[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Flow Club (YC S21) - Virtual co-working s...
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: Flow Club (YC S21) - Virtual co-working space for
focused work
We're Ricky, David, and Minjeong and we built Flow Club:
https://www.flow.club. Flow Club is a virtual co-working space to
help you focus. You work in hour-long sprints of up to 9 people led
by a host and designed to get you into flow quickly. Here's a video
showing how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svl68znFgLc.
A lot of innovation around work today focuses on helping employees
collaborate while distributed. The problem? Either you can't get
any work done from the constant Slack pings, excessive emails and
agenda-less Zoom meetings, or (if you unplug from all that) you're
isolated and without structure. Then it can get hard to figure out
which tasks to work on or find motivation to start. The challenge
is to craft a virtual environment that is conducive to doing deep
work and at the same time feeling connected to other people. That's
what we're trying to solve. David and I got back together to do
our third startup in 13 years. I'm a hard worker, but David takes
it to another level. When we would get together in coffee shops,
we'd start pomodoro timers to make sure we don't talk forever
instead of working. When the pandemic began, we made a virtual
timer overlay for our Zoom meetings to do stretches of work
together while WFH. It was effective, but we didn't think about it
as a startup because we were working on other, more social
products. None of those got traction. The hard part about building
a social product, especially for "older" people (i.e. everybody but
the super young), is that purely social value props no longer work.
Our desire to meet people, self-express, etc., goes down as we get
older and busier. So how to bring busy people together? That led us
to think about working as part of a "club," and we went back to our
simple timer, which had solved a real problem for us, and developed
the idea from there. With Flow Club, you work in sprints in the
style of a group workout class. Every session takes place in a
small group setting led by a host. The first five and last five
minutes of the hour are reserved to hear a bit about what each
person is working on and to celebrate their progress. Over time, as
you attend more sessions, you start to feel connected to the
community of "co-workers". If you've tried remote co-working with
friends and found it distracting, you could try bringing your
friend to Flow Club instead. It's harder to slack off / goof around
when there is structure, community norms, and a clear leader. We
help you get started on big tasks like writing, coding, or
creating, as well as keep you accountable for smaller tasks to
unblock you for the first type of task. I'm writing this in a Flow
Club right now because I read HN everyday and I am intimidated to
post to HN. Tasks that scare you a little bit are great for Flow
Club :) Our members have launched their startups, finished their
pitch decks, finished research papers, gotten to inbox zero,
finally sent their investor updates. Others come at specific times,
for example, to follow up right after a meeting, or to fight an
after-lunch slump. So please check out the demo video we made and
let us know what you think! If you've tried your own Zoom coworking
with friends, we'd love to hear how that went as well. We know that
live video coworking isn't for everyone--we actually initially
thought it might just be for solo or new founders working on their
own projects, but we've been very pleasantly surprised by who it
has resonated with. We also keep hearing from community members who
thought it sounded weird, but tried it, and now have been back to
hundreds of sessions. If this sounds like something you might like
and benefit from, we created a special invite code for a limited
number of Hacker News readers. We have a waitlist because session
space is limited. This will also get you a special HN tag to find
other HN members, and see a few HN-only sessions David is hosting:
https://in.flow.club/invite/HNRunsOnArc07
Author : rickyyean
Score : 150 points
Date : 2021-08-18 15:14 UTC (7 hours ago)
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I use Focusmate and it works great, but I don't love that there
| is no community and I feel that people on the platform basically
| just "use" each other as productivity implements. I'd love to try
| this to feel out how the community aspect would work.
| rickyyean wrote:
| Thanks. Yes, the "club" part is a huge part of what we're
| doing. I'm honestly really glad you get it.
| DanielBaum wrote:
| I joined last week but have already been in 2 Flow Clubs and
| really loved it! It's a great forcing function to actually get
| work done and not procrastinate!
