‘Sitting down with another human being and sharing those goals creates both accountability and urgency.’ Illustration: Carmen Casado/The Guardian Life and style Eleven strangers watched me write this article. Is this the answer to our productivity crisis? When the pandemic hit, I realized the work that would take me a few hours in the office drags on at home. Discovering a site that forced me to be accountable saved me

The first thing I did when I sat down to write this piece was to have a conversation with Ben. Ben is a polite, clean-cut, white American thirtysomething with a five o’clock shadow, and he’s sitting against a plain blue wall. The only thing hanging in his study is a white frame with “less” on it in lower-case serif, which makes me think he’s a graphic designer. But the only thing I really know about Ben is he’s too easily distracted, and so am I.

I have been randomly assigned to work with Ben on a website I use every day called Focusmate, which uses a sense of accountability to help you focus. The homepage kind of looks like a Google calendar: you book in a 50-minute session and the site matches you with someone else who wants to work in that time slot (this is mostly done randomly, although brand new users are matched with more experienced ones). When the time comes, you and your buddy get placed on a video call. You politely and briefly tell each other what you’re planning to use the time to do – and then you get on with it.

When the pandemic hit and many of us started to work from home, I experienced what I like to call the kitchen drift. You sit down to write six emails, but halfway through the first you find that you’re making a cup of coffee, and then, actually, your bedroom is messy so why not just put a few clothes away, but that’s also where your phone is charging, and so why not treat yourself to a YouTube video or five – after all, no one is watching. Oh, look, it’s lunchtime.

This kind of procrastinating didn’t mean I ended up working less, just that work that would take me a few hours in the office was dragging into my evenings and early mornings, eating up my social time. I know I’m not alone in this: after monitoring changes in web activity of their huge user base during the pandemic, NordVPN released a study that showed the average American’s working day was lengthened by three hours once they started working from home.

The site was created by Taylor Jacobson. The brainwave came to him in 2015: a friend had a big presentation coming up but was a terrible procrastinator and was worried he wouldn’t get his preparation done in time. They decided they would stay on a Skype call, telling each other what they were doing and leaving the window open to make sure they were doing it. Both of them felt they were suddenly in a productive, concentrated state of flow they hadn’t previously managed to reach.

I wanted to ask Jacobson about how he got from that idea to setting up a business, but when I put in my interview request he suggested that rather than a phone call we send each other voice notes on WhatsApp. “It can be a nice way to get high fidelity and do some back and forth, sans scheduling.” Who am I to argue with the person who has already improved my productivity threefold? I record my first message for him.

When my session begins, I move my buddy to the corner of the screen and focus on what I need to be doing – constantly aware that we will be swapping notes about our progress at the end. For anyone who slouched their way through school but managed to pull it out of the bag during the final exam, you’ll know the feeling of working with a proctor – everything speeds up as you feel the time pressure.

What people are trying to achieve, and how much they think they can get done in the time, varies greatly. Some are just trying to read academic texts without distractions: “I made it to the end of the article!” is a common, joyous refrain at the end of a session. Not everyone uses it for work – in early morning sessions you get people writing stream-of-consciousness “morning pages”, or even just reading the paper. I’ve had a couple of people use it just for tidying their room.

This might all seem like some deep psychology for an app that basically puts you on a Zoom call with a stranger, but Jacobson is far from the only one who is concerned that our lack of focus is now a central societal problem. There are big concerns that technology has stolen our ability to enter any kind of flow state, and this has been worsened by the disintegration between our personal and work lives. Recent books like Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks (named after the amount of time most of us have on earth), Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing and Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention are part of an ever-growing literature that suggests an inability to use time meaningfully is one of the central problems facing the world today.

Jacobson says that there were almost a million Focusmate sessions last year, and his aim is for the platform to one day reach 100 million users. People often ask me whether there are any weirdos on the site – Chatroulette, a somewhat utopian website that launched in the late 00s and lets you speak with a random person anywhere in the world, quickly descended into little more than a meet-up for masturbators – but I have never been matched with anyone who wasn’t using the service genuinely. Jacobson says the high barriers to entry (you have to create a profile and talk about why you want to join) mean in the site’s history there has only ever been a tiny handful of isolated complaints, all dealt with by his team.

A bigger problem is that it does feel as though its initial power can wane over time. Sometimes, by the fourth session of the day, I take my pledge to my working partner less seriously and end up distracted. In those moments I go full nuclear mode and share my screen with my Focusmate – the site offers this functionality – obliterating my right to privacy and creating an extra layer of accountability. This is incredibly effective – although make sure the Guardian doesn’t find out about this, as I’m sure it violates their privacy policy in 12 different ways.

Source: The Guardian

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