I wish I had had the guts to do it. Earlier this year I handed in my Bachelor thesis and got it back with the top grade. What a success for a procrastinator like me! Alas, in my acknowledgements I left out some of the most important contributors to my success: My virtual coworkers at Focusmate.

Focusmate works like this: You book time slots of 50 or 25 minutes in a virtual calendar to get things done. Then you get connected to somebody in a video call. You say hi, tell each other what your goals for the upcoming sessions are and then start working alongside each other, in silence. At the end of each session both report on how the session went, you may or may not do some small talk and then you say your goodbyes: “Thank you for working with me.”

A sense of accountability

This is simple but incredibly effective. Even though there are no interactions during most part of the session, just working alongside somebody does wonders for your focus. Plus, having to announce your goals to another human creates a sense of accountability, and drastically decreases the likelihood of procrastination, distraction and scattered attention.

The service is most suited if you work remotely or on your own – for example if you’re a student writing your Thesis. Like many, I signed up because I had a concrete project that I desperately needed to make progress on and I absolutely didn’t trust myself to work on it diligently enough. I started booking sessions here and there, and it worked so well that soon I was filling up whole days with Focusmate hours.

This worked great for my productivity, but it also had nice unexpected side effects. Days hunkered down to work on my thesis would traditionally be very lonely and lacking in human interaction. With Focusmate you’re kind of always with people, but not in a socially draining way.

I had many many brief, nice, encouraging interactions with people from all over the world and caught a glimpse into their (working) lives, what they were doing, what their goals were. It’s so inspiring to see people working hard for their goals – in me, it created a sense of responsibility to take my own goals seriously as well. And then there is the camaraderie in the struggle against procrastination: we’re in this together, and we shall overcome it together.

Let me introduce you to some of my Focusmates

Some people you just encounter once, some you work with once in a while. With some, the interactions are very brief, with some you have little chats, especially if you notice you have things in common. And some you start getting familiar with and update each other on the progress of your projects. As of now, I have had close to 400 sessions with more than 200 different people – let me introduce me to some of my Focusmates¹Names have been changed to protect peoples anonymity.

There’s Ali from the Emirates, a medicine student studying flashcards, walking back and forth to keep moving and using a tiny Bluetooth game controller to enter his answers. We noticed that we have the same standing desk,

Or Roald, the stage performer from London who was practicing his one-man show, a biographically informed Shakespearean tragicomedy about four people in prison in the eighties.

Or Ivan, who recommends the book The Mind Illuminated about meditation (which turns out to become very influential on me), about 10 stages of enlightenment. The late stages are about losing your ego, “which is something people who meditate sometimes like – but I don’t want that, so I recommend stopping at chapter 5 or 6.”

Or William, the father who booked a 5 o clock session, before his kids wake up, to do typing speed exercises for 50 minutes.

I also had some regular coworkers like Kyra, who used her very early morning to practice pronunciation. Ben, an effective altruist who shared many tips and apps with me and usually showed up just in time for morning sessions, hair still dripping from the shower. Kiona, who managed to finish the epic Wheel of Time series which I was never able to, we recommend books to each other. Or Ivana, an art therapist who shares an interest in psychology with me.

So, let me fix my mistake and make this an official addendum to the acknowledgements of my thesis: I want to thank all my Focusmates for all these hours of productive co-working, words of encouragement and company in a stressful time.