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Would You Pay Someone $40 To Keep You Focused on Work? (wired.com) 50

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Lacking any of the necessary willpower to go back to my work, I spiraled further into a procrastination hole and clicked on the link. "Working on something hard? Distracted? Overwhelmed? Imagine a place where you know you'll get your work done," the landing page read. I didn't believe such a place really existed, outside of maybe a plane at 35,000 feet before the advent of inflight Wi-Fi. But I was feeling preoccupied and stressed, and I wanted this mythical destination to be real, so I signed up for one of the company's sessions last month. That's how I found myself inside a drab office building in downtown San Francisco, feeling more like I was on my way to a dentist appointment than to experience the latest productivity solution to come out of Silicon Valley. Focused has a deceptively simple premise: What if you could pay someone to help you accomplish undistracted work for a couple of hours?

For $40 a pop, cofounders Nodira Khoussainova, 32, and Lee Granas, 40, put on a study hall of sorts, perfect for a certain breed of multitasking, multi-side-hustle, 21st-century adult. (They do also offer financial aid.) The company has two newly opened offices, one in San Francisco and one in nearby Oakland, where clients show up with laptops and one or more daunting tasks they hope to cross off their to-do lists. The startup feels, in some ways, like a natural outgrowth of a culture that's obsessed with optimization and an economy in which more people work remotely than ever. It caters to the same type of person that productivity apps, books, and gurus do, but it also provides access to what's essentially a coworking space. Yet unlike other products and services that promise to help you get more things done, Focused doesn't treat procrastination like a personal moral failing. Its founders believe that people probably can't do everything they want to alone -- they need a real, live human supporting them, even if it's someone they pay.
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Would You Pay Someone $40 To Keep You Focused on Work? More

Would You Pay Someone $40 To Keep You Focused on Work?

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  • no (Score:1)

    by pyrrho ( 167252 )

    that's ridiculous

    • Not ridiculous.

      This is most of the benefit of pair programming.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bobby ( 109046 )

        Yeah, I've done it. We got things done, but we also bogged each other down at times.

        In hindsight, I think a hybrid would have worked best. It was a long project- maybe 2 months. We should have figured out what we each were best at, what parts we would have been good at doing alone, how to communicate, how often, when to work directly together, etc. You know, management's job. And we sort of did that, but it was all by chance. The project should have been organized with milestones or something, not jus

      • ... will get a lot more done if they use two keyboards, two computers, and a design they understand.

        I believe you, however, that that's the benefit of a detrimental practice... it might keep the pair from searching the web all day and making comments on... oh shit I got to get back to work.

        • > it might keep the pair from searching the web all day and making comments on... oh shit I got to get back to work.

          Funny that some of us are spending our workday posting on Slashdot that anybody who gets distracted at work is immature or whatever, huh. :)

          I know some of my strengths and weaknesses. The tests say I'd super ADHD, and my experience is consistent with that. I can also be highly productive at time, I'm "smart". So it was more effective for me to hire someone whose job included a) showing

          • one, I of course knew what I was doing ending with ... oh shit gotta get back to work... iow, I'm not taking my opinion thaaat seriously, everyone works differently. Certain people might be better peer programming, for example.

            However, what you talked about is different, having someone that keeps track of tasks and things... that's just admin work, it's project owner or scrum master or a million other job titles... iow, having people help.

            But I agree with you.

          • It seems to be a more realistic outlook on things. In my head, there is always an ideal plan for how everything should happen. However, I do not always have the time and energy to do this. When I lived for some time in Singapore I needed to do my job (freelance) and draw up financial reports without errors. I just couldn't do both, so I didn't meditate but simply hired accounting services [osome.com]. Any task has a simple solution, and people learned to delegate authority long before the advent of computers.
      • When you have to drag along the other pair side because of their basic understanding of extremely complex systems, it can seem more daunting and tiring than productive.

    • Wait tho. "Would You Pay Someone $40 To Keep You Focused on Work?"

      One time fee? Oh hell yeah. That's the question, right? Or are the editors hopped up on goofballs again?

  • I'd be more focused if that jerk wasn't here bugging me

  • ..sounds distracting, then this isn't for you.
  • The people who need their services most, the ones who would pay through their noses premium amounts for their service are also the ones most likely to post pone signing up for their services.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )
      I agree that it's fundamentally flawed, but I would suggest differently that the ones who need their services the most are people who don't value their work enough in the first place to remain mentally engaged in it on their own, and therefore are not likely to want to pay someone else to help keep them focused on it.

