Every day, I have to wake up and do my little tasks. With On Together, at least I can have cat ears and vampire fangs while I do them.
I have severe ADHD and concentration has always been a struggle for me. Getting work done without wandering off or getting distracted has been a trial for my entire life. For a little while, my Discord groupchat—who all also have ADHD—was getting on a silent Discord call so that we could keep ourselves accountable about staying on task. That worked well enough, but ever since my friend Maddy Myers from Mothership suggested trying the game On Together, I have actually been more productive than ever.
On Together, which Maddy read about in a Teen Vogue article about co-working games, is essentially a chat room where you can park a digital avatar at a desk or a bench and sit next to other digital avatars as they all work. There’s very little game to be had here: You create and dress up a digital avatar, go to a server, walk around a little digital island until you find a good spot and then enter “focus” mode, which has your avatar loop in a little animation of “working,” whether that be typing, reading or making art. There’s even animations for non-work tasks, like eating and meditating. The longer you’re in focus mode, the more tickets you earn to buy new cosmetics for your avatar. So far, I have bought new pants, cat ears and a mouth with fangs. She’s just like me! You can also minimize the game so that it’s just sitting in the corner of your screen, like the desktop pets of yesteryear. My husband keeps calling it my BonziBuddy.
The way that this game has improved my productivity makes me a little embarrassed. Who knew that actually being able to see a cute avatar of myself sitting next to the avatar of a real life friend would make me lock in when so few other strategies have worked? When I see my avatar typing away at a laptop, it actually does remind me that oh yeah, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing right now.
What really gets me going, though, is the built-in pomodoro timer. While I have a real timer—shaped like a mushroom and not a tomato—sitting on my desk, it requires me to manually set how long I’ll be working and how long I’ll be taking a break. On Together’s pomodoro timer has intervals of 25 minutes on and five minutes off already baked in, meaning I really just have to sit my avatar in focus mode, turn on the timer, and then listen for the chimes. There are a few more productivity tools in the game, like a to-do list, a planner and a journal, which might be useful for other people but aren’t what I need from the game.
On Together gives me the body doubling that I was missing in my work from home era, and is adorable to boot. Thanks to this game I have finished two somewhat tedious projects I’ve been putting off. Soon, I will be unstoppable.
