Brief opened its beta on November 3, the day it launched on Product Hunt. From that day, signing in took no invitation, only a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 work account, starting in North America.
Brief tells you who owes you a follow-up, and lets you know when the work you handed off goes quiet. To the people who used it before the beta opened: you told us plainly where it fell short, and it's better because of it.
–Clint
What's on Larry's mind
The day before the beta opened, I published the argument behind Brief. It's called Decision to Done: Leadership Is Next.
It goes back to February 1998, when a small group of us in Silicon Valley coined the term Open Source. Every shift I've worked through since then started the same way. Someone noticed people doing a job by hand that no system had ever picked up.
Leadership teams still have a job like that. A decision turns into a dozen promises, the promises scatter into email and chat, and from there they live in people's heads. Weeks later you find out which ones got kept.
The piece follows one decision from a Monday meeting to a Thursday warning, while there is still time to act. It also says where Brief goes next. Team Edition is coming: one shared record for a whole leadership team.
Read Decision to Done: Leadership Is Next. If it describes a leader you work with, send it to them.
–Larry
What's in the beta
Here's everything in the beta.
- What people owe you, and what you decided. Brief finds the commitments in your email and chat, each with who owes it, who it's owed to and where it stands, and keeps them for weeks. Brief closes each one when the evidence shows it's finished, so the list stays true without you marking anything off. It also keeps the record of what you decided and why.
- Who owes you a follow-up. Brief tells you when someone owes you a reply, and when a thread you're waiting on goes quiet.
- The follow-through, drafted. Ask in chat and Brief drafts the follow-up. It sends from your own account once you approve.
- Ready for every meeting. Brief preps you for your meetings and one-on-ones, and sends you a daily brief every morning.
- Your task list, kept in sync. Brief suggests tasks from your email and from Slack, Teams and Google Chat, and keeps them in two-way sync with Todoist, Google Tasks, Microsoft To Do or Slack Lists.
- Questions that run on their own. Ask Brief something once, say when to ask again, and it runs on that schedule as an agent. Tell Brief who is on your team, and a Friday check on what each person committed to and what didn't land is one sentence away.
- Talk to Brief. Have a spoken conversation with Brief from your desktop or your phone's browser, and hear your daily brief read aloud.
- On your terms. You decide, action by action, what Brief may do. By default, nothing is sent without your approval. Private by architecture.
One thing to try first: your daily brief, out loud. Select Listen to this brief in the email, or Speak with Brief on Today, and Brief reads you your morning. Then ask it what's waiting on you. Your first daily brief arrives the morning after you sign in, at 6:00 AM your time unless you set another.
New to Brief? Your first 24 hours walks through the first day, from signing in to a brief that arrives where you want it.
–Zac
What has Brief caught for you, or what would you use it for first?