For me, the big advantage of working from home is that I can do my thing without fear of distraction. I check my mail and Slack in the morning, then close them both and know that nothing can sidetrack me the rest of the day.

This seems like the opposite of that. It seems to want to point a camera at me all day long and interrupt for 10 minutes of standup meetings (with strangers) every hour. I can't get my head around why that'd be something you'd want.

I guess maybe if you weren't the self-motivated type (and kinda got thrown into remote work against your will, and are thus struggling), maybe this would help. But if you thrive in a remote environment and have a bunch of things to do, I can't imagine it would do anything but slow you down.

Congrats on the launch! I have perhaps an unconventional feature request for this: broadcast which apps/domains my window was focused on.

To me, I feel so little additional accountability just because there's a backgrounded meeting. I scroll Twitter in large meetings already.

But if there's other people who would see a report that I was on Twitter/HN/Reddit for 10 mins of the flow session, I would not let myself do that.

> It’s harder to slack off / goof around when there is structure, community norms, and a clear leader.

People had this in an office, but I bet your monitor screen being visible to everyone around you in the office is more of a forcing function to not goof off than all of those other things combined.

The data broadcasted that I have in mind is something like what RescueTime might collect (https://twitter.com/jarredsumner/status/1426962249332125701/...). Obviously difficult to navigate privacy issues around a feature like that, but I don't think impossible (e.g. I'd trust a collector agent if it were open source).

Anyway, that's just me personally. Good luck!

David from Flow Club here— I'll be hosting a few Hacker News-only sessions today and tomorrow. I remember attending a HN meetup in Palo Alto back when I was an undergrad back in 2009 and it was super cool to hear what people were working on—not just the high-level pitch, but literally what they were debugging that day. That's been my favorite part of Flow Club as well.

I've been a big fan of pomodoro and time-blocking, but for a long time was convinced that it didn't work well for coding until I experimented a bit. Wrote up some of my thoughts here: https://www.flow.club/blog/makers-schedule-2021 Would love to hear if any of y'all try to time block for writing code and will be around to answer any questions!

> Either you can’t get any work done from the constant Slack pings, excessive emails and agenda-less Zoom meetings, or...

So the premise upon which your business is based is that many organizations have a bad remote work culture. To be fair, many (most) do. But I'm curious what you envision as more organizations learn how to properly work in a remote environment? Because this feels like it is adding meetings around my work, not even with my co-workers, and with a time limit on when I need to stop flow. It all feels quite odd to be honest.

But the problem you are trying to solve is real. It seems like it would be effective to push this more towards a coaching service for organizations struggling to define their remote culture vs. ongoing flow meetings.

My gut reaction to this is hell no. I absolutely do not want a camera on me while I'm trying to concentrate and get work done. I also don't do well in open offices with my back to the room.

Maybe I'm just old but I need some privacy to be really focused, creative, and productive. Feeling like I'm being watched just kills my focus.

What I find so interesting about this is that it's NOT your co-workers. Which is actually really intriguing. I wouldn't be able to participate in this right now due to my living situation, but I love the idea.

One problem with trying to get co-workers to do this is that it's probably hard to find people that would want to. So instead open it up to a global pool of people and you're much more likely to easily find 9 that want to sit and work.

Long time ago I rented a co-working space for $99 / month and working amongst strangers is oddly powerfully motivating.

I really love this idea. I see a lot of similarities to fitness with the idea of organizing regiments to sprints/pomodoro for generating flow. It seems like the current iteration is a conservative and accessible akin to a Planet Fitness approach, light on the pressure and celebratory of wins. I would be very interested in a Peloton approach that is focused on keeping the pace high and pushing me further. In my world, I need less discipline for vision work and more for tedious activities.

I actually like the idea. One small thing, I wish you added pricing on your homepage.

And one of the reasons I am not 100% excited about it, is I can kinda see it being helpful, but I think there is no real accountability (I can imagine pathological procrastinator might lie that their session went well, when in reality they browsed FB).

Any ideas how to fix it? I guess showing proof of work might be too intrusive for some, but maybe 10% of flow session could be in accountability mode (so the user selects accountability/no accountability)? Then I guess faking real work might make people decide fuck it it's too much work, I am going to do a real thing and make them really productive.

Just saw the intro video on youtube; this reminds me a lot of the weekly video sessions during startup school;

One question: how do you optimize for quality time during the 5min intro to set the enter-the-flow mood/vibe? do you mute a person’s mic after 1 min (eg to prevent some people from accidentally becoming mildly annoying for talking too long?)

[edit: elaboration]

I like it! may be add an option for users to group themselves by the type of work, i.e. coders with coders, writers with writers, let them optionally choose the kind of co-workers they want (or default to a random mix of strangers in "cofeeshop" mode)

and also let users work together on shared tasks, such as leetcode prep, school homework, startup or open-source project, or anything which requires collaboration.

Also you could provide "virtual PM" as a service to tech companies to manage their sprints.

I use Focusmate and it works great, but I don't love that there is no community and I feel that people on the platform basically just "use" each other as productivity implements. I'd love to try this to feel out how the community aspect would work.

