Ulysse Pence

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FocusMate

Show Notes

April 21st, 2020

FocusMate.com

Music

Transcript

Ulysse: Hey, this is The Growth Podcast with your hosts, Ben and Brendon. This episode we'll be talking about FocusMate, a virtual coworking site that helps you get stuff done while an Internet stranger watches you.

Brendon: So Ben, tell us about FocusMate. What is that?

Ulysse: It's a web application online that you use to get work done and be more accountable when you're getting work done. I know a lot of people feel they don't have the energy to do things or maybe they schedule something to do and then they don't actually follow through on doing it. And one dimension you can tweak to get stuff done for yourself is to make yourself more accountable, is to increase the accountability that you feel.

Ulysse: The way it works is you log onto this website. You select which time slot that you want to use for doing your work and then it will automatically pair you with someone else who wants to work around the same time. When the time comes and you want to get your work done, you log in again and then open up a video channel with this other person. And then basically you watch them as they work and they watch you as you work. And there's some amount of accountability that like, “Oh, you're being watched, you shouldn't be looking at Facebook or going on Reddit.”

Ulysse: I should've mentioned that usually people will put microphones on mute so you don't hear what's going on in their room and they don't care what's going on in your room in case you want to listen music. Or in my case I'm doing a lot of Mandarin vocab review and that's going to be me saying things out loud and I think it'd be very disruptive to them if they could hear me. It lasts for 50 minutes, five zero and at the end of it you just talk about what you got done and that's it.

Brendon: Huh. That's pretty interesting. So how has FocusMate affected your life?

Ulysse: I think at this rate I've done 70, 80 hours, maybe of FocusMate sessions. When I was working from home, I would find it difficult some weeks to get pumped to work on personal projects. There are a lot of things that I want to do in my time off and I didn't necessarily always have the energy do it. And so for me FocusMate was a good way to hook back into that momentum, to get back that momentum of getting stuff done. So that's sort of how I used it last year, in 2019.

Ulysse: And then this year I just use it a ton. Now that I'm working full time, I just use it a ton outside of work to motivate myself to do stuff at night. So after I come home from work and I want to study Mandarin or I want to work on some electronics project or I want to work on some podcast citation project that I'm working on in my spare time, I'll just fire up FocusMate and find someone to be accountable with me while I'm doing the work. It's almost a secret weapon I feel in some ways because it's ridiculous how effective, at least for me, it's been in my life. I don't know. Yeah, it's crazy how effective it's been for me.

Brendon: That's great. So, how do you think FocusMate works for you or why is it so effective?

Ulysse: I think for me, one of the hardest things about getting started on work was, it's just that, it's just like getting started. It's the activation energy that you need to start doing work seems insurmountable compared to the actual amount of work that it takes to just do that task, to sit down for an hour and do something. Once you get started, you don't even notice that you're working. At least that's how I feel about some things. There's certainly some tasks where I'm just like, “Oh, this sucks so much,” and every minute is grueling agony.

Ulysse: But for the most part I don't work on things like that, except for taxes or... I don't know. Figuring out health care for me is grueling agony. So those have been harder times to do. But for the most part it's been once I get started I just feel really productive and that like energy carries on into the next task I do and the next day even sometimes. I feel in a lot of ways it's helped me stay happy.

Ulysse: I think when I'm productive I'm happy and I think FocusMate has done that for me. Yeah. For me it's not important that someone is always watching me. I think the most important thing for me is that the timing is not flexible. It's like there's a time and I have to be there and then I just show up and I do the thing and then I'm done. It's not important to me that I have someone checking to make sure I'm not actually watching YouTube videos about, I don't know, space. I don't know what people watch on YouTube.

Ulysse: I know some people... Do you have that problem? And so there actually is a feature where you can share your desktop or there's some people who are really strict about saying exactly what they're working on and during the session they update, “Okay, now I'm working on this, now I'm working on that.” But for me the most important thing is just get in the chair and start and then after that I just don't even worry too much about it. I don't have any problems.

Brendon: FocusMate is effective for you because it helps you get started on work. Is that because you can schedule a work session in advance and then you'll feel bad if you don't show up to the work session and leave your partner hanging?

Ulysse: Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. So I didn't really mention this, but I usually schedule the work sessions in the morning. So around nine or 10:00 AM I'll be like, “Oh, what do I want to do today? Oh, I want to review this vocab.” Okay. I'll schedule a session for that because I'm not sure if I'll have the energy today.

Ulysse: Some days I'll have a continuing education class for learning how to draw and on those days I'm not always feeling as gung-ho about just jumping into something at the end of the day. So for those it's really effective to schedule in the morning and then it's a pre-commitment thing where I've sort of committed to being there for someone at some time. When the time comes, I would feel the motivation to not let down the person on the other side. And so I think that was really helpful for me.

Brendon: Cool. So FocusMate sessions can be scheduled what, 24/7 and up to one or two weeks in advance?

Ulysse: You can book sessions anytime. Although I think for the most part it's primarily North American users. If you want to get paired with someone, most of the people are on around the awake hours of the North American continent.

Ulysse: So sometime between 9:00 AM Eastern time and 11:00 PM Pacific time you can find someone. Although I have paired with someone in the past I was pretty sure was in Singapore, was just a 12 hour difference-ish, somewhere around there, so...

Brendon: Have you ever experienced difficulty booking a session during North American sleeping hours? During the time people in North America are not awake?