      • Re:Fundamentally flawed business plan (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday December 02, 2019 @12:12PM (#59477130) Homepage

        I agree that it's fundamentally flawed, but I would suggest differently that the ones who need their services the most are people who don't value their work enough in the first place to remain mentally engaged in it on their own, and therefore are not likely to want to pay someone else to help keep them focused on it.

        If all your work is mentally engaging I'd say lucky you, even though I don't generally hate my job there's definitively times where I'm basically whipping myself to focus and get shit done. Of course I value the paycheck and all that way down the line but in the moment it's easy to let your mind wander off. Particularly if you're pouring through logs trying to figure out where and why something went wrong rather than creating any grand masterpieces. This is also where a two minute mental break or talking to a coworker to see if they have any ideas can be good.

        My guess is this is for the people who don't have the discipline to come back, rather than two minutes it was an hour watching cat videos and the talk turned into a water cooler chitchat instead or maybe your brain has a touch of attention deficiency disorder and you just zone out rather than focus. It won't stop the procrastinators that don't even get started but there's plenty who get started with a lot of ambition and then it just fizzles away. Maybe these people need someone to keep them on track, but I think it's more the commitment they get from going than the actual service.

        • From experience, when you love doing something it's not really work. There are always trade offs (money, time) but in general, people are far more productive when doing something they really want to do.

  • In XP (Extreme Programming) [wikipedia.org], it's Developer Practice #2 : "Practice paired programming [extremeprogramming.org]". (Another description from O'Reilly guide [google.com]).

  • For that money I'd hire a couple of 'massage therapists' to make me happy.

  • Seriously? I should start up a competitor. "Put your phone down and get back to work!"

  • Well gee, if I did... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zarmanto ( 884704 ) on Monday December 02, 2019 @11:48AM (#59477036) Journal
    If I were to pay someone to keep me focused on work, I wouldn't very well be reading /. right now, would I?

  • I can look productive all day. Generate a lot of output. But at the end of the day, my contributions are minimal. Other days it can seem like I am not working send the day to write a dozen lines of code, only to accomplish a task that took other teams of developers hundreds of hours of work to create a failure.

    I am a human who is doing a job. I do things the human way, which isn't just punching out repetitive tasks, but being creative and create something new and meets what is needed. During all this t

  • I do not need to pay (Score:3)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Monday December 02, 2019 @11:53AM (#59477068)
    a stranger $40.00! I am married.

    Just my 2 cents ;) and yes happily married I know the rules ;)

  • What's my motivation? (Score:3)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Monday December 02, 2019 @12:27PM (#59477186)

    Do I get paid more for working hard or diligently? Is there a fixed amount of work each day and after that I get to go home? What is my motivation for being focused on work?

  • Just find a new job already! If you have a procrastination problem you clearly don't enjoy the work you're doing.

  • So Millennials have to pay someone now to keep them focused on their work? So when is a stereotype no longer a stereotype, but the truth?

  • Somehow managed to come up with something more hair-brained than WeWork.

  • People pay for personal trainers, coaching, all sorts of things. Why not this?

    If it were really as easy as "just do it yourself" then everyone would, er, just do it themselves.

  • I'd pay him a quarter of what he made for me, and hire three others with the rest, and so on. Whenever somebody would go "Hey! That's not OK!", I'd go "Muh profits! or "Capitalism. Deal with it".

    Legal crime is best crime.(TM) /s

  • I might pay someone $10 to find me work. But I can't handle anything over ten pounds, customers, being part of a team, standing, sitting, or the slightest responsibility.

  • ...perfect for a certain breed of multitasking, multi-side-hustle, 21st-century adult.

    Those aren't adults. Those are post-college kids still behaving like college kids, people who got completely useless degrees in Studies who are desperately trying to pretend they have Important Work to do while they fumble their way through yet another semi-literate Medium post no one will read.

    I almost don't blame them. When their schooling forced them to "collaborate" with their "peers" on every-fucking-thing since age 6, it's no wonder they're unable to take a piss unassisted.

    Unlike other people posti

  • Work or get fired.

    Seriously, put the goddamned phone down, set a 2-4 hour schedule for checking email, stick your noise cancelling headphones on and get er dun.
  • I am already focused on my job because I love doing it.
  • I bill almost $200/hr so having someone keep me focused and just get me started in the morning is worth it. My biggest issue was finding someone reliable enough. I need someone who will show up at 8:30am. Knowing they will be here is often enough to ensure I get a good night sleep, eat breakfast, stretch and am alert to start. Once I start work I'm usually amazing and I need her to tell me to eat lunch and to stop working at the end of the day.

    she isn't here today - it is 12:30 my time and I've accomp

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