| throwawayswede wrote:
| Don't mean to pick on this product specifically (it does look
| polished), but in general, does anyone else think this whole idea
| of opening a video camera and microphone (even if muted) for long
| sessions while people work on different things is kind of
| dystopian and sad? It makes sense when you're looking and working
| on the same thing, maybe even if it's like a shared desktop where
| each is working on a separate part of the same document for
| example, but each working on their own unrelated thing and still
| get on this? I know remote work is becoming more and more of a
| thing now, but it's usually the whole idea is to be: 1) async, 2)
| less distracted, and not revert back to another version of
| "office". I get pretty creepy vibes from this idea. Maybe I'm out
| of touch and/or old, but I can't ever see myself wanting to
| "virtually hang out" with coworkers or strangers with an always-
| on camera, verges on creepy imo. I can only imagine something
| like this with _some_ family members.
| ngokevin wrote:
| I've been using it and it's more wholesome than as you
| describe. It's not long sessions (50 minutes, pre-booked), and
| there's actually not much "hanging out", just focus time. I've
| been using it to boost my productivity for the last month as a
| solo founder
| alixanderwang wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! I have perhaps an unconventional feature
| request for this: broadcast which apps/domains my window was
| focused on.
|
| To me, I feel so little additional accountability just because
| there's a backgrounded meeting. I scroll Twitter in large
| meetings already.
|
| But if there's other people who would see a report that I was on
| Twitter/HN/Reddit for 10 mins of the flow session, I would not
| let myself do that.
|
| > It's harder to slack off / goof around when there is structure,
| community norms, and a clear leader.
|
| People had this in an office, but I bet your monitor screen being
| visible to everyone around you in the office is more of a forcing
| function to not goof off than all of those other things combined.
|
| The data broadcasted that I have in mind is something like what
| RescueTime might collect (https://twitter.com/jarredsumner/status
| /1426962249332125701/...). Obviously difficult to navigate
| privacy issues around a feature like that, but I don't think
| impossible (e.g. I'd trust a collector agent if it were open
| source).
|
| Anyway, that's just me personally. Good luck!
| rickyyean wrote:
| You'd be happy to learn that it's not so unconventional a
| request among Flow Club members. Everyone comes to Flow Club
| primarily to get work done, so people want the software to find
| ways to keep them even more accountable. We want to offer more
| "intense" experiences like that for sure.
| cnaut wrote:
| I love this idea! I have used Flow Club a lot and this would
| keep me even more accountable.
| option_greek wrote:
| I'm curious, if you are distracted and end up browsing what
| not, won't your tasks suffer? And won't that be noticeable in
| jira/other metrics?
| puszczyk wrote:
| Not the OP, but I think lot of us get distracted often. The
| tasks are rarely 8 hours exact, and I bet its not easy to
| notice that a task took say a 10% hit.
|
| Also this post from Joel Spolsky [0]
|
| > When I had a summer internship at Microsoft, a fellow
| intern told me he was actually only going into work from 12
| to 5 every day. Five hours, minus lunch, and his team loved
| him because he still managed to get a lot more done than
| average. I've found the same thing to be true.
|
| For me personally, the biggest issue from distractions are
| not these extra hours that may accumulate over time, but
| rather a loss of momentum.
|
| When I feel productive I can churn tasks quickly one after
| the other, even the ones I "dread" -- documentations, docs,
| posts. OTOH when I start getting distracted its hard to be
| back to productive even on something I usually enjoy (coding,
| investigating some tricky problem).
|
| [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-
| motion/
| robby1066 wrote:
| You might want to check out RescueTime's slack integration. It
| can _sort of_ do what you 're asking for. You can configure it
| to update your Slack status with whatever category of app
| you're spending time in.
|
| Unless they've changed something in the last year since I used
| it.
|
| https://www.rescuetime.com/integrations/slack
| eterpstra wrote:
| Big +1 for this. Or maybe some sort of integration with
| RescueTime (not sure how, but why not)
| archibaldJ wrote:
| Just saw the intro video on youtube; this reminds me a lot of the
| weekly video sessions during startup school;
|
| One question: how do you optimize for quality time during the
| 5min intro to set the enter-the-flow mood/vibe? do you mute a
| person's mic after 1 min (eg to prevent some people from
| accidentally becoming mildly annoying for talking too long?)
