Crossposted from my Substack: The Marginal Hour
In the spring, I created an online coworking discord server for my friends and I (mostly EA Bath folks) to use so that we could continue coworking during the holidays before exams. It eventually expanded out to a lot of UK EA University students (Bath, Manchester, Bristol, Warwick, London, Cambridge, Reading, and some others). Coworking is good because it increases motivation and accountability, and is nice to chat to friends between bursts of work, as it generally keeps the mood up.
In this post I'll outline how we cowork and the pros/cons of coworking online/in person.
Methodology
Pretty simple, we work for 50 minutes, and break for around 10. I really recommend Lionbot as you can set pomodoros on it and it also records everyones study time, displaying it on a leaderboard. This element of competitiveness can be fun too. I also recommend adding a separate channel for to-dos – the idea being that you can write up your to-dos at the start of the day and go back and edit the message to tick them off as you go. I think having it in a channel adds accountability, and you can organise check-ins with your coworkers too.
We also have other channels – resources, wins, gaming, music recommendations – these help to keep the discord fun and also useful!
Pros and Cons of Coworking Online/In Person
| Pros | Cons | |
| Online | You can't get distracted by people talking, as you can just deafen. | You can get easily distracted by websites. This can be avoided by sharing your screen though. Or by using a website blocker. |
| In Person | People can see your screen, so if you are getting distracted, you can use them for accountability. | Very easily could talk for longer than intended. |
| Both | This is great for community building! Like a low effort social where you also get work done. I think this was probably the most effective way of community building last year at EA Bath. |
I think coworking online is probably a lot more productive than in person, and is also easier as you don't have to go to a physical place, you can just work from anywhere. One barrier is that if some people are not familiar with discord, they are less likely to use the server regularly.
Here's a server template of the one we use. And if you are a UK University Student, or a recent graduate, please let me know if you'd like to be invited!
And for people landing on this post and looking for a coworking online space to join right away, check out EA gather town :) http://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nxfhxwQg4HJ7KQz4A/ea-coworking-lounge-space-on-gather-town (I used it more actively a couple of years ago but still like the idea and believe it has some active users.)
Confirmed, there's still people around :)
Thank you! I keep forgetting about gathertown, it seems really good.
As a tl;dr from my initial thoughts on the original post: I think this has individually been really beneficial for my work, and I’m excited to potentially see it grow :)