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Comment by qnsi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Thanks for checking it out and the kind words re: the idea qnsi.

>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).

That's a good point— a "pathological procrastinator" could definitely do that, but they'd mostly just be cheating themselves since they're not here to pretend to work for their boss. To your point though, some users have requested a way to share their screen for extra accountability, and we've even had a couple members do this with virtual cameras. At the end of the day though, we're building a community that celebrates the process and gradual progress made by time-blocking and goal-setting to do our best work, so if someone feels this way, I think the community can help them. To bring in another perspective, I'm an avid runner, and occasional cheating (course-cutting during races or faking Strava data) does happen within that community, but besides the shame of getting caught, if you're running every week with a community, cheaters will either self-select out of the community, or hopefully see the emptiness that comes with achievements they didn't earn.

These people feel like they’re working in an entirely different world to the one I’m in. If I were to share my screen while working with a bunch of strangers that would be considered gross misconduct, and result in my immediate termination for distributing confidential material.

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