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In my ten years of writing reviews and helping people get things done, my preconceptions about a service have never been so wrong as they were with Caveday. If you’ve heard about Caveday, you might have gotten the wrong impression, as I did, that it’s a Zoom call that people pay to be on so they can co-work all day long under one another’s watchful eye. That’s not only a gross mischaracterization, it also ignores the magic and energy that can result when people work in a shared space. After trying Caveday, I fell in love—despite being a lifelong killjoy when it comes to feel-good group activities.
What Is Caveday?
Caveday is like a work retreat for modern times. Think of the writer’s cabin-in-the-woods approach to knocking out a first draft, except that Caveday is better, because it’s time-limited and guided. A better association might be the accountability and inspiration that comes with going to a yoga class in person rather than practicing alone at home. You’ve gone to great lengths to show up. Everyone’s in the same room to accomplish something. And there’s an instructor to prompt you along and keep you on track.
No one uses Caveday all day long, either. Part of its effectiveness comes from joining a session only when you know what it is you want to accomplish. It’s a wonderful productivity tool that benefits anyone who needs to focus deeply for a few hours at a time, and it’s a PCMag Editors’ Choice winner.
How Does Caveday Work?
To use Caveday, you join the site, decide whether you want a membership (about $30-$40 per month) or merely want to pay for a 3-hour drop-in session ($20) and sign up for a Cave. As of this writing, you can get a free one-week trial, too.
A Cave defines the session when and where you work. Caves are either an hour long with one work sprint or three hours long with three sprints.
The dates and times span numerous time zones and are offered seven days a week. I’ve been in Caves with people from India, the UK, and all the US time zones. In my local time zone, there are Caves that start at 2:30 a.m. and those that end at 8:00 p.m.
Once you sign up for a session, you receive confirmations on-screen and in email with instructions for how to join via Zoom Meeting. You can sign in a few minutes early. If you’re more than 10 minutes late, you may not be admitted to the video call.u
Every Cave has a Cave Guide, or a trained host who leads the session and controls the meeting. The host introduces and closes out each session and times the sprints. The host mutes everyone upon entry, and it’s up to you whether you want to turn on your video.
Inside the Cave
When a session starts, the Cave Guide welcomes everyone and suggests changing your Zoom name to show first name and last initial, location, and what you’re working on or what type of work you do. For example: Jill D. | D.C. | writing. Many people also add their preferred pronouns. Caveday has strict rules about courtesy and not promoting products or services, which you agree to before you join.
The Cave Guide says a few words to set the tone. In my experience, hosts tend to create an extremely calm atmosphere. It’s meditative rather than cheerleader-level energy.
Depending on how many people are in the session, the host may divide people into breakout groups for a tight 2 to 3 minutes to answer a prompt. Joining a breakout room is optional. The prompt usually has you state something about your intention for the session, such as “What are you setting out to accomplish?” If you came into the Cave fuzzy about what you would do while there, the prompt might nudge you to name it and be specific.
Sometimes prompts are different, like on International Women’s Day. We were asked to share a few words about the women we appreciate in our lives.
I never once encountered anyone who veered off course in the breakout session. People follow the rules. They are succinct and respectful of everyone’s time. After all, people are eager to get to work.
The breakout sessions honestly left me inspired. It felt energizing to experience the shared desire to focus on something important, even though each of us was working on something totally different. I met students studying for big exams, illustrators, engineers, and professors. I heard from people who were using their Cave time to answer emails and others who were developing radio shows. The fact that the group isn’t homogenous sparks curiosity and interest, and those feelings, for me at least, transformed into energy that I then put toward my work.
There’s still one more step before the session officially begins. Once everyone re-joins the main call, the Cave Guide asks you to raise your arms and push away anything you don’t need. Then everyone rubs their hands together and claps on the count of three. After the group clap, the session begins. I’ve never been the type of person who buys into the charisma of groups, but in the Cave, I sincerely enjoyed it.
Everything I’ve mentioned so far takes about 8 minutes all told. The next 50 minutes—plus or minus a few—everyone works in silence. Some people leave their cameras on. I turned mine off. I also navigated away from the Zoom window and didn’t watch what people were doing.
What Is Monotasking?
Monotasking, the opposite of multitasking, is the secret sauce to making the most of your Cave time. On the website and when you enroll in a session, Caveday suggests silencing notifications and removing your phone from being within arm’s reach to better monotask. The Cave Guide on occasion reiterates those points, too.
The team who started Caveday have done their research on people’s ability to focus deeply. It’s a generalization, but most people cannot focus well on one task for more than about 52 minutes or so. Yes, it depends on the task, the person, the environment, and other factors such as skill level and previous practice, but generally speaking, after focusing on one thing for 50 minutes, taking a break refreshes one’s ability to focus again.
When the first 50-minute sprint is up, the Cave Guide announces a communal break and encourages everyone to stop working. The host may suggest a series of stretches or movements. While testing the service, I used this time to pull the Zoom window front and center and soak in a few minutes of feeling like part of the group again. The chat box had a few messages each time of people who were interrupted by power outages, illness, care responsibilities, and other issues that forced them to call it quits. Some of them left with words of encouragement to cheer the rest of us along.
After the short break, if you’re in a three-sprint Cave, you then repeat the cycle twice more, though usually without any more breakout groups. At the end, the Cave Guide may invite people to share their accomplishments or wins in the chat box.
Other Caveday Services and Products
A three-sprint drop-in Cave costs $20, and you can pay for a membership from $39.99 per month or $105 per quarter. Membership gives you unlimited access to as many Caves as you want. Members also get access to Caveday self-guided work sprints, but those are nothing more than videos that play either silently or with a background soundtrack of your choice, and it plays a chime when your sprint time is up.
Caveday sells gift cards, too, which you could certainly buy for yourself, for a one-month membership ($39.99), five sessions ($85), or a yearly membership ($480).
There are team plans for organizations that include workshops, private caves, and more. Prices aren’t publicly available, so contact Caveday for an estimate.
Another option is to sign up for a Squad ($65), which is a month-long membership to a specific group of other Caveday users who help keep each other accountable for their goals. Squads come with professional coaching sessions, weekly check-ins, and negative consequences for missing goals. The Squad membership doesn’t include benefits of the general Caveday membership; you have to pay for that in addition if you still want to participate in Caves.
On the site, you can also drop a few bucks on merchandise, from work planner templates that you print at home to hats and posters.
Spend the Day in a Cave
What is Caveday good for? If you’ve ever thought about making a grand gesture, like renting a cabin in the woods or a fancy hotel room until you’ve completed some work that requires intense focus, Caveday may be a better solution. Caveday is more realistic. Lock yourself up in the Waldorf Astoria, and you might still get distracted or burned out if you don’t take adequate breaks or have someone there holding you accountable to your goals. It’s also a lot more expensive than working from home. Go into a Cave, however, and you have either one 50-minute sprint or three to make progress. If it goes poorly, you can try again later, and you haven’t dropped a ton of money on that hotel bill. Reset yourself for success and give it a fresh try.
The dynamic of the collective worked for for us in testing, but if it doesn’t match your personality, you can skip those parts. You choose whether to participate in a breakout session. You decide when to turn your video camera on, and whether to clap on the count of three, and if you want to share a win in the group chat. The next time you need to focus to accomplish or make progress on something specific, give Caveday a try. Inspiration and motivation might just rub off on you, too.
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