Rethink: Workspace
As I’ve been collaborating with Chris Gajus on YOU | A collective introspective most of it has been virtual and I’ve come to realize that most of what we’ve done has replaced the need of a workspace or “office”. Granted Chris has a shared studio space in downtown cincinnati but that’s a bit of drive, plus when you see familiar faces you tend to get distracted.
Most of our communication has been via instant messenger, which is humorous because my away message is “I’m currently out of the office right now” however I’m a freelancer and my main machine is a laptop. Technically I can work anywhere, but it’s better than the default - “Hey I’m away from my computer” but what makes it humorous is my first message today was from Chris saying “never in the office haha…” which is true. I don’t work in an “office” or a cubicle. My desk is a red table from ikea and my chair is a beanbag chair. It’s awesome, I love it.
No longer do you need huge meeting rooms, cubicles or any of that excess stuff. I remember working at the airport on my way to visit my grandma for her birthday and when I was at her house having to hold my laptop by a window in her room to send an email out to a client. (Okay that part sucked but the point is - So much work can be done virtually)
Besides Instant Messenger, Email for when we can’t catch each other online, if it’s an urgent thing we might send a text or direct tweet (sometimes a phone call but that don’t happen much unless we are meeting in person to do some work.)
I’ve made use of Adobe’s Acrobat ConnectNow for showing examples of the web applications running on my local machine since it wasn’t ready for production yet and it has a white board function but we haven’t had the need to make sure of that yet. A few times we’ve had to meet in person, just to make sure we are on the same page of things - most of that was during the beginning and as a bonus the meetings in person normally included grabbing lunch. I mean the only use of an “office” or studio I can think of is if there are too many distractions or if the team has to meet a lot and has to keep stuff in a safe place I can see it’s need. That & client meetings, but I do enjoy having those at a place like Panera… Gotta love that mac & cheese.
