Work is a thing we do, not a place we go
An excellent article by Cal Newport in the New Yorker on remote working and the future of office work.
We are all to some degree struggling to get used to this new culture where “A gallery of thumbnail-size co-workers on a laptop screen is a diminished simulacrum of the conference-table gatherings that drive so much of corporate life.”
As we struggle, we are discovering tools that help us structure our days in new ways, that allow us to batch meetings together and block time for tasks that involve sustained concentration.
The fact that so many surveys are telling us that few want to go back to the old office life and most want to hold onto the benefits of the commute-free job suggests that the struggle has its rewards.
While CFO’s add up the financial benefits of reducing office-space or eradicating it altogether, employees start to wonder why they are living where they live and why not somewhere a bit cheaper, or sunnier.
A friend has been a creative industry nomad for the past decade. She has no home of her own. Instead she lives in Airbnb’s as she travels the world from one gig to the next. When Coronavirus hit it felt like that life was coming to an end, if cheap flights and short term lets were to dry up. But maybe she’s in the vanguard of a new way of working, freed from the demands of having to travel to physical offices every day. Imagine a life structured around where you want to live, not where you want to work. If work and home are disconnected to the point that where you live has no impact on the work you do, would you plan your life differently?
Globalisation stretched the elastic of culture until it reached a space where we could no longer thrive, a space of viruses and climate crisis. Now we have pinged back to the safety of our own four walls. Our office is the spare room, kitchen table or the shed in the garden. Our groceries are picked up from local shops because the centralised delivery systems of the supermarkets struggle to cope with everyone being at home. This deep homeostasis is as safe as we can make ourselves. Hyper-local is the new global. And maybe deeper inside still. VR technology is already being used in therapy as means of helping PTSD patients confront the source of their trauma. Will VR be deployed next on work culture as we create simulacrums of physical interactions in the office.
Have those Californians who have been microdosing psychedelics to boost creativity and wellbeing stumbled upon the future of holiday travel. Forget Bali, take a trip into the antipodes of the mind.
At the start of the internet age, Manuel Castell’s predicted that “sometimes we will go places to network and sometimes we will use networks to avoid going places.” We are beginning to experience what that actually means in terms of work.
At the moment it’s the wild west in terms of work culture. Virtual meetings seep into every crack in our day and those days start earlier and finish later. But we are fighting back with all those planning tools that have been gathering dust in the virtual stationary cupboard.
So why is there a mounting groundswell of pressure to return to work? An advertising trade mag recently published an article that said the 16% of UK advertising agency staff who say they never want to return to the office should be careful what they wish for, as there jobs could be first to go. Why the fear tactics? Is it because a lot of managerial jobs depend on having people in a space to be managed? In fact, many of these managerial jobs may exist because of physical offices. When workers are working autonomously, using tools to manage their time and structure their workloads, what are the managers for? Hence the fear tactics, better get them back to work or they’ll realise they can work without us.
Work was originally what we did to survive and eventually to thrive. Along the way it became the word for somewhere we go. Now we are reclaiming work as something we do, not necessarily somewhere we go.
