The Service That Makes Shame a Productivity Hack

A figure working hard at the desk while a smiling screen watches over.
Part social network and part virtual co-working space, the new service Focusmate suggests that accountability is the most powerful motivator to get work done.Illustration by Julian Glander

These days, the seven deadly sins are not all so sinful. Pride, greed, and envy can be framed as by-products of ambition, our most prized virtue. Wrath, when channelled properly, can be understood as righteous outrage. Lust? A highfalutin term for the pursuit of pleasure. Even gluttony can be spun as anodyne, a form of self-care. It is only sloth that seems unconscionable. Sloth is sudden, aimless; it can strike anyone at any moment. Once contracted, it is hard to cure. Worst of all, we’re told, it threatens the very bedrock of our society: productivity.

The disdain for sloth has become so powerful that there exists a cottage industry, increasingly robust, of products and techniques designed to attack it. Everyone has his or her preferred strategies, most of which involve trying to create the dullest possible environment in order to avoid being sucked into a vortex of distraction. There are browser extensions that block certain Web sites for a period of time. There are self-help books that cull tips from successful entrepreneurs. Each of us has become a walking advice column, eager to relay directions to the shrine of productivity. Wake up at 4 a.m. Work in twenty-five-minute chunks. Set short-term goals. Set long-term goals. Place your phone in a padlocked safe.

Many of these techniques involve isolation. The logic, generally, is that removing distractions—especially other humans, virtual or not—allows people to do their best work. The problem with isolation is that it heightens the anxiety that flows from procrastination. This is the puzzle that Focusmate, a new service developed by a former corporate worker named Taylor Jacobson, hopes to solve. Jacobson spent freelance years fine-tuning a suite of productivity strategies, but the premise of Focusmate, which is geared toward a list of professional types that include side-hustlers, entrepreneurs, and distracted office workers, is simple: you sign up for the service and schedule chunks of time that you’d like to dedicate to work. Focusmate matches you with someone trying to get work done during the same chunk of time, and then it schedules a video conference between both parties. The rules are strict: you must arrive promptly to your session, keep your camera on for the full duration, stick to business (no real socializing is permitted), and be kind and respectful. At the beginning of each session, each party announces his or her goal and gets to work.

There are two forces at play here. One is the idea that misery loves company—that a sense of solidarity with another human being makes work more enjoyable. The other is our sense of obligation to other people. Part social network and part co-working space, Focusmate suggests that accountability is the most powerful motivator. It is easy enough to cancel a work date with yourself; it’s another thing to cancel with a stranger. And, though the service is meant to reduce the anxiety of procrastination, it also creates its own form of shame. Not showing up to an appointment compounds the sin: you’ve reneged not only on your work but on your contract with another person. Shame becomes its own kind of productivity hack. Recently, a friend of mine was only able to start a major project once she entered into a pact with another friend, who swore to upload incriminating photos of her to Instagram if progress wasn’t made. So far, the threat of humiliation is working like a charm.

Although Focusmate sounds creepy—like entering an AOL chat room or live-streaming a feed of your dingy living room—it is, in my experience, a mundane encounter. In sessions, there’s been no awkward small talk, only a brief and direct explanation of goals which lasts no longer than thirty seconds. Neither party watches the camera; the mere presence of another person is enough to insure that I stay on task. It’s a bit like going to the library with a classmate who isn’t friendly enough to present distraction. More importantly, the desire to do work is urgent enough that voyeurism becomes secondary. In one session, I worked alongside a young woman who was doing data analytics. I remember that she was drinking coffee and lived on the West Coast, but I cannot recall the details of her kitchen or what her voice sounded like. I was too busy tackling the onslaught of e-mails in my in-box.

Productivity hacks should be met with a healthy amount of skepticism. There are plenty of arguments that obsessing over productivity is just another surrender to our vampiric employers, who mean to wrench us from our passions and joys. Maximizing productivity often means minimizing leisure—a growing concern in conversations about work-life balance, a concept that most workplaces are now forced to pay lip service to by encouraging employees to take vacation time or leave the office at a reasonable hour. (The implication is that you should relax for precisely the amount of time that it takes you to feel energized for more work.) It’s no wonder we romanticize a more European life style, in which extra-long lunch breaks and forty-hour workweek caps are the norm.

But there is productivity for productivity’s sake, and then there is focus. Productivity can feel like a trap. Focus is liberation—the ability to accomplish a task efficiently and free up time for more joyful pursuits. This is the driving theory in the work of Cal Newport, a computer scientist and viral TEDx speaker who promotes the idea of “deep work”—hyper-focussed stretches of work that insure the protection of one’s free time. “Only the confidence that you’re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow,” Newport writes. But he also believes that focus is about more than work. At one point in his book, Newport, discussing the research of the behavioral-science writer Winifred Gallagher, writes that “what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore” helps to define “the quality of our life.”

Focusmate is not a solution to the problem of meaningless productivity; its literature, for example, still relies on plenty of tired tropes about work. (It calls its demographic a “Community of Doers.”) But it does harness the key distinction between productivity and focus. Toward the end of one particularly humming session, I realized that I had finished my work in forty minutes, rather than the designated forty-five. Still a novice user, I logged out of the video chat before alerting my partner. I felt pride, and then a twinge of guilt.