|
| [edit: elaboration]
| rickyyean wrote:
| We haven't had to do that. Each session has a host who
| facilitates and there are regulars who help reinforce the norm.
|
| I led a Startup School cohort a few years ago when I was in-
| between projects. Yes, kind of like that in terms of the kind
| of people you'll get to meet in Flow Club, but the primary
| purpose of sharing in Flow Club is not to learn from each other
| but to prime yourself into focus.
| ahel wrote:
| I don't see the added value compared to virtual-study-hall that
| uni runs https://www.ucalgary.ca/live-uc-ucalgary-
| site/sites/default/... and random strangers on different free
| website/platforms.
| coding123 wrote:
| What I find so interesting about this is that it's NOT your co-
| workers. Which is actually really intriguing. I wouldn't be able
| to participate in this right now due to my living situation, but
| I love the idea.
|
| One problem with trying to get co-workers to do this is that it's
| probably hard to find people that would want to. So instead open
| it up to a global pool of people and you're much more likely to
| easily find 9 that want to sit and work.
|
| Long time ago I rented a co-working space for $99 / month and
| working amongst strangers is oddly powerfully motivating.
| dtran wrote:
| We definitely see parallels with co-working spaces. How did
| that co-working space work for you? Do you work out of any
| coffee shops or other places like that now (if that's possible
| given restrictions where you live)?
|
| Pre-pandemic, I would often sit at a Starbucks before going
| into the office to knock out one specific task since I always
| knew as soon as I got to the office, I'd usually have to sync
| up with a coworker on something. Again, I know everyone has
| their own preferences, but something about the energy/ambiance
| of a coffee shop has always helped me get focused much more
| than a library or completely silent corner. One issue with co-
| working spaces is that sometimes it's not clearly delineated
| when people are trying to get focused work done vs. chat, and
| we felt the same pain with unstructured co-working Zooms that
| we did at the beginning of the pandemic.
| orky56 wrote:
| I really love this idea. I see a lot of similarities to fitness
| with the idea of organizing regiments to sprints/pomodoro for
| generating flow. It seems like the current iteration is a
| conservative and accessible akin to a Planet Fitness approach,
| light on the pressure and celebratory of wins. I would be very
| interested in a Peloton approach that is focused on keeping the
| pace high and pushing me further. In my world, I need less
| discipline for vision work and more for tedious activities.
| dtran wrote:
| Thanks orky56! I'm an avid runner and can't stop seeing
| similarities between fitness/training and work (and
| specifically startups). Wrote about some of them here:
| https://www.flow.club/blog/how-to-work-like-elite-athletes-t...
|
| > In my world, I need less discipline for vision work and more
| for tedious activities.
|
| That's definitely a big use case for Flow Club--getting to
| inbox zero or writing an email that you've been dreading.
|
| Re: increasing the intensity, we do have some 90-minute and
| 120-minute sessions, which are super challenging for me even
| after hundreds of Flow Club sessions and years of using
| pomodoros. There's also some interesting ideas in this thread
| that my co-founder responded to re: ways to increase the
| intensity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28223257
| version_five wrote:
| Serious question, how does it work demographic wise. I'm in my
| 40s and picture it being awkward for everyone to be the old guy
| in a room of 25 year olds (also a factor why I don't do yoga
| anymore). I wouldn't be surprised if there are women who are
| nervous about being the only girl in a room full if guys. At the
| same time, I don't think I'd want to sign up for a demographic
| specific version. Is this something you expect will sort itself
| out naturally?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| I'm disturbingly close to my 40s myself and I'm a bit worried
| by your comment. I'd imagine that any novelty that the
| young'uns would have to you or me wandering into a yoga
| class/room full of programmers would wear off quickly when we
| just do our thing like everyone else and fail to fall on our
| faces or do anything else to draw negative attention to
| ourselves. I'm far from a social butterfly, but I've yet to
| feel any particular awkwardness (more than normal, anyway) due
| to my age when joining social or work events which I have been
| invited to.
|
| I'm sorry if this comes off as a bit brusque, but maybe this is
| a self-confidence thing on your part.
