What is actually in it
Four things. They were built in this order and they only make sense in this order, so that is how they are written up.
Dives
A dive is a block of time with a depth attached. Shallow is twenty-five minutes and you are reachable by your team. Mid is fifty and you are reachable by three people. Deep is ninety and you are reachable by the escalation path and nothing else.
The depth is chosen at the start and cannot be raised from inside the dive, which is the only genuinely opinionated thing in the product. Lowering it is always allowed: coming up early is a decision anyone can make, going shallower mid-dive is a decision the part of you that wants to check Slack makes.
Dives can be started from the desktop app, the menu bar, the CLI, or a calendar event with the right title. The dives reference has all four.
The Shoal
One screen for the whole team: who is down, at what depth, and for how much longer. It is deliberately not a productivity dashboard. There are no totals, no leaderboard, and no history older than today, because the moment a focus tool starts keeping score it becomes a surveillance tool wearing a nice font.
What the Shoal is for is the thirty seconds before you interrupt someone. Seeing that a colleague is sixty minutes into a ninety-minute dive is usually enough to turn a tap on the shoulder into a message that can wait.
Everything on the screen expires by itself. There is no status to clear and therefore no stale status, which is the failure mode of every manual system this replaces.
Currents
A current is a recurring block where the whole team dives together. Two hours, three mornings a week, is where most teams land after a month of trying other shapes.
Currents work for a reason that has nothing to do with discipline: interruption is cheapest when everybody is unavailable at once, because nobody is waiting on a reply they were going to get anyway. A team that stops individually is a team with a queue. A team that stops together is a team with a quiet morning.
They publish to your calendar as real busy blocks, so the rest of the company sees them without needing to know what VivaOcean is.
Daylight
A weekly summary of how much real depth the team got, and what took it away. It goes to the whole team, not to managers, and it is per team rather than per person. That is not a privacy gesture; it is the only unit at which the number means anything.
Daylight names the interrupters, and the most common finding is that they are meetings rather than people. The second most common is a single recurring sync that costs the team more deep hours than everything else combined.
It can be exported, and the Shoal API exposes the same figures if you would rather put them somewhere else.
The rest of the list
- Escalation path reaches any depth, capped at five people all plans
- Calendar sync two-way, Google and Microsoft Reef
- Chat integrations status and hold-my-messages Reef
- Single sign-on and SCIM SAML 2.0, directory sync Trench
- Self-hosting one container, one Postgres Trench
VivaOcean is a fictional product. This site exists to show a theme, and every number on it was made up to fill a layout.