Why “Coworking-vacation” is wrong
This winter, The Guardian, the New York Times, and many other outlets published pieces about a brand new trend that they call “coworkation”.
Co-workation, they say, is when coworking and vacation meet.
It’s when people go to Bali or the Canary Islands or any other postcard destinations, and work with like-minded people in a coworking space at day, and have fun at night.
I don’t hate the idea, on the contrary. As a journalist who had the chance to work from Senegal, California, and Morocco, and as the founder of The Blue House, a residence for startups in a surf town in Morocco, I love the idea. I just hate the word, and the way media talk about it.
Don’t call it vacation, if it ain’t vacation
It’s not because you work in a surf town, because you see the sea from your office, or because you get to do some sight seeing during the weekend that you’re on holiday.
Wherever you are, you still have to do your hours, you still receive emails that you’d rather not receive, you still have to handle clients or bosses, and your brain is still trying to solve work problems. Does that sound like holidays to you?
“Certainly if you are working all day to call that a vacation is not the right word. That is working remotely,” explained curiouscats on Hacker News
“It has all the aspects of a vacation except for the vacation part. Working from an enjoyable location does not make it a vacation. It’s remote work, not vacation,” added masklinn on Hacker News
Nope, it’s not a new fad for workaholics
The truth is, ever since people had the ability to take their work wherever they wanted, they have been working in places where they have a better life, are happier, and work better.
It all started in 1804 when the French government selected French artists to study in a villa in Italy. Two centuries later, artists are still joining residencies to “explore his/her practice within another community; meeting new people, using new materials, experiencing life in a new location” according to Wikipedia.
More recently, people running small and medium sized companies, freelancers and the alike, have moved outside of the big cities, to smaller cities or to beautiful houses in the middle of nowhere.
Of course, some people actually go to coworking spaces in dreamy locations, like the Surf Office, Hubud or Sun Desk, or attend coworking camps, such as Workaway Camp or Hacker Paradise, to go on holidays and still have the possibility to jump on a Skype call if duty calls. And that’s just fine!
But most people I’ve met in such locations were working full time and not considering themselves on holidays at all.
The danger in using the word “coworkation”
The problem here is that it might drive some people (who’ve never attended such coworking places, or work remotely) to think that people working in postcard locations are workaholics and that well-balanced people shouldn’t follow their lead.
“Whether that’s a good thing for overburdened modern workers remains to be seen,” concluded The Guardian’s journalist Lauren Razavi in her piece We’re all going on a co-working holiday’ — workaholics welcome
When in fact, the opposite is happening, people feel more relaxed, and hence take better decisions, work better, and feel better. Workers get to do more with their time as they face fewer distractions, mentioned New York Times’s Tanya Mohn in Co-Working on Vacation: A Desk in Paradise. They also get their dose of sun, and novelty, something we all need to get the inspiration going.
One of our participants at The Blue House, Maria Richardsson from Nordic Design Collective, summed it all:
“We worked more than usual but felt more relaxed. I realized our level of stress is not related to the amount of hours we work.”
So, you may ask, what word should we use instead? Why not “working remotely”? It has worked just fine in the past!
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