| codingdave wrote:
| > Either you can't get any work done from the constant Slack
| pings, excessive emails and agenda-less Zoom meetings, or...
|
| So the premise upon which your business is based is that many
| organizations have a bad remote work culture. To be fair, many
| (most) do. But I'm curious what you envision as more
| organizations learn how to properly work in a remote environment?
| Because this feels like it is adding meetings around my work, not
| even with my co-workers, and with a time limit on when I need to
| stop flow. It all feels quite odd to be honest.
|
| But the problem you are trying to solve is real. It seems like it
| would be effective to push this more towards a coaching service
| for organizations struggling to define their remote culture vs.
| ongoing flow meetings.
| rickyyean wrote:
| Working in limited timed sprints could feel odd if you're not
| used to pomodoro, and it could be difficult for certain tasks.
| David shared his experiment in the other comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28222665
|
| We have worked with several employers to bring Flow Club to
| their employees to help create opportunities for deep work, but
| the problem is bigger than that. From Cal Newport's New Yorker
| article last year (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-
| technology/the-rise...): "The knowledge sector's insistence
| that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a
| so-called "tragedy of the commons" scenario, in which
| individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a
| negative group outcome. An office worker's life is dramatically
| easier, in the moment, if she can send messages that demand
| immediate responses from her colleagues, or disseminate
| requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner. But the
| cumulative effect of such constant, unstructured communication
| is cognitively harmful: on the receiving end, the deluge of
| information and demands makes work unmanageable. There's little
| that any one individual can do to fix the problem."
| codingdave wrote:
| I've found that individuals absolutely can change
| organizational behavior. Setting teams norms is a simple
| first step that establishes what the expectations on response
| times truly are for various communication channels. It takes
| 15 minutes in a team meeting, and almost instantly improves
| team culture. All it takes is one leader to put that
| discussion on an agenda, and the entire team can relax and
| let message piles up while they get work done, because
| everyone has a shared understanding of how the team has
| chosen to operate.
|
| This isn't just theory - My company was downright sad when
| the pandemic started when it came to remote culture. But a
| handful of us stepped up, made suggestions and
| recommendations, and things have improved greatly. At this
| point, we have established communication guidelines that are
| shared with the company, and mostly followed.
|
| The tragedy comes when everybody believes that one person
| cannot make a difference, so nobody tries.
| xcambar wrote:
| Thinking that the majority of organizations will ever have a
| decent remote culture is, in my opinion, nothing but wishful
| thinking.
|
| Of course, a huge number of companies will append "work from
| home" to their job descriptions, but for non other reason than
| to avoid to lag behind others.
|
| Yes, that's a bit harsh and the reality may be that in fact,
| most companies will think they have a remote culture for one
| reason or the other, but will lack the... well... culture, to
| support it.
|
| If you think I'm being pessimistic, think about agile.
| Certainly you can name companies that do agile properly (good
| for you, please share names :), but most companies claim to be
| agile only because anything else is a blocker to hire these
| days.
| slingnow wrote:
| This looks like a dystopian future wrapped in slick packaging.
|
| As I understand it, this service involves voluntarily putting
| myself in front of a security camera, and then being forced to
| interact with people irrelevant to my task on a regular basis.
|
| How exactly is this "designed to get me into flow quickly" ?
| fooblat wrote:
| My gut reaction to this is hell no. I absolutely do not want a
| camera on me while I'm trying to concentrate and get work done. I
| also don't do well in open offices with my back to the room.
|
| Maybe I'm just old but I need some privacy to be really focused,
| creative, and productive. Feeling like I'm being watched just
| kills my focus.
| dtran wrote:
| Thanks for checking it out! I don't think that it's because
| "[you're] just old"-- it's definitely a matter of personal
| preference, and we know this style of working isn't for
| everyone.
|
| Re: open offices, that's a good point-- I actually think open
| offices are distracting if people are walking around behind you
| or chatting in the background. But if everyone else is also
| hard at work (and therefore not really watching), I definitely
| feel a small lift from that ambiance/energy.
