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It’s become increasingly common for people to devote two to three hours to email per day. Reducing that burden has been a 15-year mission for Aye Moah, cofounder and CEO of Boomerang. Since Gmails early days, she and her team have helped nearly 1.5 million businesses streamline their inboxes using Boomerangs triage tools, including a popular “pause” button for emailall to the tune of about $8 million in annual revenue. Now, the company is expanding its reach with its acquisition of GQueues, a to-do list and team task manager designed to tackle other forms of digital distraction. Moah spoke with Fast Company about managing information overload, protecting work-life boundaries as a fully remote team, and why simply processing emails differently can reduce anxiety by 10%. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. How do you structure your week to minimize the context-switching that plagues remote work? I use a weekly cadence for what I do each day. Monday is all one-on-ones with people I manage and my CEO coaching. Tuesday is for external vendors, managing contractors and marketing agencies. Wednesday has light meetings in the morning, and then the afternoon is maker time for the whole company. We don’t have company meetings then, and everybody is supposed to turn off everything and have a three-to-four-hour block of maker time. That’s where I do a lot of deep thinking, strategy, and planning. Thursday is our weekly meeting dayall our company meetings happen together. Its kind of exhausting because I go from one weekly meeting to another, making a lot of decisions, but it really helps not having to switch contexts. Friday I have two maker time blocks, and Friday afternoon I leave for entrepreneurs that want to network or want advice. You created Inbox Pause to free us up from after-hours email. How do you personally manage work-life boundaries? My inbox is paused at 6 p.m. every night and over the weekend. Only at 8 a.m. on Monday do I get all the email from Friday afternoon through Monday morning. The first few days, maybe even up to a week, my brain didnt quite recognize that pattern. I would check my work email on my phone. But after three or four days where you don’t see anything new, your brain kind of reprograms itself. It stops looking for that dopamine hit and you stop checking. Its automated so I don’t have to spend willpower to say Im going to shut it off and step away. It does it for me, and then, when it becomes a habit, I dont even notice anymore. What if there’s a true emergency? How do you handle that while still protecting your boundaries? I’m speaking from a position of privilege. I am the CEO. I set the company culture. For people who really need to get to me during server outages or some crisis, we still have exceptions. You can set exceptions like this email is from my boss, put it through. So general nonessential stuff is not bothering you. Your brain holds onto anything with open loopsthe Zeigarnik Effectwhere anything you didnt put away will give you more anxiety and less good sleep. Your coworker might send you an email Sunday afternoon without meaning for you to get back to them, but just reading it can ruin your Sunday movie night with your kids because its in the back of your mind. By not seeing it until Monday morning, you’re protecting yourself from that Sunday night anxiety. I put my personal cell phone number in my away message. If its really urgent, you must text me. Or you could set up a separate email address that forwards to your mobile phone for emergencies. You mentioned your team is fully remote. How do you keep meetings engaging and efficient? We have one all-team daily meeting. It’s 11 minutes; we set it for 10:40 and it has to end before 11 a.m. Thats the only meeting we require video for. We know video fatigue is real, so for weekly meetings and status meetings, we dont require people to have video on. We also have very few meetingsan average developer on our team will have three to four meetings a week. If we need to talk live, we just do a quick huddle for a specific topic and get the question answered right away. Those are three to four minute conversations rather than long meetings. We’re also very good about canceling meetings if we don’t think the week requires actually talking through something. We can all just leave feedback and comments on the Google doc. Scheduling meetings takes a huge amount of time. How has Boomerang approached this problem? We tried to make the recipient experience as good as the sender experience because there’s a weird power dynamic with scheduling links. I send you a calendar link, and you have to go look on there, look at your calendar, type in your name, type in your email address, book itthat starts everyone on the wrong foot. To change that we push technology to generate a live image in the message of the schedule of the person proposing to meet. If you’re the recipient and have Boomerang, you don’t even have to leave your email. You can overlay your own schedule and book it. You don’t have to click over and go type in a form like you’re their secretary. We have a customer who took a list from a conference, split it in halfone side got a standard scheduling link and one side got our image in the email. He booked 120% more meetings when he sent the image. What keeps you motivated after 15 years with the same company? We talk to our customers a lot and fill our product road map from their needs. Customer conversations give me a lot of my energy because you see their problems and then when you’re showing something in beta, they say Oh my god, I can’t believe this! We’re just launching a Doodle alternative for group polling or meeting polling, and during user testing they’re saying I can’t wait to get my hands on this. Hearing about peoples real problems keeps me super motivated and energized. Adding GQueues has been fun. We haven’t really been in the to-do list and team management space before. It helps that all of us are productivity geeks, so for us, these are the things we want to tinker with. We get to fix things we aren’t happy with in existing tools. We’re solving our own problems while talking to real people whose problems we’re solving. That’s what keeps me motivated.
