The Coworking Pact
One of the benefits of coworking is that it helps reduce procrastination. But I know from very real experience you can procrastinate just as much in a coworking environment as you can while at home by yourself. I also know from very real experience it’s really hard to procrastinate while pair programming. It takes a lot of effort and planning to pair procrastinate.
So of course pair programming only works for programming and only works if two people have the same programming goal. How can we generalize this? Let’s start by sitting as closely as possible to someone else, so that you are able to see their screen without turning your head much. This would probably help a little because you know the other person can easily verify whether you’re procrastinating or not. But I want to take things even further.
The Coworking Pact
- What should you be working on today and what does this generally consist of?
- What are activities you should be doing NONE of? (IM, reading hacker news, youtube, etc)
- What are activities you might need to do but should be minimized? (Email, things like that, maybe provide set times for when you will be doing them)
Both coworkers should go through this list at the beginning of the day and make an agreement that they will hold eachother to what they answered. They should then shake on it so that the agreement holds more cognitive weight. Now throughout the day if one coworker catches the other doing something they shouldn’t be doing they should kindly remind them about the agreement.
So that’s it, just my little attempt at a solution for procrastination. An additional thought is you might be able to achieve the same thing with two remote people using VNC or something similar (maybe even using an extra monitor just for their screen).
What do you think? Any thoughts on additions to the pact?
What if what you were working on was public. Like Twitter, but automated. Maybe it just sends the focused window at specified (or randomized) intervals
That could then be graphed, etc. With Safari 4 there are web applications which are separate applications. So “Gmail” could be different than Safari.
It would be like “productivity sharing” and there wouldn’t be any one looking at your screen (proprietary code, etc).
I think it would be really easy to do. I might go do it now.
Jackson
February 8, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Yea that’s a cool idea, I like it.
untitledz
February 8, 2009 at 8:39 pm
[...] The Coworking Pact One of the benefits of coworking is that it helps reduce procrastination. But I know from very real experience you [...] [...]
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February 10, 2009 at 12:05 am
I’ve been mulling over a reply to this for a while, because I thought the post really captured an importance aspect of coworking, which is often missed in practice. Then I came across the following from Brad Neuberg in a recent e-mail exchange with one of my coauthors of I’m Outta Here, that said it for me:
“I had an idea where I wanted the participants of coworking to be able to support each other with goal setting, which is hard and important when you work for yourself. For example, you could ask another participant to help support you to finish writing some chapter of your book, get a report out by the end of the week, etc. Then that person would checkin with you at regular intervals to see if you had achieved your goal.” (Brad Neuberg)
Best of luck! If you put this into practice, I’d love to hear how it turns out!
-Todd
Todd Sundsted
February 12, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Thanks for the snippet from Brad. It’s good to know he’s thinking along the same lines.
I probably won’t be putting this into practice anytime soon because of course I’m just an armchairer
But… who knows maybe I will.
Also, I really appreciate you actually reading and thinking about my post!
untitledz
February 12, 2009 at 5:20 pm
[...] a comment » Ok. So pair programming was the inspiration for The Coworking Pact. Having pair programmed in the past and realizing how much it really kills procrasination I was [...]
Don’t cowork, pair program! « untitled z
February 12, 2009 at 6:04 pm