Company Name: PolyDock
Founder: Jessica Gleason, PhD — Founder
Where are you based: Corinth, ME
Year founded: 2026
I am a “polyworker.” I work across multiple roles, projects, and organizations. I am a cultural anthropologist who teaches at two universities, conducts research, writes, and develops applied programs and early-stage ventures.
Almost all of that work happens digitally, but it happens across different documents, platforms, folders, subscriptions, and communication channels. I noticed that I was losing valuable time simply reorienting myself between projects—especially when it had been a few days since I last worked on something. I would search through documents, browser history, emails, and folders within folders just to remember where I had left off and what I needed to do next.
The problem wasn’t that I had too much work. It was that switching between different kinds of work created unnecessary cognitive friction. I wanted a faster, simpler way to leave one role and return to another without having to reconstruct my context every time. That was the beginning of PolyDock.
The earliest version was less of a traditional business and more of a sketch of the workspace I wished existed.
I started mapping out a role-based digital workspace where each major area of work could have its own “dock.” Instead of trying to replace all of the tools I already use, PolyDock would create a simple layer above them: a place to organize the links, resources, notes, decisions, and next steps associated with each role or project.
From there, I began developing mockups and thinking more intentionally about the experience of moving between docks, capturing information quickly, and returning to a project without having to remember everything that happened previously.
PolyDock is designed for people whose work does not fit neatly into one job, one project, or one digital environment.
That includes entrepreneurs, consultants, researchers, project directors, freelancers, gig workers, and other polyworkers who regularly move between different professional roles and responsibilities.
The problem is context switching. Our digital tools are often very good at helping us complete individual tasks, but they are not necessarily designed around the person managing several distinct streams of work. The result can be fragmented information, duplicated systems, lost decisions, and significant time spent figuring out, “Where was I?”
Most productivity tools are built around tasks, documents, teams, or projects. Polyworkers often end up adapting those systems to manage something slightly different: multiple professional identities and contexts at once.
The alternative is often to build increasingly complicated productivity systems or add more applications. But more tools can create more places to check, maintain, and remember.
PolyDock starts from a different question: How little information does someone need to see to quickly understand a project and begin working again?
PolyDock is developing a role-based digital workspace that helps people organize and re-enter their different streams of work.
Users create separate docks for the roles, projects, or ventures they manage. Each dock provides a lightweight home for the information needed to work effectively—such as key links, quick-reference information, captured thoughts, recent decisions, completed work, and next steps.
The goal is not to move every document or replace every application. It is to create a simple orientation layer that helps users move between the tools and projects they already have.
PolyDock is intentionally designed around reducing cognitive load and ‘digital fragmentation’ rather than maximizing the number of productivity features in one application.
Instead of asking users to migrate their entire working lives into another platform, PolyDock is meant to sit alongside existing tools and make them easier to navigate. Its role-based structure recognizes that the same person may be a researcher in the morning, an instructor in the afternoon, and a founder that evening—and each role requires a different set of information and priorities.
The design philosophy is simple: capture quickly, display only what matters, and make it easy to pick up where you left off.
PolyDock is currently in early-stage development and customer discovery, so its first customers are still being defined and tested.
Initial customer segments include entrepreneurs and small business owners managing multiple ventures, consultants and freelancers working across clients, researchers and project directors managing long-term projects, and polyworkers balancing multiple professional roles.
Through Dirigo Labs and upcoming customer discovery and concept testing, the goal is to better understand which of these groups experiences the strongest version of the problem and which PolyDock features provide the most immediate value.