The workspace can be an underappreciated player when it comes to productivity. Often times, productivity lapses are blamed on internal motivational levels and an inability to silence psychological distractions, but according to a paper published by the International Journal of Engineering Research and Applications, approximately 86 percent of productivity problems relate to a poor work environment.
Everything from a lack of window space to using an area for something other than work can hurt productivity. This leaves open demand for an area that satisfies environmental criteria while also existing solely as a productive space. Enter Cove, a Boston-bound service developed by recent Harvard University graduate Adam Segal, which allows its users to rent an optimized private workspace on demand through the Cove app or online.
“Cove is the ultimate productive alternative to working from home, from a coffee shop or even from your traditional office,” Segal said. “We brand ourselves as your neighborhood productive space.”
Cove provides patrons with coffee, soda or other (legal) agents of focus and fuel. Users access all of these features through a membership that begins at $32 per month. That fee grants members eight hours of use, which is tracked through the Cove app. When entering a Cove, a user will scan his or her smartphone, and this will log the number of hours spent working in a Cove space. Plans offering more monthly use decrease hourly rates on a sliding scale.
Segal developed the idea for Cove from his own experiences in trying to find workspace as a student and an employee who was working from home. He found that there was nothing that satisfied his need for a space separate from his overly familiar home.
“I hoped that my lack of productivity was about my environment and not necessarily about me,” Segal said.
A catch-term Segal uses to refer to Cove is “And Cove,” meaning that, as a service, it is not meant to stand alone. Rather than hope for his customers to utterly abandon their peripheral productivity habits, Segal presents Cove as an extra item on a productivity checklist, meaning that someone on the run can spend the morning, the afternoon and the evening in the coffee shop, office “and Cove” on the way home. The goal is seamlessness.
“It’s a good basis for a business if you’ve directly experienced the need [for your service],” said Ashley Stevens, an innovation and entrepreneurship lecturer at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
Stevens said a key to Cove’s success will be its ability to supply a supportive environment that employees and students can’t find in something like a coffee shop, where individuals are very inwardly focused and aren’t likely to provide any significant motivation. Discussion and an assurance that your peers are also making progress, Stevens said, can serve as a powerful motivating factor.
As of now, Cove is open in nine locations across the Washington D.C./Virginia area, where Segal himself is currently based. He is a Massachusetts native, though, having grown up in Wellesley, getting a bachelor’s at Amherst College before his graduate studies at Harvard — hence the plans to expand Cove to the Boston/Cambridge area this summer. He said the neighborhood-centric structure of the city also had a lot to do with the expansion decision.
“We definitely gravitate towards neighborhoods,” Segal said. “A large portion of our population will go to multiple locations, which that structure facilitates.”
However, the reaction from undergrads — perhaps Segal’s most important constituency in his expansion to Boston — is for the most part mixed.
Brent Heineman, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, finds himself generally preferring private workspaces to public places such as coffee shops or libraries to maximize his productivity. He said Cove could find success in targeting students with his preferences who may not have as much private-space access as he does.
“I think it could do well. I think people might want to access some kind of space where they could work privately without the cramped spaces of BU,” Heineman said.
Leyla Tonak, a freshman painting major in the College of Fine Arts, said she could definitely see a need for Segal’s service in the undergraduate population, especially among her artist peers who are forced to make due with BU’s limited studio space.
Still, both Heineman and Tonak expressed concern that something like Cove is not a financially feasible option for college students who have free access to a wide range of workspaces, even though these areas may be less-than-ideal.
“It’s beneficial to isolate your work from your personal life, which is something that a lot of people in university struggle with. Sometimes, the dorm environment can be the opposite of conducive to studying,” Tonak said. “The only problem I see is with kids trying to spend extra money on a workspace.”
Heineman agreed that college students may not make the purchase of an app like Cove a priority.
“I think the typical college student,” he said, “would prefer the public space.”
