interesting it has to be
for the creators of WhatsApp to realize that people started to tool for chat for
like huge companies and to manage work management, probably that has to be a big
surprise for them. But I'm really, I keep thinking why people are doing this to
themselves, why they decide to run their companies 20, 30, 40 people companies in
WhatsApp, which is dedicated for chatting.
And the only thing that I come up with is because this is a free application, but
still, I think this is a huge thing. Okay, so let's talk about the cost of this
application. It's not free. I mean, it is free. You're not paying anything to me.
And a subscription, but... And a subscription, nothing. You're not paying anything.
The actual costs.
There are costs. They have this phrase in American English, the cost of doing
business. So the cost of doing business with WhatsApp, it's substantial because the
stress, anxiety of your workers, the hours they lose searching through messages to
find relevant information. Or thinking that there is something And for them,
but apparently this is someone who gave the thumb up for someone's else information.
- So on top of that, the hours they lose of not having deep work sessions because
they are being bombarded by WhatsApp notifications. All of that has a cost. Like an
hourly rate of, you know, the cheapest hourly rate in the US, it's $8. So it's $8
per hour. Nozbe costs $8 per month or less per user.
So yes, you have to pay for Nozbe if you want to use the premium version. I mean,
up to three people, it's for free. But if you use the premium version, you have to
pay $8. But then you get it back in hours of-- saved hours of productivity,
of calm communication, of deep work, of finding things easier,
like in all of that. So just, you know, again, think about the cost of doing
business, the cost of running a free tool that is free because it's not being paid
for, but other than that, it's not free at all. Yeah. So to - Summarize,
let's go through all of these points. First, data security, it's questionable. No
second, no structure, no scalability. Third, no planning,
no priorities. - No priorities, no deadlines, no delegation.
- Fourth, doesn't lead to action. - Yeah, WhatsApp doesn't lead to action is for
chatting, not for mobilizing you to get things done. 5.
You lose context instantly. It's so difficult to find what has been done in the
past in the long and very quick threads. 6. Personal and work messages all blend
together, completely unstructured. 7. Notification mark nightmare.
Eight, WhatsApp is not for asynchronous work at all. And project management apps are?
And nine? File management, and data management, and knowledge management,
total yes. No reporting whatsoever, no review options, and bonuses.
No purpose tracking. Yeah. And you can log in to your Nozbe account on a new phone
and just get instantly all of your data back and keep being productive. You have to
wait just a few seconds. So-- - While WhatsApp is a really great application for
chatting. - Yes. - Michael is a walking pro-- - I love it.
- Yeah. - Okay, so if you have arrived that far, we are one hour in,
I'm gonna just keep you here one more minute. There is a WhatsApp history in our
Nozbe history because when we were designing new Nozbe after Nozbe Classic.
In Nozbe Classic, there were comments also to tasks, but the latest comment was on
top. While we were building and designing new Nozbe, we realized that we are
chatting more within the task, we're communicating more. And then I came up with
this idea that we have to inverse the thing so that when you go to a common
thread, you see, I mean, the latest is at the bottom, not at the top,
because when you scroll and read, it's just faster, easier, and more productive.
And it was because I was using WhatsApp like this, and I was like, let's do what
WhatsApp does does here. That's why Magda said several times today that Nozbe has
the WhatsApp component within the task. Yeah, when you come to comments section,
Nozbe can be your messenger, your WhatsApp, your whatever, because here when the
conversation and quick chat can take place, but in a context. Exactly.
So again, the structure of tasks.
To our show, thanks for live listeners, for their questions and engagement. And let's
get productive and don't use WhatsApp for project management. Use it for chatting
with your friends. Yes.
See ya. Thank you. Bye -bye. Thank you for being an amazing listener of the NoOffice
podcast. Every other Wednesday, we meet to talk about productivity and hybrid
lifestyle, because we believe that work is not a place to go. It's a thing to do.
It's a special gift only to NoOffice podcast listeners. When you sign up for Nozbe
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