Have been aware of @Focusmate for awhile as one of the main alternatives/competitors to complice.co/rooms coworking, but it didn't occur to me somehow until today that maybe I actually just want to *use* Focusmate for stuff I've been wanting accompaniment while working on.
Live impressions of trying Focusmate for accompanied work
13 tweets · January 2021 · 10 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
Checking it out now. Loving the onboarding—was sort of hoping I could just book a call without choosing what I was gonna work on, but nope. And that's probably good. Have tried such calls and I usually end up with something random. (& they have a quiet "skip for now" button)
I think I'm just gonna go with Yearly Review, in which I'm bucketing both my blog post (half-written and showtime scheduled for tomorrow) as well as private reviews. First task: finish an adequate full draft of blog post (it currently has a bunch of placeholders & blanks)
Watching the intro... I like how they have the timer at the top... was expecting them to actually have a separate 1-2min timer for the "tell your partner what you're working on". For me there's something that feels good about committing *then* hearing the bell.
They also don't have a clear separate timer for the debrief, which I was expecting even despite the lack of that at the intro. (Could be fun to have a lil chatbot in the Complice rooms that asks "how'd last pomo go?" when break starts & "what's next?" 1min before pomo starts🤔)
Now I'm into "ready to book a session" and it's asking me for a session title and I'm like... do I put my goal there? Hmm... it's not showing me that goal anywhere. Ah yeah, title only visible to me. So I could use it for that, or not, or whatever.
Oh nice, automatic buttons to make it repeat daily or weekly. Easy to get it to stick. This is a well-made product. I can tell lots of work went into making it as simple & functional as it is.
Very curious how they do the match-up. I seemed to somehow immediately have a partner the moment I picked a time. I would have guessed some people have a kind of auto-availability, but I don't see that option anywhere! They said something about gcal integration though maybe?
I guess maybe I got lucky that there was someone already waiting for that slot? Seems there are lots of people who have booked slots...
(Oh. Thought I'd tweeted the above stuff last night.) Anyway, I just tried my first few sessions and can confirm that if you sign up for a slot that nobody else (in this case 9 minutes away) has then it puts you in a "Matching..." state.
But literally 2 minutes later someone grabbed that slot. Impressive! Curious how they bootstrapped the initial volume of users to make that possible, although ofc pairwise matching means there's only ever at most one odd person out for a given slot.
I know from my experience with the Less Wrong Study Hall (a coworking room originally on tinychat, now at complice.co/room/lesswrong) that people thought it would take dozens of ppl signing on a few hours a week, but critical mass actually looked more like a few ppl 40+ h/week.
This is great. I just did 3 sessions in a row working on my yearly review blogpost showtime and then I got a simple "pay $5 a month to access unlimited sessions" and I'm like "yeah I want this". I can sometimes focus fine on my own but I love the affordance of "let's cowork rn!"