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E-Commerce
We may be the last generation of CEOs to lead fully human workforces. That isnt a futuristic prediction; its a reality already taking shape inside businesses today. AI agents, once imagined as distant possibilities, are stepping confidently into our organizations. These systems are capable of autonomously handling tasks across departments, making decisions, and learning over time. By 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously, according to Gartner. And given the current pace of adoption, even that may prove to be a conservative estimate. This shift isn’t just technologicalit’s operational and cultural Its not about replacing humans; its about augmenting them. Were entering a new operating model, one where human users and AI agents work together in tandem to drive outcomes with speed, intelligence, and scale. In this model, AI agents become active participants in the workforce, not passive tools. Already, forward-thinking organizations are hiring digital talent. They are assigning agents to workflows, integrating them into teams, and relying on them to create value alongside their human counterparts. The implications for leadership are profound. AI agents are not simply software add-ons; they are redefining how we design our business processes and collaborate on our daily work. Theyre collaborators in the broadest sense, and like any collaborator, they benefit from thoughtful integration and clear frameworks. Rethinking leadership in this new environment From what weve observed, organizations may benefit from shifting how they think about their workforce. Digital talent, like human talent, performs best when it has structure, support, and clear purpose. Some companies are already considering how to onboard digital agents, define their roles, measure their performance, and create environments where human and artificial intelligence complement one another. One notable strength of digital talent is its scalability. Once aligned, AI agents can be rapidly deployed across geographies and business functions. They operate continuously, adjust to real-time data, and remain consistent in execution. When deployed intentionally, this can open new doors to agility and resilience. Another shift weve seen is in how human capacity is being reallocated. As repetitive, manual tasks are passed to AI agents, employees are freed to focus on higher-value work: strategy, creativity, complex problem-solving. This unlocks not just efficiencybut also engagement. In a world where innovation is a differentiator, enabling people to do what only people can do becomes a strategic advantage. Designing teams for collaboration As we reimagine our workforces, its helpful to revisit how organizations can structure teamsnot just by department or title, but also by responsibility and collaboration model. Some leadership teams are now exploring how to define where human insight leads and where AI provides leverage. Questions about decision-making rights, accountability, and success metrics are being reframed to reflect the blended nature of todays teams. Naturally, with new capabilities come new responsibilities. Ethics, transparency, and governance cannot be treated as afterthoughts, but rather embedded from the beginning. Many organizations are exploring how to train digital agents responsibly, define behavioral expectations, and ensure these systems reflect their values. Setting the tone here, through clear policies and thoughtful design, can help build the kind of trust we aim to foster in any team. A common mistake There is, however, one common mistake I see many organizations making. They are applying AI agents to outdated processes, hoping to speed them up. But efficiency is not the same as transformation. If you automate a broken process, you only get broken resultsfaster. The real opportunity is not in acceleration. Its in reinvention. This moment calls for a process-first mindset. Its advisable to step back and ask ourselves the fundamental question: If we were designing this workflow today, knowing we had AI agents on our team from day one, how would we build it? That kind of thinking leads to a very different kind of organization. Sales, customer service, and operations In sales, AI agents can now qualify leads in real time, orchestrate outreach based on behavioral signals, and surface personalized insights for sales reps at the exact right moment. This creates a rhythm where reps focus less on handoffs and more on outcomes. In customer service, were seeing companies move beyond bots and into intelligent agent networks that proactively resolve issues, understand sentiment, and escalate complex problems with full context. The experience is faster, more empathetic, and more efficient. In operations, AI agents are making proactive decisions by managing supply chain variables, predicting demand shifts, and optimizing resources in ways that used to require layers of manual coordination. These arent hypothetical scenarios. Theyre real, and theyre redefining how companies deliver value. This is where the most exciting breakthroughs will happen. Not because we used AI to do what we already do faster, but because we gave ourselves permission to reimagine how the work could be done better. It starts with a mindset As CEOs, we are not just responsible for growth. We are responsible for building organizations that are intelligent by design. That means being intentional about how we integrate digital talent. It means leading the shift from legacy processes to modern, fluid systems that reflect how people and machines work best together. It also means embracing the cultural shift. The best outcomes will come from teams that are curious, experimental, and empowered. Leaders should encourage their teams to question assumptions, rethink workflows, and explore new possibilities. The organizations that do this well will be the ones that stay ahead. The blended workforce is already here. AI agents are changing how work gets done. They are reshaping roles, challenging hierarchies, and inviting us to reconsider what leadership looks like. This transformation doesnt start with technology; it starts with mindset. It starts with a CEO who understands that the future of the workforce is collaborative, intelligent, and profoundly human in its ambition. The future wont be fully human, but it will be more human-centered. It will be defined by those willing to lead with purpose, with courage, and with a commitment to building something better for both people and machines.
