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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

It's great if you can have that luxury, but it's not always possible. A lot of us have some level of constant "on call" duty where we can't just be unreachable the whole day.

The problem for me is that it is definitely possible for me to be unreachable for 1-2 hour chunks, but often times when I "get out of flow" it's difficult for me to get back it. I could see something like Flow Club benefitting me.

reachable does not mean being on camera all the time

This comment makes no sense. Something like Flow Club, when I'm on camera, is specifically for when I don't want to be interrupted by my colleagues.

I like how disciplined you are with only checking messages in the morning. It's just three of us here at Flow Club so I can't really do that yet. One day...

I think motivation is messier than just self-motivated vs not self-motivated. Could depend on the task you're tackling, time of day, other things in life that happened that day. Work is so personal and so varied. I'd say Flow Club members are very self-motivated, some are wildly successful by conventional standards, and yet there are still moments where Flow Club is a reliable environment to fall back on or to pick themselves up just a little.

> 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.

I get a few dozen pings in Slack per day, many of which need quick responses. It would be awesome to be able to only look at Slack once or twice per day but I'd keep too many engineers blocked / waiting if I did that.

How do you help your coworkers when they need a hand? It's a rethorical question, of course.

I don't see much advantage of having work colleages if it turns out they are just available for half an hour every morning and then they will dissappear for the rest of the day. Say someone needs me to guide them find some file or some method that I wrote and I'm the best one to answer that question, should they just wait for 4, 6 hours, or even until the next day, just to have me getting to know that my help would be welcome?

I see most value in working with other people precisely in the ability to work _with_ other people. Maybe not interrupting people constantly for silly questions, but definitely either not having to almost feel like if we had to ask for an appointment with the doctor.

> 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 suspect that you wouldn't want it, and yet, there are loads of people willing to sign up for a service like this. I have seen similar services which seem to get users and charge a hefty monthly.

Personally, I have been doing this so long that text feels normal for me. I think the key for me has been to work with people who are able to shoot across a lot of information without the need to say much. For most of the people I work with, I can sort of read their mind. For a small number of others, text becomes a chore. The occasional chores are a reminder that not everyone feels at home working from home. Maybe this sort of service could be useful for them.

I’ll second people needing to be able to write succinctly for things like Slack to work. There’s a strong divide in my job between engineers, who will dive straight in with a bunch of detail on what they need help with, and non-engineers who will just say “Hi, how are you?” and then wait to be promoted as to what it is they need.

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