Crush Priority Tasks With Handle

A lot of us are drowning in our email inboxes these days. Shawn Carolan, a managing director at Menlo Ventures, was no exception. For years, he struggled daily to keep up with his email, which caused him to have less time to go out into the field, check out the marketplace, and meet with entrepreneurs. He looked for solutions that would help him deal with the information overload more efficiently but didn't find anything that addressed his needs, so he started Handle.

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, Carolan unveiled Handle's launch product, the world's first priority engine. “This is not just about getting your email down to zero,” he told VentureBeat. “This is about finding and keeping your priorities straight and spending time on the things that matter.”

Unlike most productivity apps that focus on the project, Handle centers on the individual. The idea of the system is that if you're clear on your priorities, you spend the majority of your day on them and go home each night having made progress on the really important stuff. Handle lets you “triage” your inbox and sort through your myriad emails to create a prioritized task list, which acts as your blueprint for the day. And because to-dos come from other places, not just your inbox, you can also add items to your task list and prioritize them. Then there are keyboard shortcuts to help you become as efficient as you can be.

“If important work is undone or unplanned for, your subconscious will haunt you,” says Carolan. “We realized that the only way people end up being happy and feeling good is when they know they spent big parts of their day on the things they care about most, and brought these things through to completion the best they can.”

Currently in private beta, Handle is available on the web and iOS. The priority engine is just the beginning for Handle – it is part of a human operating system Carolan and company are building to make life easier.