Brain & team brain
Your personal brain
You're in the middle; around you are the companies you work with, with their projects and themes below. Click a node for the details: open tasks (with deadline, estimate and who you're waiting on), linked mail, notes, ideas and sub-items.
Still empty? Choose Build from your mail: HeyOtto creates one node per company you emailed with in recent weeks — without newsletters, notifications or free email addresses — and links the mail right away.
At the top is the cockpit: what's overdue, what's due today, what's coming this week and what you're waiting on. Jot down a quick idea in the field at the top (shortcut I); later turn it into a task with one click.
Everything revolves around the brain
- Mail — mail from a domain that belongs to a node is attached to it automatically. In the inbox you see for every email which company or project it belongs to, and you can relink it by hand.
- Tasks — a task from an email inherits that email's node. Commitments from your sent mail end up in the right project. To Do sync keeps working as before.
- Drafts — HeyOtto reads the node's notes and open tasks, so a draft knows what's going on. Internal notes are never written verbatim to the sender.
The people map
Under People you'll find everyone you work with, per company. HeyOtto builds the map from your mail and takes contact details from signatures. For each person you see how the collaboration is going, what they expect from you (questions and your promises), what you're waiting on and recent emails.
- An open question in your inbox automatically becomes an expectation, and disappears as soon as you reply. Turn any expectation into a task with one click.
- HeyOtto assesses the collaboration (the collaboration, never the person); you can always override it yourself. Health, HR, pay and character judgements are never stored.
- What someone likes, dislikes or what to keep in mind is taken into account by HeyOtto when writing a draft.
- Under Meetings you see, for each meeting today and tomorrow, what the attendees expect from you. With Ask HeyOtto you ask a question about your own tasks, projects and people.
- The people map is always private: your colleagues never see it, not even in the team brain.
Planning, handover and weekly overview
Under Planning you see all your open tasks as a table, kanban, calendar or timeline. Give a task an estimate and choose Auto-schedule: HeyOtto puts it in the free slots of your working days, around your Outlook calendar (free/busy only), your lunch break and your leave, and keeps some time free every day.
- The result is first a proposal: you review it in the calendar and confirm or discard it. A confirmed schedule can be undone with one click.
- HeyOtto doesn't write anything to your calendar. If you want a block in Outlook, add it yourself with the link on that block.
- Under Schedule & leave you set your working days, hours, lunch break, longest block and free buffer, and add your leave.
- Handover shows which tasks run during your leave. For each task you choose who picks it up; HeyOtto writes a text per colleague that you copy or open in a new message and send yourself.
- The weekly overview shows what you completed, what slipped, how much time you scheduled per company and what's coming next week.
The team brain (Business)
The team brain brings everyone's projects in your organisation together on one map, grouped by company. Projects from different colleagues for the same client come together; projects that share the same external contacts are connected with a dotted line.
The share gate: see what you share first
Everything in your brain is private. To share a project, open the share gate. There you see exactly what your colleagues will get to see: the summary, every task and every linked email — each with a checkbox.
- Linked mail is included by default, so your colleagues can follow the communication. Untick what must stay private.
- HeyOtto flags what may be sensitive — HR, pay, health, contracts, passwords, account or ID numbers. Such items are unticked by default.
- You only share after an explicit confirmation.
- Anything added later is never shared automatically: it waits in the gate until you review it. If you unlink an email or delete a task, it also disappears from the team brain.
- You can withdraw a share at any time.