Awesome project! Reminds me of donothingfor2minutes.com from Calm, but with a different end goal of focus instead of calm.
Regarding mobile phones going to sleep, Wake lock [1] might help, unless you can reduce to 59s since I believe 1m is the threshold (make sure to request within the context of the user hitting "start"). Unfortunately on older mobile browsers [2], the best workaround I found was using this NoSleep library[3].
We thought about it but ultimately decided that owning a truck would detract from what we really needed to be doing which was getting truck owners to do the luggs
TL;DR: my co-founder and I hosted hundreds of 1-hour co-working sessions ourselves.
In the early days of what is now Flow Club, my co-founder and I had built several apps to try to help us stay in touch with busy 30+-year-old friends. It was tough to get any friends to even install the apps we made on Testflight, much less use them. They were busy with work or family (and the apps just weren't compelling enough).
We started asking friends to come work together on Zoom (during the pandemic) like we used to do at coffee shops. We wanted to add some structure to these, so we made them 1-hour co-working sprints with a screen-shared pomodoro clock and agenda (5 minutes to share goals, 50 minutes of working, 5 minutes to check in), sent out the Zoom links to friends, and then started pre-committing to times at the beginning of each week and sending that out to an email list. Within a month, we had hosted a couple hundred of these sessions between the two of us and couldn't keep up with the demand or requests for more times of day as it spread to friends of friends. When an early user who we didn't know IRL and then my partner each separately asked if they could also host sessions, we were blown away. We didn't think anyone else would want to volunteer to host. Then when we realized both of them were actually better "hosts" than we were, a lightbulb came on for us that we could stop doing the unscalable thing we had been doing and build for hosts.
>Working solo has its difficulties. For one, my income is somewhat tied to my productivity, and my productivity highly correlates to my state of mind.
Since going back to being primarily a maker after organizing my days around being a manager[1], and being an avid runner, I've redefined my relationship with "motivation" in a way that can be summed up succinctly by author Brad Stulberg: "You don't need to feel good to get going. You need to get going to feel good." I know that I am long-term very motivated, but day to day or hour to hour, "motivation" is a tricky word, because my energy and creativity waxes/wanes.
Agree with the author that structure is the most important thing for me to work around this. Even though makers dream of an open schedule, on the days where I'm off my usual routine, it's really tough to prioritize all the many things always on my plate. It's even tougher trying to decide to peel myself away from work to go for a run that I know will help me focus better after. Making the decision can be emotionally and mentally taxing, whereas if I rely on the default that I just go out for a run as soon as I wake up, the rest of the day just flows from that without the decision fatigue. Time-blocking or even just very simple structure like the OP has has been really effective for me. This includes a hard stop time each day even if it feels like I'm on a roll— my younger self would often borrow against my future energy, and that seemed to rarely work out in the medium-to-long term.
> This is combined with a lack of co-workers. Comrades in the trenches, if you will. And finally there's the ability to not do anything, which can be quite nebulous and dangerous if not managed.
For anyone who is a solo-creator struggling with this, "body-doubling" is a term from the ADHD/neurodivergent community that simply means "doing a task in the presence of another person". Surprisingly, they don't have to be working on the same task to help you feel like you have "comrades in the trenches". If you're interested, check out Flow Club in my bio.
You don’t think yourself in another emotional state, you act yourself into one (act as in you do stuff not act as in acting like an actor).
This is what I found combatting my social anxiety by approaching people on the street. Even after a decade of doing it, I am still as socially anxious as ever but simply giving some genuine compliments to a few fellow pedestrians loosens me up after half an hour (in Europe).
Good advice. Re: body doubling, I think I would benefit a lot from that, but I hate having a webcam turned on all day with strangers. Or even a microphone. I feel these body doubling apps focus too much on neurodivergent extroverts, and it's a damn shame.
Honestly, if I need strangers around, I'd rather work in a coffee shop, but ideally I just want something no more intrusive than an IRC chat to shoot the shit while the code is compiling.
Still crossing my fingers for body doubling that less intrusive.
Body doubling isn't only for neurodivergent extroverts. I'm an example of a neurodivergent introvert who needs body doubling to do more than 2-3 hours of work per day. I understand what you mean, though.
The problem with working from a coffee shop is that your strength and motivation to go there must come from you. You must get up, leave your apartment, go to the coffee shop, and decide to work there. For chronic procrastinators, it's rather tricky. A person like that needs enough motivation to do it but not enough to work alone.
Shameless plug - you can try us (https://workmode.net/). However silly it sounds, we provide body doubling as a service. Try the demo session - no registration is required, and it lasts from 15 minutes to several hours.
Some features that might convince you to finally give body doubling a shot:
- you connect with our employee (aka productivity partner), not a random stranger,
- you always connect with the same productivity partner,
- all sessions are 1-on-1. It's just you and your productivity partner,
- you don't have to enable your camera. We don't rely on you being our body double. We're happy as long as text chat/audio/screen sharing/webcam feed makes you productive,
- you can share your screen at a greatly reduced resolution. It's enough for us to distinguish between you watching Youtube/reading Hacker News and spending time in IDE/Excel/other work-related apps. We're unable to read any text on your screen, even at 32px font size,
- every day, we make sure that you connect with us. We make sure you tell us when you want to start the next day, and in case you don't show up, we'll call you and keep calling you.
