Webby
Wed 27 Feb 2008
I am sitting in my kitchen today with a housemate and it has just dawned on me that I am more inclined to work harder when another human being is around.
It is quite a eureka moment actually.
The truth is I have not worked so hard over the last few weeks but the days when people are around seem to be much more productive for me.
I worked for the mobile phone company O2 in the UK a few years ago and managed to work from home for two days a week. I remember at the time that I found it much harder to motivate myself at home, compared to the office environment.
My friend worked with me last November for a month and I did heaps of work. The evidence is there.
Maybe it is just me? Lots of people now work from home and telecommute and I am sure they don’t feel less motivated to work when they are alone.
I still think it would be cool to hire some offices somewhere for working nomads to work in together. There would be so many benefits in my opinion, just being able to swap ideas and compare notes would be neat.
I would be interested to hear what others think of this and whether working on the road (and presumably by yourself) is actually viable for people who are motivated more by the company of others.
February 27th, 2008 at 3:19 am
Looking back over the last several years, I have found I work well when there is a blanket of ambient noise like that often found in a coffee house.
When alone, there are times I work great in silence, but I occasionally find myself getting drowned out by the silence. music helps but doesn’t work quite as well as the coffee house environment.
Now a days I am in a small office will other developers around. It is great motivation because everything is transparent. If there is a question it gets answered and there is that nice puff that comes from a group effort.
February 27th, 2008 at 10:10 am
I totally agree.
I spend too much time surfing or looking into new ideas, and not getting billable work done.
I have a freelance friend who sometimes brings his laptop round, and those days are much more productive. We’ve even talked about regularly meeting to make ourselves more productive. It’s good to have a person to bounce off too. A quick moan or idea passed by them saves talking to wall for an hour about why you don’t like a client!
February 27th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
I enjoy what I am doing so it doesn’t make much difference to me. When I was working in an office so much of the day was wasted by just chatting with other people, which of course didn’t bother me.
March 1st, 2008 at 1:51 am
Maybe we should build a kind of remote working social networking site. You can search by location for both local remote workers, and meeting places where people work. You can register both as a worker and also a work location. So you can add your house if you’re cool with people coming over, or a local coffee shop where you and others work from their laptops or whatever. Then when you’re in a new city you just look up the local place and go meet some other people who you already have something in common with. Think there’s enough people doing this to make it worth building a website like this? Google’s open social api might be good. Or it could even just be a facebook app.
March 4th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Not sure how big the movement is outside the u.s. so you may not have heard of it yet, but it sounds like you are describing the coworking phenemenon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coworking