| dsiroker wrote:
| I just tried this yesterday and I was very impressed! I didn't
| expect it, but there was something magical about setting goals
| for the hour, seeing the faces of six strangers on mute, and a
| timer ticking down. It drove focus and accountability.
|
| Great job, Ricky, David, and Minjeong!
| dtran wrote:
| Thanks so much for trying it out and for the kind words Dan!
|
| > setting goals for the hour, seeing the faces of six strangers
| on mute, and a timer ticking down. It drove focus and
| accountability.
|
| Goal-setting is so powerful and yet so difficult-- clarity of
| goals + setting the right level of challenge for the time
| period are two of the key characteristics of flow state (as
| defined by the great Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Re: "seeing the
| faces of six strangers", we think that this experience becomes
| more powerful as you come back to Flow Club over time--you'll
| do sessions with some of the same hosts and a mix of new faces,
| acquaintances, and friends, both from outside Flow Club as well
| as ones that you make in Flow Club.
| thebouv wrote:
| Hmm, I guess I don't really get the concept. I still don't know
| how this stops constant interruption from emails, Zooms, and
| messaging pings.
|
| If the block on my calendar for this is supposed to help stop
| people contacting me -- well, it doesn't stop them now.
|
| I'm glad this seems to work for some people though.
| dekervin wrote:
| If there is a YC member here, would be interesting to know why
| Flow Club got in and not for example other startups like
| https://www.focusmate.com/ which in my mind deserve all the
| credit for the first really good implementation of the concept.
| Extra points if you remember other applicants with the same
| concept that didn't get in ! ( Btw, applicants, if you reading
| this, I would love to hear from you !!! )
| breck wrote:
| I am just an alum, and have no insight into YC's thoughts, and
| I don't even know if FocusMate applied (I assume by your
| question they did). I would also add, that I'd hope they'd
| apply again, as I have a strong pro-YC bias. But I find this is
| an interesting question, both for the general pattern, and also
| because I am interested in productivity boosters and did end up
| paying for Flow Club but haven't yet tried FocusMate.
|
| 1) There's a Francis Darwin quote that is relevant "In science
| the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the
| man to whom the idea first occurs." I hope to explore that idea
| in an essay someday, for now I'll just share the quote. I am
| not trying to make a prediction here. Getting into YC is _not_
| convincing the world. No one has done that yet in this market.
| I know some of the people involved in Focus Mate and absolutely
| think they could be the #1 player, but assuming a big market is
| there it 's certainly game on and who was first is a rounding
| error and the rest comes down to execution. It's a wide open
| field.
|
| 2) I did YC with AirBnb and at the time CouchSurfing.org was
| indeed a decently known thing in some circles. For every YC
| investment I'm sure you can find multiple "really good
| implementation of the concept".
|
| 3) This is still very much early innings in this space. As an
| investment, it's very hard to predict whether Flow Club or
| FocusMate or one of the other 8 will be the big unicorn (if
| any). A lot of it will come down to the founders. Even if there
| does turn out to be a huge market, some may take an early exit
| (Facebook v. MySpace, for example). As an entrepreneur I
| generally opt for the small earlier exit, but as an angel
| investor I try to avoid investing in people like me (both to
| hedge and b/c of power laws of returns).
|
| 4) A friend had brought me to SoulCycle once and so I totally
| get the "Peloton for Work" angle. So that's what led me to give
| Flow Club a shot. And I have found it very productive a couple
| of times per month. The coach and music have been great. For me
| the FocusMate style was intriguing, but it was just slightly
| below the threshold where I would give it a shot. Could those
| be 2 different markets with one being 100x bigger than the
| other? I have no idea but seems small things like that could
| actually make a big difference.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Not YC here, but it usually comes down to team, traction, and
| timing. Given the immense amount of applicants they screen, its
| unrealistic that they would be able to assess the traction of
| all of each startup's competition. Timing-wise, a 2019
| application for virtual coworking would have theoretically done
| poorly in its batch relative to a 2021 company in the same
| space. Also, solo-founder companies just aren't as attractive
| to investors. There is no backup in a flameout or hit-by-bus
| scenario, and may signal that the founder "doesn't play well
| with others". YC is now offering a co-founder matching service
| to attempt to mitigate this issue.