Hmmm, what if you had a simple concept of pushing a button that's asking the other person, "hey, you still going?"
(I'm kind of reminded of video games where there are some "canned lines" that you can click on in the middle of the action and your character will "say" them to the opponent.)
Still going!
Still going?
10 mins more and let's break!
I think I'm done
Thanks for playing
Ok
Hmmm
Never!
Eh, not sure I want body doubling to peer pressure productivity.. mostly should be a way of very low key socialising and venting about code not compiling.
Oh interesting! I have a smart watch (albeit a Garmin instead of an Apple Watch) and purposely choose not to send notifications there because I'd look at it all the time. Do you find yourself glancing down at your watch even when you aren't getting notifications? Or do you have pretty tuned notification settings such that if you do receive one, it's likely important?
I've started leaving my phone in a different room, using it as a continuity camera, or literally tossing it on my chair or bed before sitting down to work, but inevitably I'll need it for 2FA via Google Authenticator— maybe it's time to move 2FA to another device, and once it's on my desk, it often gets picked up out of habit.
According to a 2022 survey [1], the average US adult picks up their phone 352 times per day, or approximately once every 2m43s while they're awake. Inspired by Calm's DoNothingFor2Minutes.com which launched on HN 13 years ago [2], I made this simple webapp to see if my friends and I could go an hour without touching our phones. It is surprisingly difficult. If you're reading HN on your phone, definitely give it a shot.
On browsers that support it (iOS 16.4+, most versions of Android Chrome), it uses the Screen Wake Lock API [3] to keep the page open, and falls back to nosleep.js [4] otherwise. From testing on my iPhone 14 Pro Max running iOS 16.6, battery life only went down 3 or 4 percentage points after an hour with the wake lock.
Made this as a web app as a quick demo to be compatible across all mobile devices. As an app, we can probably save more on battery + not have the screen on. One caveat is that on iOS this will actually increase your Screen Time (although hopefully reduce your other category usage). I currently only track time on page through Google Analytics 4. No other calls are made to a server, although if we actually wanted to verify that you kept the page open vs. javascript/inspector-system clock-fu, we could add a verified mode that pings the server every X minutes. As a PWA, possibly due to an iOS/Mobile Safari quirk, neither wake lock nor nosleep.js appear to work .
OP's co-founder here. The stack is React, Node, and Daily.co (YC W16) for WebRTC video, and was scoped to take ~20 hours including setting up the environment and discussing goals. Happy to answer any questions.
I believe we originally got the idea for a paid workweek trial from David Rusenko of Weebly. I know it doesn't always work logistically, but when it does, we believe it gives a much better signal for both the company and candidate in terms of what it'd be like to work together. Plus, it's fun to actually launch it if it's useful to people!
I'm an avid runner and take recovery seriously, but was always skeptical of the price tag of compression therapy like the Normatec Legs recovery boots and similar products. Finally pulled the trigger last year during a sale ($700), and wow, I can't believe I didn't buy these much, much sooner. I use them multiple times a week. They're surprisingly super relaxing to wear while working or watching something, and definitely feel like they help with sleep and recovery.
So sorry re: the PF. It sucks. IANAD/IANAPT (physical therapist), but based on my own experience with PF a few years ago and experiences of friends, it's usually a combination of:
1. Rest from running
2. Doing a lot of stretching/strengthening exercises
3. Potentially using orthotics like u/bilsbie suggested. Would make sure to go in an d get a custom fitted one, and it may be tough to wean off off
For #2, the exercises that seemed to help me the most were the various towel stretches, rolling with a lacrosse ball, and doing a lot of calf raises. I even briefly went to a few barre classes on a friends' recommendation, which was kind of fun (and very humbling), but probably helped because we did tons of calf raises with what I thought were tiny weights, but was super challenging.
I had chronic achilles tendonitis and ended up getting shockwave therapy from my orthopedist, who mentioned it's also frequently used for plantar fasciitis if PT does not help
Would you recommend a casual runner (more jogger, really) take the plunge to invest in something like this? I never get seriously injured anymore, since I just take it easy nowadays, but I do get the typical aches and pains. Although, those are usually easy enough to ignore.
Congrats on the launch Rahul, Cody, and Reshma! A headless EHR sounds so cool! Why did y'all decide to describe it as Firebase, and has that description resonated well with potential users/customers?
That's a great question. Healthcare tech is a big and diverse space, and we are still honing a product description that speaks to all audiences.
Among technical decision makers (Software Engineers, Architects, etc), the Firebase analogy clicks much faster. Among traditional healthcare administrators, "EHR" or "API first EHR" or "Headless EHR" resonate more.
Headless EMR resonates best with me because of the parallel to other cms solutions like contentful. I’d spend time making sure you validate your point of view on the persona of the technical decision makers. The EMR decision for an early stage healthtech company is 10x more important than your initial cloud provider.
Regarding mobile phones going to sleep, Wake lock [1] might help, unless you can reduce to 59s since I believe 1m is the threshold (make sure to request within the context of the user hitting "start"). Unfortunately on older mobile browsers [2], the best workaround I found was using this NoSleep library[3].
Source: ran into this same issue when building https://www.phonefreehour.com
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WakeLock
[2] https://caniuse.com/wake-lock
[3] https://github.com/richtr/NoSleep.js