Cover Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash
Virtual Coworking is all the rage right now
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” — Jim Rohn
But what if I don’t even have five people around me on a regular basis?
What if I’m stuck with people that bring me down?
How can I surround myself with people that uplift me when I spend all my time at home?
Those are questions I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve been toying with the idea of working from home for a bit but frankly, I know my productivity will dramatically go down and I can become quite lonely.
Do you work from home? Is that how you feel?
My answer for the past seven years was to go work from coworking spaces. It’s hard to deny its benefits. With all the people around, it’s so much easier to stay accountable and make important business and personal connections.
But working from home has its undeniable benefits, greatly improving your work-life balance. Reducing commute time can save you hours every day, not counting how much stress you’re avoiding, or germs and bacterias if you take the public transit. Plus, being in your own environment can be more comfortable, you can cook your own healthy meals, and you save tons of money from all that.
Still, I could never work from home before because I couldn’t stay accountable and was lonely. That’s when I came across the concept of Virtual Coworking. I wrote on the subject a year ago mentioning how we’re going to get there in the near future, but I’m writing about that again today because the future has arrived!
What is Virtual Coworking?
Picture something like this:
Screenshot of the Sococo web app
Or like this:
Screenshot from a member event in The Arena Coworking
These are only two examples of players in the space. There’s also FocusMate, and launching today, Forest Coworking.
So what is it exactly?
A Virtual Coworking is an online community of people working from a centrally located environment.
Imagine Slack meets a physical coworking space. It’s everyone working remotely but feeling like they’re not alone.
How does it work?
All the above companies implement the concept differently:
Sococo built its technology to support companies with distributed teams.
The Arena brings people online through Zoom meetings.
FocusMate connects two people over video for short focused work sessions.
Forest Coworking uses Sococo to bring people in a visual coworking environment.
But they also have at least one feature in common: all of them rely on video chat. And they all solve the same issues:
Loneliness;
Procrastination;
Accountability; and
Networking.
Which one is right for me?
As you can imagine, there’s no one-size-fits-all. As such, I’ll review each of FocusMate, The Arena, and Forest Coworking based on Community, Focus, Accountability, Accessibility, Health, and price.
I have used FocusMate a few times and have chatted with both the founders of FocusMate and The Arena on a few occasions. And a disclaimer: I have built & run Forest Coworking. That being said, I’ll do my best to stay as objective as I can be.
Community
If tightness of community is the most important for you, nothing beats The Arena. If you prefer a wider-range and bigger community, your best bet is Forest Coworking. If you want to build more one-on-one relationships, FocusMate is for you.
FocusMate attracts a majority of male freelancers while The Arena attracts female entrepreneurs. It’s too early to tell for Forest Coworking.
Focus
If what’s most important for you is getting things done with minimal interruptions, you can’t go wrong with FocusMate. It’s in their name after all! You can get a similar focus on Forest Coworking by moving into a room and getting an accountability partner to join you.
Since The Arena is mostly focused on events and fighting off loneliness, work focus is not their main concern.
Accountability
You can’t go wrong with any of the three options. FocusMate is one-on-one accountability, The Arena is tight groups, and Forest Coworking is both.
Accessibility
FocusMate has the most seamless sign-up process, allowing you to be on-boarded right after sign up. Forest Coworking on-boards its members within 24 hours. The Arena requires an interview process.
Once on-boarded, FocusMate makes you schedule a one-on-one call with an accountability partner. The Arena invites you to community events and their Slack channel. Forest Coworking lets you sign in on Sococo and gives access to a virtual workspace, with Slack integrated.
Both FocusMate and The Arena work much better for English speakers. Forest Coworking has spaces for different languages and interest groups.
Health
FocusMate and The Arena don’t focus on health directly but since you’re on camera, your looks do matter to some extent, forcing you to at least take as much care as yourself as you would in a public setting.
Forest Coworking has a gym area in a few of its spaces where people can do their home workouts at the same time, for added accountability.
Price
FocusMate is free for 10 sessions per month, or $20/month for unlimited sessions. Forest Coworking costs $99/month. The Arena costs $199/month.
How do I know it will work for me?
Like anything, you won’t until you try. FocusMate is currently free so you can try with nothing to lose. You can do an interview with The Arena to see if you’re a good fit without paying anything. They don’t take your money if they don’t think it’s the right fit for you. Forest Coworking is offering a one-month free trial for its launch today, so it’s the perfect opportunity to try it out!
If you’re working from home or are thinking of doing that, there are currently no better options than Virtual Coworking. It has most of the important benefits of a physical coworking while removing things like commuting, saving you tons of time and headaches.
With some free options, there’s no reason not to try it and see if it works for you. Plus, if you do it now, you can brag to your friends that you were a pioneer in this upcoming workplace revolution! So check them out and I hope you’ll find value in them!
You can do this!