Ulysse: There have been times where no one has showed up to the session because for whatever reason they canceled or I didn't get automatically paired. And for me that's fine. I can imagine some people might have problems with that because they need someone to actually watching them.

Brendon: Right.

Ulysse: But for me it's been totally fine. Actually that reminds me, the first session I did on FocusMate, I actually wasn't really able to focus very much. I think I just wasn't used to the experience of someone watching me. And even though they weren't watching me, they were looking down at their book or something, textbook. I felt my face blush, I was blushing out of... I don't know, it was almost like Chatroulette in some ways where it was just this random person and suddenly they peered into your soul.

Ulysse: Yeah, it was definitely unnerving the first time I did it, but towards the end of the session and I sort of got the hang of it, or I got used to the feeling and then the next session it was totally fine. I'm not sure if that's a common experience for people, but I just thought that was really interesting and also really... Yeah, really interesting.

Brendon: I see. Yeah. I didn't heard several people mention a little bit of hesitance around using FocusMate when they first hear of the concept because perhaps they're not used to the idea of just video chatting with a random stranger. That might feel a little bit uncomfortable to them. So I think that for some listeners, that may be a factor, but it may also not be a factor.

Ulysse: Yeah, I do think about it. I do think about that a lot. Like am I being creepy?

Brendon: Oh, sure. It sounds like the FocusMate community generally follows pretty good practices when it comes to being respectful of other people during sessions and sort of making sure everyone is having a good time.

Ulysse: Right, Yeah. Yeah. No, I've never met anyone who's been rude or disrespectful or... There've been people who have just disappeared from the session and I just go, “Oh, I don't know what happened.” For the most part, yeah, everyone's really, I shouldn't say normal. Everyone's really tame.

Ulysse: And there are a lot of people working on really different stuff. Some people will be working on writing their book and some people will be working on electronics projects and some people like me, I use it to practice drawing or to work on Mandarin vocab. So I don't know, there's a really interesting-

Brendon: That's really cool.

Ulysse: Yeah, there's a really interesting collective of people who are doing it. It's not just like, “Oh, it's all tech people or it's all writers.” It's a really interesting a group. Yeah.

Brendon: Yeah. Once I met a doctor that was working from home, I think this was perhaps a radiologist or something and she was just using FocusMate to get work done and be productive while at home. So I think it is really cool the diversity that is sort of visible in the FocusMate community.

Ulysse: Yeah. That's funny. I think one of the people I paired with the most is this nurse practitioner and she's always just doing her charts at the end of the day.

Brendon: Right. That's funny. Aside from comfort with strangers, do you think there are any other barriers for someone to get started with using FocusMate?

Ulysse: Yeah, definitely. One, I would definitely see as a barrier would be internet bandwidth. Either a low bandwidth or I guess or if you have a very inconsistent connection I can imagine there could be some kind of frustration experienced by the person on the other side if they are just trying to figure out what you're trying to say or whatever.

Ulysse: But I've paired with people who are in computer labs working on homework or something and they just use texts to talk to me, so I guess it's not a blocker, but maybe it wouldn't be as effective for you if you knew the person on the other side of the wire was unable to hear you or see you because of your low connection, I don't know.

Brendon: Right. In fact, I think that FocusMate requires that both parties in the session use the video conferencing feature, although it seems like not everyone does that 100% of the time, perhaps.

Ulysse: Right. Sometimes there are things like, “Oh, I want to clean my room.” And I've seen people do that, but I don't think that would work for me as well. I just don't think people would see me and maybe it'd be kind of weird.

Ulysse: Yeah, there's some tasks that don't lend well to FocusMate, but I'd say for the most part, everything I do or most things I do are on my desk and that's what it's great for.

Brendon: Right. FocusMate does cost $5 a month, but people can book up to three hour long sessions per week for free before they need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Ulysse: Right. If you want to get free sessions, you can enter my referral... No I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. There's a limit on how many sessions you can do for free per week. Yeah.

Brendon: Yeah, definitely.

Ulysse: But I think for me, there's a lot of things in life that I don't pay enough money for but I do feel it's worth way more to me than $5 a month. I think the amount of value I've gotten out of it for like increasing the velocity of the work I get done and then how good I feel about myself after I get shit done is enormous.

Ulysse: It's a huge contributor to the things in my life that are making me happy like getting stuff done and I'm seeing progress in learning skills and yeah, just getting stuff done.

Brendon: Yeah, it's fantastic that you found the tool that works so well for yourself. Is there anything else you want to share about FocusMate or talk about?

Ulysse: It's a pretty cheap thing to try, I guess is what I want to say so, I recommend people to check it out if they're having trouble. I think accountability doesn't work for some people and other people it works really well.

Ulysse: So yeah, I'd say if you don't know if your accountability works for you, I'd say give it a shot or if you know it does work for you, then give it a shot.

Brendon: Yeah, definitely. I mean it's free. You just sign up online and you can book a session at any point in time, either scheduled in the future or starting in a few minutes from the current point in time. So I think that does make it sort of extremely easier to try.

Ulysse: Thanks for listening. To find out more about FocusMate, go to FocusMate.com. Neither Brendon nor I are a part of FocusMate and we did not and will not receive any benefit from reviewing this product.

Ulysse: The beautiful intro music to this episode was created by Oliwia Orłowska. This relaxing melody is by Neighborhood Vandal. Links to both of these songs can be found in the show notes.

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