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— Written by San Choudhury

This Monday morning I rolled out of bed ever so slightly hungover. The week before, I had taken my annual summer break. With my sister and her boyfriend in town, we spent our days moving between bustling restaurants, lively bars, and energetic dance floors. There had barely been a moment to myself. Each day unfolded as a succession of what nexts, a far cry from an experience of time that takes the form of a present. So, when I woke to the stillness of Monday morning, it took me a while to find my bearings.

Still, the motions of my body took over. After lingering over a coffee for an hour, I sluggishly made my way to my desk and opened my computer. Hungover, and after a week away from work – and all the habits of thinking and being that work cultivates – resistance crept through every inch of my body. Yet, without consciously deciding to do so, almost as though I were taking one step after another along a well-worn path, I found myself opening the online study room on Scholar Square. There I was, staring back at myself through the small square of the Zoom window. 

I would like to believe that I joined the study session because I was feeling motivated, inspired, and ready to work. Or perhaps because I felt some sense of obligation. But neither explanation would be right. As I said, I joined almost without realising it. My hands simply followed the familiar sequence of movements across my keyboard and mouse until I found myself there. It is how most of my Mondays – and, indeed, most weekdays – now begin.

Since the beginning of this year, I've religiously hosted and joined online study sessions. They sit in the calendar of events in our shared community space, recurring with an almost comforting regularity. People drop in and out of these sessions as they please. Cameras are optional – although I usually leave mine on, there are days when even the sight of a webcam makes my face itch, so I switch it off. Microphones remain permanently muted, while the chat stays open; it is our way of whispering in a silent library.

It is almost absurd how simple the whole arrangement is. You click a link, your face appears in a small square among other small squares, and everyone gets on with their work. Over time, a handful of familiar faces have become part of my working week. I notice that I weirdly ‘miss’ some of the regulars when they don’t come on, even though we spend most of our time together in silence.

The ritual has become so ordinary over the past six months that I had almost stopped noticing it altogether. But that Monday morning, sitting there slightly hungover, I suddenly became aware of how peculiar the whole thing really is. Every weekday, I voluntarily join a Zoom call with people I have largely met through these very study sessions so that, for the next three hours, we can ignore one another. Then, when the session ends, there is almost always the same exchange before people disappear back into their separate lives:

"Thank you for the company."

If you think about it, it is rather an odd thing to say after three hours of barely speaking. And yet, every time I hear it – or find myself saying it – it feels entirely sincere.

When I first came across the idea of online study sessions a year or so ago, I almost always heard about it through the language of productivity. They were presented as accountability tools, a form of "body doubling" where working in the presence of other people supposedly helps you focus. I’ll admit, there is something to this. Knowing that other people have also set aside a couple of hours to work makes it much harder to abandon your desk after twenty minutes in favour of making yet another beverage or aimlessly scrolling on your phone. There is also the simple fact of commitment. When you've scheduled a three-hour study session, you're much more likely to show up than if you'd just had a one-to-one prep talk with yourself promising you were going to get shit done.

Perhaps there is even a sense of surveillance. We work because others can see us working. It’s much the same way that physical office spaces work: you’re put there together in a room where not only you can see other people working, but you also want to be seen working. You’re here, and others can see that you’re here, and that matters. There’s definitely an element of that; I’ve heard people say things like, ‘I’m shamed into working’, or ‘There’s something about seeing other people work that makes me want to work’. The presence of others encourages us to remain at our desks. I’ve felt it too. For a long time, I assumed that this digital echo of the panopticon was the reason I kept returning to these study sessions. I was of the opinion that I’d found an unusually effective productivity system. 

But that Monday morning, as another fellow scholar joined the room and settled into their own work, I realised something wasn't quite right about that explanation. Nothing had changed. The microphones were still muted. Nobody was speaking. The chat only occasionally flickered into life. Yet the room somehow felt entirely different from sitting alone at my desk. 

It wasn't that I felt watched. Quite the opposite. I felt left alone. Left alone, but not by myself.

After a week spent moving from one conversation to the next, one restaurant to another, the study room brought to me something I hadn’t realised I’d grown so fond of: a space for being quiet together. Nobody expected anything of me: a response, an opinion, a performance, or even a conversation. We were just sharing an otherwise ordinary Monday morning, each absorbed in our own work, together in silence. So at that moment, the notion of study sessions being just another productivity hack started to grate on me. 

I’m not always thinking about being productive when I’m in these study sessions, no, not always. Yes, I’m slogging through the tasks on my to-do list and using these sessions as a kind of time-blocking mechanism. But what I’ve come to realise is that, in as much as these sessions are effective, they are also extremely affective. Those little squares of pixels on a screen become imbued with feelings of connection through a shared stretch of time.

It isn’t simply that we are all working and we can see one another doing so – a lot of the time people prefer to keep their cameras off. Rather, the whole arrangement creates the feeling of being in the same hour together. We are each in our own worlds of work, yet somehow participating in the same atmosphere. It is a strange form of companionship: one that asks almost nothing of us beyond our presence and a shared vibe. What puts me most at ease is exactly that there is no one telling me I ‘need’ to chat, entertain, or perform, as so much of our online lives seem to demand. It’s weird because these kinds of online study sessions are typically presented through the language of doing, doing, and more doing. Instead, what tends to happen is that we just keep each other company over a few completely mundane hours.

So as I began to make sense of the very study session I was sitting in that Monday morning, I found myself wincing at the proposition that study sessions have taken off in contemporary society principally because they discipline us into working. Far from it, I think that these sessions cultivate an atmosphere of working. It's not because I’m shamed into working, but because we are sharing the same stretch of time, and in this practice of sharing time a space for work begins to take shape. 

We usually imagine that space comes first. We find a library, a café, an office, or a desk, and only then do we begin to share time with others. Online study sessions seem to reverse that order. There is no common room in any physical sense. We are scattered across different cities, countries, time zones, and continents. Outside our windows are different streets, different weather, and different days. As I try to keep myself awake after the lethargy of lunch, someone else is joining the session with their morning coffee. There is only time. And it is by sharing with one another the gift of time that we somehow give ourselves a space in which to work. 

Perhaps that is what we are really thanking one another for when we say, "Thank you for the company." It is not gratitude for a conversation, because there often isn't one. Nor is it gratitude for collaboration, because we have each remained steadfast to our own individual tasks. Rather, it is gratitude towards another person who has agreed to create a space for work with you. There’s something quite beautiful in this practice where by sharing our time, we create a place where thinking, reading, and writing become a little easier to access. 

I can’t get behind the idea that these study sessions are merely productivity tools anymore. The more I think about them, the more I see them as small cultural institutions. They are our time’s digital reading rooms: spaces that are not pre-existing, but are continually brought into being through the temporal relations of the scholars, students, researchers who gather there. 

Tomorrow morning, I'll probably make my coffee, open my laptop, and, almost without thinking, click into another study session. I doubt I'll be thinking about productivity, shared temporality, or cultural institutions. I'll simply join the room. And when I leave a few hours later, I'll probably say the same thing I always do.

"Thank you for the company."

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