| immy wrote:
| [I'm not YC] For one they are YC alums. Also the "Peloton for
| your brain" angle means there's motivation in the value
| proposition, and a group aspect. Whereas FocusMate comes across
| like pairing two souls to be a little better off together.
| There's a slew of other group coworking things but they haven't
| launched yet.
| kmod wrote:
| I've been a user of Flow Club for a while now and I highly
| recommend it even though that's probably not in my personal
| interest. I often find that I am >2x as productive during these
| hours, which I find remarkable, and sometimes it gets me to crank
| out something I would have otherwise procrastinated. I find it
| great as well for adding structure to my unstructured work
| schedule (I work for myself). The combination of forced intention
| setting with light external accountability is really powerful.
| dtran wrote:
| David from Flow Club here-- I'll be hosting a few Hacker News-
| only sessions today and tomorrow. I remember attending a HN
| meetup in Palo Alto back when I was an undergrad back in 2009 and
| it was super cool to hear what people were working on--not just
| the high-level pitch, but literally what they were debugging that
| day. That's been my favorite part of Flow Club as well.
|
| I've been a big fan of pomodoro and time-blocking, but for a long
| time was convinced that it didn't work well for coding until I
| experimented a bit. Wrote up some of my thoughts here:
| https://www.flow.club/blog/makers-schedule-2021 Would love to
| hear if any of y'all try to time block for writing code and will
| be around to answer any questions!
| stakkur wrote:
| Ugh.
| eterpstra wrote:
| Wow. As irony would have it, during a procrastinatory fit today,
| I wandered onto HN for the first time in weeks. Saw this, and it
| seems like it's exactly what I've been looking for lately! I've
| been intensely struggling with staying productive at my new
| startup - to the point where I'm looking to hire someone to
| basically look over my shoulder (via video) to keep me on task.
| Seriously, I'm interviewing someone tomorrow for this. The fact
| that there's a company devoted to this is astounding (it's not
| just me!). Can't wait until my invite is accepted so I can try
| this out!
| jasonkester wrote:
| For me, the big advantage of working from home is that I can do
| my thing without fear of distraction. I check my mail and Slack
| in the morning, then close them both and know that nothing can
| sidetrack me the rest of the day.
|
| This seems like the opposite of that. It seems to want to point a
| camera at me all day long and interrupt for 10 minutes of standup
| meetings (with strangers) every hour. I can't get my head around
| why that'd be something you'd want.
|
| I guess maybe if you weren't the self-motivated type (and kinda
| got thrown into remote work against your will, and are thus
| struggling), maybe this would help. But if you thrive in a remote
| environment and have a bunch of things to do, I can't imagine it
| would do anything but slow you down.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > I check my mail and Slack in the morning, then close them
| both and know that nothing can sidetrack me the rest of the
| day.
|
| It's great if you can have that luxury, but it's not always
| possible. A lot of us have some level of constant "on call"
| duty where we can't just be unreachable the whole day.
|
| The problem for me is that it is definitely possible for me to
| be unreachable for 1-2 hour chunks, but often times when I "get
| out of flow" it's difficult for me to get back it. I could see
| something like Flow Club benefitting me.
| rickyyean wrote:
| I like how disciplined you are with only checking messages in
| the morning. It's just three of us here at Flow Club so I can't
| really do that yet. One day...
|
| I think motivation is messier than just self-motivated vs not
| self-motivated. Could depend on the task you're tackling, time
| of day, other things in life that happened that day. Work is so
| personal and so varied. I'd say Flow Club members are very
| self-motivated, some are wildly successful by conventional
| standards, and yet there are still moments where Flow Club is a
| reliable environment to fall back on or to pick themselves up
| just a little.
| raman162 wrote:
| I just finished a session for the first time and enjoyed it. I
| will definitely try this out again in the future
| superamit wrote:
| Been to a few Flow Club sessions so far and liked it enough to
| subscribe. The social motivation is real and I dig the attitude
| Ricky et al are bringing to this.
