Co-working

Co-working sessions are work sessions in which people get together to work independently on their own separate projects.

With TBTS co-working sessions, you intersperse doing work (usually for 15 minutes or 20 minutes at a time) with taking turns doing Teddy Bear Talk Support (usually for 3 minutes each).

"We have to do this every day!!!" was what a co-working partner said to me after our first session of co-working. All we had done was interspersed three 20 minute work sessions with 2 minute meditation breaks. She was working on finishing a book she was writing, and now she wasn't having to do it alone.

For me, sometimes I use these sessions to work on things that I might otherwise have a hard time getting myself to do. Or, sometimes it's just nice to have some company while you take breaks, and it gets you to be good about taking scheduled breaks.

Quote from my co-working writing partner: "It's amazing how I know what to say when someone is listening."

Co-working is something I started doing when I was an undergrad. I was an electrical engineering student, and my chemical engineering student friends were the ones who were permanent fixtures at the library. I could always just find them there without ever having to arrange to study with them. So, I did my work alongside them as they did theirs.

When I was working on writing my dissertation, there was a group of us that would do this together at the library. We called it "Writing Camp" and it involved timed sessions of writing with timed breaks in between them.

My partner and I had come up with the structure of Writing Camp when we took a vacation with a friend who we were helping with writing a book. So, again, each person can be working on very different things while everyone is working together.

Then there was a period of time that I called "The Death of Writing Camp" where I sorely missed the support of Writing Camp. One benefit of Writing Camp is that you come to have a better sense for time and how long things take and how long of a session you tend to benefit more from. I need sessions that are 20 minutes or less. My partner needs sessions that are 40 minutes or more. So, doing Writing Camp together no longer worked for us, and I often bemoaned The Death of Writing Camp.

By happenstance, Writing Camp was revived when my friend who is a professor and I started working together when she was finishing a book. Shortly after that, a different friend asked me to be her writing coach to help her with finishing a graduation paper for professional certification. So, I was meeting with both of these friends during the same time period. It was interesting how differently we went about things in the two cases.

Abbreviations you can use when proposing calls on the Teddy Bear Signup for these sessions

Co-workingInPairs

Calls where you intersperse doing work independently (usually for 15 minutes or 20 minutes at a time) with taking turns serving as teddy bears (usually for 3 minutes each).

Co-workingInBreakoutRooms

Co-working session where you will be putting pairs and triples in breakout rooms