The Future is Flexible.
Work from Anywhere, Whenever.
With the pandemic slowly getting somewhat under control, the twitterverse is chattering as people prognosticate as to what the future of work looks like. Will work from home become the dominant form of employment? Will we abandon the cities? Will we ever go into the office again? Will it snap back to ‘normal’ and we go back to what life looked like before the virus up-ended it all?
I have my own thoughts (which are more like wishes) for a future that is not as binary as the discussions happening seem to predict.
San Francisco and NYC will not die. People will not work from home in a hermetically sealed bubble and HQ will not disappear.
The future will be blended — and I don’t think it will happen fast. Over the next decade or two I think we will see a slow but steady shift from the somewhat binary and static arrangements that the majority have been living for the last few centuries.
I think that the division of “on work - off work” and “at home-not at home” will become a bit more blurry. I don’t think offices will disappear, but I do think that the Monday-Friday 9–5 is a thing of the past that needs to go away.
The future. We work and get what we need to get done, working from home somedays and a few days driving (or flying) into the main office for face to face meetings. The cycles might not be so discrete, where the weekend ends on Monday morning at 9am. I think we will prefer to slowly ease into the week, or the month.
We will not become van living nomads, but working from ‘somewhere else’ 3 months of the year will not seem weird, nor will seasons where we hit it hard and other seasons where we work but are taking somewhat of a reflective working sabbatical. Planning phases and bursts of building, some weeks working 15 hours and others 80 hours, based on the project, and what needs to get done, as well as accomplishing other things we want to do and going to places that we want to go.
It will hopefully fuel the resurgence of the second cities, as we all return ‘home’ to visit our relatives and parents and grandparents for months at a time, climbing the trees and wading in the streams of our youth with our own children, all in time to get back to an afternoon meeting. We can walk with our mom on the sidewalks of our old neighborhoods, and be ready to fly to SF for a week for a critical project kickoff.
We can, at the same time, grow the second and third tier cities while making life in SF and NYC a bit less insane (and allow more people to participate in the prosperity happening there).
We won’t live in vans, but might have a mobile container house that we move from city to city as we relocate our ‘home base’ around the country or the world. Maybe we become nomad ‘lite’.. or maybe we become homebodies with our homes becoming more mobile.
My own bias of actually wanting this to be a reality is skewing my judgement a bit. I would embrace this new world with open arms, where I can choose to engage in the most productive metros without abandoning the small town life that I love or abandoning my roots.
I think we would all be happier, healthier, and a great deal more productive. In a future blog post, I will go WAY off into the weeds of the container home idea, as I think it could be a thing.