|
| Would definitely recommend this to anyone that finds themselves
| pushing certain to-dos forward from one day to the next.
| andyxor wrote:
| I like it! may be add an option for users to group themselves by
| the type of work, i.e. coders with coders, writers with writers,
| let them optionally choose the kind of co-workers they want (or
| default to a random mix of strangers in "cofeeshop" mode)
|
| and also let users work together on shared tasks, such as
| leetcode prep, school homework, startup or open-source project,
| or anything which requires collaboration.
|
| Also you could provide "virtual PM" as a service to tech
| companies to manage their sprints.
| dtran wrote:
| Thanks Andyxor! We have a weekly writing session that my co-
| founder hosts and I'm going to host a couple of coding-specific
| sessions soon. Even more specific tasks like leetcode/interview
| prep would be super interesting. One of our members hosts a
| weekly reading session--during busy weeks, that's basically the
| only time I'll make progress on a book, so that's been
| delightful.
| andyxor wrote:
| also I think there is great B2B opportunity is providing PM
| as a service in post-COVID world.
|
| Now tech companies hire a legion of PMs with no particular
| domain or tech skills just to repeat the same standup/sprint
| routine on daily/weekly basis. If a vendor comes in with
| consistent and cost-effective way to administer remote-first
| virtual sprints I believe businesses would pay for it. Your
| "hosts" are the real asset.
| 58x14 wrote:
| Discovered this while procrastinating here on HN. Too ironic not
| to sign up!
| eterpstra wrote:
| Ha! Same :)
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Hacker News, the source of and solution to all your
| productivity problems.
| puszczyk wrote:
| Any chance to release another batch of invites? I think I've just
| missed mine :) the page says "invalid invite code" after I've
| filled in the email and password...
| smalter wrote:
| big fan of flow club here. happy to answer any questions from the
| user perspective.
| bartvk wrote:
| How many session do you do per day? Is it for powering through
| particularly hard work? Do you enjoy the company, or is it more
| of a discipline thing?
| jonbishop wrote:
| I've done 4 Flow Club sessions and have really enjoyed it.
|
| I get the folks saying they'd be distracted and I thought the
| camera would throw me off (and you can turn it off if you want),
| but I got used to it right away and have been pretty productive
| during my sessions.
|
| I'm working solo from home, so having others there has been
| energizing.
|
| The people in my sessions seem to most commonly use Flow Club to
| get through work that they don't want to do or something they've
| been putting off.
| qnsi wrote:
| I actually like the idea. One small thing, I wish you added
| pricing on your homepage.
|
| And one of the reasons I am not 100% excited about it, is I can
| kinda see it being helpful, but I think there is no real
| accountability (I can imagine pathological procrastinator might
| lie that their session went well, when in reality they browsed
| FB).
|
| Any ideas how to fix it? I guess showing proof of work might be
| too intrusive for some, but maybe 10% of flow session could be in
| accountability mode (so the user selects accountability/no
| accountability)? Then I guess faking real work might make people
| decide fuck it it's too much work, I am going to do a real thing
| and make them really productive.
| dtran wrote:
| Thanks for checking it out and the kind words re: the idea
| qnsi.
|
| >I think there is no real accountability (I can imagine
| pathological procrastinator might lie that their session went
| well, when in reality they browsed FB).
|
| That's a good point-- a "pathological procrastinator" could
| definitely do that, but they'd mostly just be cheating
| themselves since they're not here to pretend to work for their
| boss. To your point though, some users have requested a way to
| share their screen for extra accountability, and we've even had
| a couple members do this with virtual cameras. At the end of
| the day though, we're building a community that celebrates the
| process and gradual progress made by time-blocking and goal-
| setting to do our best work, so if someone feels this way, I
| think the community can help them. To bring in another
| perspective, I'm an avid runner, and occasional cheating
| (course-cutting during races or faking Strava data) does happen
| within that community, but besides the shame of getting caught,
| if you're running every week with a community, cheaters will
| either self-select out of the community, or hopefully see the
| emptiness that comes with achievements they didn't earn.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-18 23:00 UTC)