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E-Commerce
The nonprofit world is caught in a perfect storm, and many organizations are fundamentally misreading the moment. For decades, nonprofits ran on a static and reliable playbook: Chase government grants, court institutional donors, send the obligatory newsletter, and host the annual gala with open bars and cover bands. It was a comfortable model that did not require active audience engagement. Organizations could simply rely on the steady flow of federal funding and foundation checks. Then lightning struck. Twice. The Trump administration’s DOGE team landed like a wrecking ball on the nonprofit sector, freezing grants and ultimately turning the once-reliable federal funding spigot into a game of Russian roulette. This policy had near instantaneous effects: At least 14,000 nonprofit jobs were lost two months after inauguration day. Yet the DOGE disruption only amplified a shift that was already underway. As nonprofits were suddenly losing institutional funding, audience behavior underwent its own revolution: People started donating through their phones at unprecedented rates, began engaging with video content at increasing rates, and developed expectations for digital engagement that most nonprofits weren’t remotely prepared to meet. Combined, these rapid transitions pose an extinction-level event for nonprofits clinging to outdated models. But there’s a counterintuitive opportunity buried in this crisis: The same forces threatening nonprofit existence might actually be liberating them from decades of institutional dependency. The key is knowing how to pivot. Here are three core strategies. Lean into digital experiences The 205% surge in mobile donations is a critical signal that audiences want to engage differently. When 51% of your supporters are visiting your website through their phones and your digital presence feels like it was designed for a desktop in 2010, you’re actively driving away support. It is important to note that the byproduct of this strategy is not simply a mobile-optimized website that delivers static information. Wildlife Insights from WWF demonstrates this strategy well. This platform allows anyone to upload wildlife photos directly from mobile devices, then uses AI to automatically identify species and aggregate data from around the world. By making conservation accessible through smartphones, they’ve created a community where citizen scientists can contribute meaningful data from anywhere, transforming how wildlife monitoring happens at scale. In other words, much more than a brochure. Use data to drive engagement The most forward-thinking nonprofits are converting audience insights into growth drivers for online engagement. It is no longer good enough to get traffic to a site. A modern, successful organization follows a different strategy that converts attention into behavior. This process is unleashing a new wave of innovative feature development that is changing the perception of what nonprofits do with and for their audience. Digital innovation does not require next-generation technology, just an intelligent distribution plan. The Marshall Project Inside delivers criminal justice news to over 223,000 incarcerated individuals through a video series specifically designed for the 60% of prisoners with low literacy levels. By using audience data to shape content format, they became the only major news outlet making this level of investment to reach this underserved community. Create subscription revenue streams The final conversion in this process transforms audience engagement into monthly subscription revenue. This matters in the new era when government funding can evaporate with the stroke of a pen. Organizations building these structures are creating immunity against political whiplash. The pioneer of this strategy is Charity: Water, which launched The Spring, an online community of recurring donors, radical transparency, and undeniable impact. This strategy alone has raised over $320 million. This transformation isn’t just about survival, it’s about discovering what nonprofits become when they’re built on audience relationships instead of institutional approval. The organizations making this pivot now won’t just outlast the current political chaos; they’ll emerge stronger, more sustainable, and more connected to their missions than ever before.
Category:
E-Commerce
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