Out Of Office: inspire your workday with the things you do in your downtime.

Launching a new platform and newsletter for the way Millennials work & play today.

With our always-on-hustle culture, we often get stuck at our desks (👩‍💻🥗) thinking we are too busy to take a break or do anything outside work.

But spending all our time in front of our laptops, stuck in an office all day long, doesn’t help us be more creative.

It‘s the time we spend outside of the office, get fully engaged in a passion, a hobby, travel and meet new people that we are opening ourselves up to new ideas, moments of serendipity, daydreaming and imaging!

As we live in a time where busyness is seen as a badge of honor, downtime — time spent on leisure activities and hobbies — can often seem like a forgotten or ignored concept and breaks and leisure-time connected with being lazy.

Studies, however, show that downtime and “play” have the power to significantly improve everything from personal health to relationships to education, to organizations ability to innovate. Play leads to brain plasticity, adaptability and creativity. Nothing fires up the brain like play.

“We mistake leisure for idleness, and work for creativity. Of course, work may be creative. But only when informed by leisure. Leisure is not the cessation of work, but work of another kind, work restored to its human meaning, as a celebration and a festival.” — Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture

I’m Alice — a Strategy & Community Consultant originally from Austria, currently based in New York. While working on different clients and projects — mostly remotely — I have travelled and lived across the world and noticed, that I’ve had my best ideas and made most of my connections outside the office by working from cafes or co-working spaces, travelling, doing sports, going to events and running side projects.

Therefore, I’ve started out of office — a monthly newsletter and thought-platform exploring ideas and offering resources, tools & guidance to shape our work culture and the way we work and play today.

My aim is to facilitate new ways of working and inspire a new workforce to create the freedom to flexibly, build a (work) culture that inspires and supports creativity and make meaningful connections.

If you wonder what “new ways of working” actually means — for me, it means having the freedom to flexibly create my own everyday working life in an environment that inspires me and supports my creativity, together with people that are keen on trying something new every day.

There’s a lot of ways of doing that, and we’ll tackle them all!

• Working remotely
• Co-working
• Taking breaks
• Travelling
• Taking on new hobbies
• Doing nothing
• Collaborating with people from different backgrounds and different skillsets
• etc etc

Going forward, I’ll be sharing a monthly newsletter with events, tips, inspiration and resources to help you integrate new ways of working, find a balanced work-life that works for you.

Let me know what topics you want to be covered, I’d love to hear from you!

Reach out to outofoffice@alicekatter.com