My apo­lo­gies if this soun­ded like I was chal­len­ging Jared Dia­mond to a wor­doff ;-)   <a href=“http://idlebritishcolumbian.blogspot.com/ target=“_blank”>Michele just poin­ted me to won­der­fully can­did art­icle

coffeecolab.jpg

explain­ing why office work­ers should appre­ci­ate their sur­round­ings and pity the poor fools that con­sider the cof­fee shop their work­place. While I num­ber amongst those blighted souls and blogged last year on why I like the mobile life, Sath­nam Sanghera’s ode to office bliss, raises some not­able and worthy points.
I was par­tic­u­larly struck by Sanghera’s anec­dotal ref­er­ence to people work­ing at home start­ing to form groups so they can work at home together. Man is indeed a social animal. I like work­ing in a pub­lic space, even if I am not inter­act­ing dir­ectly with other people. I like hav­ing them around. By that I don’t mean to objec­tify oth­ers by any means, as hav­ing people in your imme­di­ate prox­im­ity can often run counter to pro­ductiv­ity. But, every­one has their own levels of tol­er­ance, and I sense that Sanghera is accept­ing this broad stratum of indi­vidual work­space demands. He high­lights a study by Ben­jamin Markham1 that under­lines the fact that work­places end up being coun­ter­pro­duct­ive by being too quiet. The silence itself becomes a dis­trac­tion.
This Regus Busi­ness Lounge of which he speaks con­jures up images of a mod­ern­ized Lon­don men’s club cater­ing to the mobile worker. Prob­ably sim­il­arly inten­tioned as co-operative work­spaces, such as the ones I spoke of in the other post, but with more of a traveler’s busi­ness lounge feel­ing. This would cer­tainly speak to why he found it far too quiet to embrace pro­ductiv­ity. I am still strug­gling to identify this milieu factor. The tran­si­ency of the Regus Lounge sug­gests that there is little or no chance of hap­pen­stan­tial interchange…nor is it desired. As a place becomes habitu­ally more famil­iar, the chance of actu­ally devel­op­ing a nod­ding acquaint­ance cer­tainly can threaten the anonym­ity of the mobile work­place. It’s a fine line.
Sanghera’s art­icle is a fun one. Well writ­ten and I find myself reminded of the fact that I am try­ing to cre­ate my own spe­cial­ized office work­space on the road. It’s not that it’s bet­ter than the office, but I sus­pect that like Sanghera, I too have social needs and dis­cip­line is part of the mix that gets me out of bed in the morning…if I could just stay there and accom­plish my work­aday routines, the scary real­ity is that I just might.

BTW, true to form, I am sit­ting in the Starbuck’s cafe in the centre of the lar­ger Indigo book­store as a I write this and have just fin­ished writ­ing 1000 words towards my dis­ser­ta­tion on a Sat­urday2

  1. Sorry, but I can’t find the source for his ref­er­ence [↩]
  2. By the way, the photo up top comes from a USA today art­icle that explores the third space and the rarpidly grow­ing mobile work­force. [↩]