“Productivity Nannies” Dig Concentration Caves for Modern Workers

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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In a world of constant distractions, how do you get things done? One of the most effective methods is to find a way to shut yourself off from those distractions and focus on only one thing, a project you make progress on before doing anything else. Now these days, that is easier said than done, but there are a number of tools that can help. For example, you might be familiar with the Pomodoro technique, which is all about setting a series of timers, often as little as 20 minutes, in which you work on a specific task without changing tabs in your browser or looking at your phone or doing anything else. Helping people get things done can also be a valuable and helpful service, and that's what we're gonna look at today.

Welcome to Side Hustle School, my name is Chris Guillebeau, and in today's episode, three friends create an event series called Cave Day, where you can push those distractions aside and crush your goals in a group co-working setting where everyone is cheering on your progress. It's a fun project that's helping people while also making money for them on the side, and they have a vision to take it to more cities. These guys are known as the Productivity Nannies, providing an environment that helps cave dwellers, what they call their customers, focus and get to work. Now I've gone on an excavation mission to learn more about how this idea came about, as well as what they've learned in putting it together. So stay tuned, and I'll tell you all about it.

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If you ever found yourself in a loop of checking your messages, then checking Facebook, then maybe Instagram, perhaps back to Facebook to see what you missed in the past 30 seconds, and then you think to yourself, hey, since you're already on your phone, you might as well check another platform too, even though you haven't used it in months. It's a cycle of distraction that keeps you from doing your work efficiently and productively. And it was a problem that Jake Kahana, a user experience designer from New York City, and two of his friends knew a little too well. They all had interesting projects in the works. They were working on things they were passionate and excited about, but they were also getting desperate.

None of them seemed to be able to finish anything they started. It's not because they didn't love what they were doing, they just all seemed to be too distracted to make enough progress to get it over the finish line. One of the friends felt they could all be more successful at finishing something, anything, if they could just shut themselves away somewhere. This would be a magical place without phones, notifications, or apps, or someone knocking at the door with a question that had a Googleable answer. It would be almost like a cave, just not as dark, and preferably with better snacks.

So the three friends decided to make a cave for a day. They got together at 9 a.m., holed up in Jake's apartment, put all of their phones in a basket by the door, set up a series of Pomodoro timers that would serve as sprints, and settled in. By the end of the day, they had all made more progress on their individual projects in one day than they had in months. Pretty soon they were doing this every weekend and adding in more friends as they showed interest. It was when enough other people wanted to join and they started to run out of space that they realized two things.

Not only were they not alone in their search for increased productivity, but also there could be other people out there who would pay for a cave day of their own to help them be more efficient. Jake and the friends got to work and set up their first public cave day for January 15th, banking on the momentum of the new year. They teamed up with a local co-working space, put up some flyers, made a few Facebook ads, told their friends, and hoped for the best. Within a week they had sold out all 60 spots for their first event at a price of $40 each. This price included two meals, snacks, unlimited coffee, and a handful of work-related services like access to the space.

The friends had a lot of the skills they needed to get cave day off the ground. Jake as a designer was able to handle the branding and website, and that co-working space was donated by a group that supported their idea. In total, they invested just $100 in web hosting and those initial Facebook ads. Then they did it again and again. A few events later, Jake and his two friends had a legitimate side hustle, helping people get away from their distraction-filled life to focus on what they really wanted to create.

These friends are now bringing in around $1,400 a month in profit. Although they started with an individual paper event model, they've since shifted into a membership plan. They have chapters in New York and LA, and have also incorporated remote days that allow users to meet on Zoom, a video conferencing platform, for a three-hour deep work intensive on Fridays and Sundays. About 500 people have participated in a cave day event so far, and most of their cave dwellers, as they call them, find out about the events through social media or word of mouth. They spend around $200 a month on Facebook ads, but say that there's no better advertisement than someone saying, "I got so much work done today." So they do as much as possible to create that atmosphere for those cave dwellers/customers.

Cave day has not only helped strangers with their work, it's helped the three friends too. Jake says that he's much more efficient, his quality of life has gone up, and he's feeling more purposeful. Each of the founders also loved leading a community of people, and it's allowed them to meet new friends. Of course, this new passion project wasn't without its challenges. Jake says that it was, and still is, a challenge to navigate their side hustle as either just a project or turning it into a real business.

And because it's so dynamic, they constantly navigate roles and responsibilities. So with that in mind, Jake recommends defining co-founder roles as early as possible. It doesn't help for everyone to do everything, and for every decision to need everyone making it. Playing to people's strengths is a key factor in maintaining harmonious roles, something the cave team are practicing every day. They're currently training three new cave guides in New York City, so they can test out growing their offering in new ways.

From there, assuming it works out, they plan on creating a program where they can train other hosts in other cities. From there, they can take over the world, but first, they're going back in the cave. [Music]

What a fun project. I wanna go to a cave day. It almost sounds like a mashup of creative mornings with a hackathon.

If you're not familiar with creative mornings, it's a monthly salon, where there's usually a person giving a talk and also a bit of networking, and I think those events are always, or at least most of the time, free. And it's been able to grow and be sustainable in all kinds of cities around the world because of sponsorship. So that's something I wondered about with this story, this model. Obviously, this model is gonna work best on a scalable basis with different hosts or guides in different cities, which they're already working on. So just thinking this could be a way for different companies that wanna reach all these people, maybe sponsorship or advertising is a model to consider.

And by the way, if there's not a cave day in a city near you, you can make your own, perhaps. You don't actually have to check your phone every 10 minutes. There's no rule or law that says you need to do that. The Pomodoro method can be super helpful in forcing you to move forward on something you need to do, but keep resisting. Again, that method is really simple.

It's just a series of timers. I use a version of it myself with an app called BeFocused. That is an app that is either free or low cost in the App Store. There are also some similar tools. The point is, even a cave morning or a cave afternoon to work without distraction can probably be good for almost all of us.

So I will leave you with that today. I hope you enjoyed the story. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. If you wanna see the show notes and learn more about cave day, just come to sidehustleschool.com/644. I also wanna mention that tickets to the 2019 World Domination Summit will be going on sale soon, at least for those listening in real time.

And whether you're listening in real time or not, if you wanna learn more about that, just go to worlddominationsummit.com. It is an annual event that I host every year in Portland, Oregon. If you have not been before or are not familiar with it, I would love for you to check it out and hopefully perhaps come and hang out with us next summer. Again, worlddominationsummit.com. I'll tell you more as we go along and I'll be back tomorrow.

My name is Chris Guillebeau and this is Side Hustle School. Get to work. [Music]