On Your Radar…

A platform for improvement.

Has anyone ever asked you to be more responsive? How many times have you heard someone say “we need better communication” at work? This is a universal challenge we all face.

In today’s world of digital communications, it is very hard for us to keep up with the pace, stay focused on what matters, and avoid dropping the ball. Communication apps have not really helped us improve in this area. Now ‘Radar’ in Notion does. Radar is a platform to improve your communication.

Quantifying Responsiveness (the Who?)

Notion is the first communication tool to quantify responsiveness between you and other people. Notion assigns a percentage measurement of responsiveness between people. It is something you can lookup and track over time for all of your relationships.

Notion’s responsiveness measurement is more than simply a percentage of times you get a reply to all of your emails to someone. Understanding responsiveness requires an ability to determine intent. You have to know if the person who sends a message wants a response.

You also have to be aware of social norms in email. For example, an email sent to multiple people will not always get a reply from everyone. Often, one person will answer a group message on everyone’s behalf. And so on.

Once you have analyzed how to track all of these scenarios properly, you can start measuring response rate and time between people.

Request Snippets (the What?)

Email captions in our message lists often begin with the most worthless content in the message, like “Hello Guy, It was so nice to meet you the other day. I wanted to just…”

Instead, Notion also knows what exactly you are being asked to respond to. Using natural language processing, Notion identifies questions and requests in a message and shows them to you instead of standard opening captions.

Response Responsibility (the Where?)

Some social norms in email are just totally screwed up. For example, socially speaking, the responsibility of response is placed on the recipient.

If I send you a request, you are expected to answer it. All of them! Except for letters from the IRS, this is basically true nowhere else in life. Usually, the person who wants something is responsible for making sure they get it.

Radar tracks requests you send in email so you can take responsibility for getting the responses you need. In one place, you can see both what people have asked you and what you are waiting on from others.

Positive Urgency (the When?)

Timing matters. A good understanding of timing can be used to drive improvement. Amazon does a great job of using its understanding of timing to instill urgency in its customers. When you see an item, they immediately show you when you could get it by:

At checkout, Amazon tells you exactly how much time is left to order an item for the quickest delivery:

Similarly, Notion uses its awareness of how long it normally takes for you to respond to someone and vis-versa to encourage improvements for each relationship.

Radar offers a unique view of your email interactions with people. It is organized to show you the most impactful action you can take next to improve your communication.

In the example below, Beth emailed you a couple of questions. If you want to improve your response time to Beth, you should reply within the next 20 minutes. If you do not want to reply to Beth, simply swipe the message to clear it off of your Radar.

On the other side of things, there is also a perfect time to followup with someone you are waiting to respond.

If you followup with someone too soon (relative to their normal response time), you run the risk of being a nuisance. If you wait too long, they may feel guilty for not replying yet. Neither condition is ideal to building a strong relationship or getting the answers you need.

We refer to this type of polite reminder as “nudging” people. Notion suggests you nudge people at just the right time based on what is both socially acceptable and respects their typical response time to you.

So what are you waiting for? Notion’s Radar can tell you. So go get ‘em!