Spaces for working alone, together

When you work alone for long stretches, two things go missing. There’s no sense of anyone around you, and no one notices what you got done today. That’s why we built Spaces in toodoori: a place where everyone does their own work, without chat, and the only thing you share is that you’re there.

Company without conversation

Some people work from a café, or join sessions where everyone meets up to work on their own projects (often called body doubling or coworking sessions). You don’t have to talk much. Sometimes it just feels different to know someone nearby is working too.

toodoori is a personal task app, and it has to be useful on its own. We kept that principle. If you never open a space, managing your tasks works exactly as before. Spaces simply add a place where you can be near other people when you want to.

What you can do in Spaces today

Create and explore spaces

When you create a space, you choose its atmosphere: Café, Office, Club, or Studio. You also choose who can come in: Public (anyone can find and enter), Invite only (invited people), or Approval (people whose requests are accepted). Anyone can search public spaces by name without signing in and see the description and how many people are there right now.

Each space has its own time zone, and day and night in the space follow its local time.

Enter and leave on your own

Opening a space or becoming a member doesn’t show you as present. You come in with a button that fits the atmosphere, such as Take a seat in a café or Clock in at an office, and you leave the same way when you’re done. You can be in only one space at a time.

While you’re there, you can keep a small space window open over your board and work as usual. As with the project memo window, you can move, resize, and collapse it. The window shows the names of the people who are there with you.

Your visits and a note on the way out

My visits shows which spaces you were in, when, and for how long, along with the number of tasks you created, moves you made, and tasks you finished during each visit. Your visits stay even if a space is later deleted.

If you stay for 10 minutes or more, you can leave a short note on your way out. Notes are visible only to you by default. If you choose Share with this space, people who can see the space can read it too, and you can make it private again or delete it at any time.

What we left out on purpose

Spaces have no chat. Once conversation starts, a space becomes more of a place to talk than a place to work. For now, there are no reactions like applause or cheers either.

We also avoided anything that looks like an attendance sheet. You can’t see when other people came in or left, or how many tasks someone finished. The history of a space shows only time ranges and totals, and on days when fewer than three people stayed, you see only your own time and task counts instead of totals. Shared notes show a rough time of day, such as morning or night, rather than the exact time. We don’t want to leave clues that let anyone piece together someone else’s day.

Where Spaces go from here

We’re still thinking about how far to take Spaces. Put as questions, there are three:

• Beyond being there, what would it take for people in a space to notice what the others got done?
• What should a space look like to feel like a familiar spot?
• Can it stay this quiet as more people arrive?

We also haven’t confirmed yet whether simply being near others makes working alone feel less lonely. So before adding anything, we set the principles we want to keep, whichever way Spaces go.

• A space should be useful even when you’re the only one there, not only when it’s busy.
• It should leave traces of time spent together without becoming surveillance.
• You choose what to show, and you can take it back at any time.
• Coming in and leaving should take a single action.
• You should be able to be there without saying a word.

If you’ve tried Spaces, we’d love to hear when it helps to have someone nearby. Send us a message from Inquiries in My Page, and we’ll take it into account as we decide what comes next.

Take a look

You can browse public spaces at toodoori.com/spaces without signing in. To stay in a space or create your own, you’ll need to sign in.

If you don’t have tasks to bring into a space yet, Getting Started with toodoori walks you through your first one. If personal kanban is new to you, see What is Personal Kanban?, and to revisit finished tasks, see Past Work and Archive.