Don't mean to pick on this product specifically (it does look polished), but in general, does anyone else think this whole idea of opening a video camera and microphone (even if muted) for long sessions while people work on different things is kind of dystopian and sad? It makes sense when you're looking and working on the same thing, maybe even if it's like a shared desktop where each is working on a separate part of the same document for example, but each working on their own unrelated thing and still get on this? I know remote work is becoming more and more of a thing now, but it's usually the whole idea is to be: 1) async, 2) less distracted, and not revert back to another version of "office". I get pretty creepy vibes from this idea. Maybe I'm out of touch and/or old, but I can't ever see myself wanting to "virtually hang out" with coworkers or strangers with an always-on camera, verges on creepy imo. I can only imagine something like this with some family members.

Discovered this while procrastinating here on HN. Too ironic not to sign up!

I've been a user of Flow Club for a while now and I highly recommend it even though that's probably not in my personal interest. I often find that I am >2x as productive during these hours, which I find remarkable, and sometimes it gets me to crank out something I would have otherwise procrastinated. I find it great as well for adding structure to my unstructured work schedule (I work for myself). The combination of forced intention setting with light external accountability is really powerful.

I've done 4 Flow Club sessions and have really enjoyed it.

I get the folks saying they'd be distracted and I thought the camera would throw me off (and you can turn it off if you want), but I got used to it right away and have been pretty productive during my sessions.

I'm working solo from home, so having others there has been energizing.

The people in my sessions seem to most commonly use Flow Club to get through work that they don't want to do or something they've been putting off.

Hmm, I guess I don't really get the concept. I still don't know how this stops constant interruption from emails, Zooms, and messaging pings.

If the block on my calendar for this is supposed to help stop people contacting me -- well, it doesn't stop them now.

I'm glad this seems to work for some people though.

I just finished a session for the first time and enjoyed it. I will definitely try this out again in the future

This looks like a dystopian future wrapped in slick packaging.

As I understand it, this service involves voluntarily putting myself in front of a security camera, and then being forced to interact with people irrelevant to my task on a regular basis.

How exactly is this "designed to get me into flow quickly" ?

Been to a few Flow Club sessions so far and liked it enough to subscribe. The social motivation is real and I dig the attitude Ricky et al are bringing to this.

Would definitely recommend this to anyone that finds themselves pushing certain to-dos forward from one day to the next.

Wow. As irony would have it, during a procrastinatory fit today, I wandered onto HN for the first time in weeks. Saw this, and it seems like it's exactly what I've been looking for lately! I've been intensely struggling with staying productive at my new startup - to the point where I'm looking to hire someone to basically look over my shoulder (via video) to keep me on task. Seriously, I'm interviewing someone tomorrow for this. The fact that there's a company devoted to this is astounding (it's not just me!). Can't wait until my invite is accepted so I can try this out!

Serious question, how does it work demographic wise. I'm in my 40s and picture it being awkward for everyone to be the old guy in a room of 25 year olds (also a factor why I don't do yoga anymore). I wouldn't be surprised if there are women who are nervous about being the only girl in a room full if guys. At the same time, I don't think I'd want to sign up for a demographic specific version. Is this something you expect will sort itself out naturally?

I don't see the added value compared to virtual-study-hall that uni runs https://www.ucalgary.ca/live-uc-ucalgary-site/sites/default/... and random strangers on different free website/platforms.

While I think this is a reasonably good idea to opt-into and maybe even something I would sign up for, I am worried that something like this will become mandatory by BigCos.

I can already see it: teams work under surveillance in shifts with a 5 minute break every hour. Companies clawing themselves into the home, with no way to avoid it. Terrifying.

An off switch or other way to preserve privacy would help address this.

big fan of flow club here. happy to answer any questions from the user perspective.

There's a similar approach in the less wrong study hall, target is usually students, buy may be useful for some https://complice.co/room/lesswrong/interstitial

Any chance to release another batch of invites? I think I've just missed mine :) the page says "invalid invite code" after I've filled in the email and password...

I’ve been using caveaday for a couple of months with middling results (I think because there’s too many people there now). Excited to try this out!

Congratulations on the Launch! How is it different from Focusmate? I've using Focus and it's being great :) Thanks

I started getting anxiety when reading your post... Are there really people who 1) want to work this way and 2) are more productive working this way?

I just tried this yesterday and I was very impressed! I didn’t expect it, but there was something magical about setting goals for the hour, seeing the faces of six strangers on mute, and a timer ticking down. It drove focus and accountability.

Great job, Ricky, David, and Minjeong!

I joined last week but have already been in 2 Flow Clubs and really loved it! It's a great forcing function to actually get work done and not procrastinate!

If there is a YC member here, would be interesting to know why Flow Club got in and not for example other startups like https://www.focusmate.com/ which in my mind deserve all the credit for the first really good implementation of the concept. Extra points if you remember other applicants with the same concept that didn't get in ! ( Btw, applicants, if you reading this, I would love to hear from you !!! )

Ugh.