What is the relationship between accountability and stress?

Hi, my name is Stuart Allsop, and this is my podcast, Crazy Wisdom, where I interview creative people about how they work with and manage the stress that is inherent in creative work. What I've realized over the past 10 years of my research is that anybody who is creating something of value that is significantly different from what has come before is considered crazy. Most of us have a fear, an ingrained fear of going crazy. So what I'm saying saying is grab onto that fear, realize that it's there,

and just go with it.

Because the problems we're going to be facing over the next 20 years require crazy people in order to solve them.

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast. My guest here is Taylor Jacobson, the CEO and founder of FocusMate. And FocusMate is a really interesting product that matches you with a virtual co working buddy. And then you basically just mentioned three goals, three goals you want to accomplish. And then you don't really talk and you just work virtually with another person. And then you end by talking about what you achieved. And I've used it both with friends and the product itself, this brilliant product. Can you talk more about how you came up with the idea and what led you to build this?

Sure, yeah. I mean, I am a lifelong procrastinator, and I guess you could say it's one of, like, the core stresses in my life has been being, I think, a creative person and someone with great aspirations who just have always been fighting myself. And like, in college, I solved that problem by every single class I took. I would find a study buddy, and that worked. And then in the workplace, you have a lot of accountability in the workplace. But when I started working for myself, I went from basically being a high performer to a low performer. And then fast forward a few years. I was talking to a friend who was also self procrastinator, and I was mentioning how I had been putting off writing a blog post and he was putting off writing an investor deck. And we just had this idea to get on a video call together for a couple hours, and we structured it. We sort of talked about exactly what we were going to do, and we wrote it down in the chat interface of the video call, and we just got to work, and it was just so effective. So he and I did that every day that week. You know, I wrote my blog post, he did his deck, but pretty quickly it was obvious that we had found something that other people would find valuable as well, that we were not uniquely bad procrastinators or something. So the seed of Focus Mate was just creating this Community of people who were sort of signing, you know, raising their hand to say, I would like to be held accountable, I would like to achieve more. And then the utility of making it really like, no coordination required in order to find those kind of people. Having the predictability of knowing what happens when you show up will be a structured interaction that's going to guarantee that you're productive. So that that's the kernel of focus made. That's that we built initially and where we're moving toward is building a more personalized experience. That's like the ability to really work with who you want to work with in the ways that you want to work. Whether that's, you know, I go to Duke and I want to work with other Duke students, maybe who are even part of this class that I'm taking, or I work at this company and we're all remote or we're really distributed. And so I want to work with other people in my company or just like these are the people that I've met in Focus Mate that I really love and I'm going to put them in my favorites or like I really didn't like this person and I'm going to put them on my blacklist, whatever the case. So it's sort of a more deeply personalized experience for you.