Future of work in a sustainable world

Have you ever wondered, why you go to the office at 9 am and come back at 5 pm, or if you are in India, at 11 am and get back at 8 pm. Or where did cubicles come from? Why are tables and chairs organized a certain way? And biggest of all, why do we take all the transportation, cars, buses, to come from homes to an office and sit for 8 hours where we barely talk to each other for 1, maybe 2 hours, and then follow the same, take the car, bus, metro and go back home and sleep. You'll be surprised to know, that most of this arrangement is a vestigial inheritance from the 1800s and early 1900s. In the transition from an agricultural economy, aka working on farms, to an industrial economy, aka working in factories, to technological economy aka working on computers, the office goers and office managers just kept walking mindlessly from one place to another, without questioning the need for one.

The advocates of "office" work are still stuck in the 1970s and old mindsets. They will often pose questions, like "How do I know if my employee is working" to which a 2020 manager and employee should and must reply is that "honestly, if you don't have that kind of trust with your teammate, then one of you must leave the job, for sure". This segregation between the place of work, place of stay, place of recreation; which is honestly how many cities across the world are organized is a purely stranded asset, or liability, I must say. In fact, this terminology of employee or employer is something that truly cringes any reasonable 2020s founder or manager.

A reality, that I have faced too deeply while building Blue Sky Analytics, a system which was just a decade earlier termed "blue sky thinking", like some out of the box, bizarre, imagination; is that we actually work, and build, in a wildly different way that we were taught by old bosses and parents and the business speakers and gurus and evangelists of the past. The feudalistic boundary between an employer and employee has thinned, and turned to a relationship between teammates with different responsibilities and separation of concerns.

For longest part of my life, I have worked most volume with most focus between 11 pm to 3 am. Even as a 14-year-old kid in grade 9, I still recall my father would hide my books at night, so I would go to sleep; but the apple doesn't fall from the tree, my dad worked with focus when the whole world slept, and his whole family of 3 tiny devil creatures of children slept; I'd go from the geography text book to another harry potter book but still sleep way past midnight. In Yale, I would go to the library at 11 pm when everyone would usually pack their bag, and study and do assignments all night; and today when I have more constraints of work-timing due to endless meetings in 9 to 5, I still execute most of "my" work post-midnight. All people have personal, individual workstyle, I have known mine since I was nine, and yet we impose this concept of "productive hour"

Past of work was much more dependent on our hands and bodies, but the present and future of work is all about our hearts and mind. Mental health is not just a rising concern because it is exponentially declining; but also because our productivity is almost directly a product of our minds. If you are focussed and good mindspace, you can execute same task in 2 hours that you have been sitting on for a week. Only when managers have not realized this fact about themselves or are hypocritical about this comfort for self but expect the managees to work 9 to 5, 40 hours per week, for 52 weeks, per year; we find a need for "office" work.

My understanding has become for both myself and all my teammates, that everyone works for themselves, for their own motivations, for their mind and heart; and income is just a side effect. A close friend of mine, has poured more than 50 hours per week for last 4 years for less than Rs 30,000 of income on his Youtube channel. `He has worked as hard as next person making 3 lakhs per year or 30 lakhs per year or 3 crores per year; and he is happiest, most content, improving day by day, and instead of designing a life where he can earn to do what he loves, he is designing a life with limited money and expenses to keep doing what he feels passionate about. Some people do computer engineering to earn money, all the top 100 rankers in IIT-JEE, which is a great probabilistic anamoly that "all" of them wanted to do computer engineering ??; but some people do it because they feel most natural on their console, experimenting with code, it comes as natural to them as writing 10,000 words a day comes to me. And instead of mindless shapeshifting to earn money, we are happiest when we are in our natural elements, our place of comfort, where our spine is relaxed and mind unstressed, we don't feel judged, we can fall fail and give another attempt one after another, its those places of being absolutely truely ourselves that we flourish.

And that means, you can be working in your pyjamas in your own bed alone, or in an office in heels around 200 people or in a cafe after a yoga class while drinking mimosa at 12 noon. When we are working with our minds, creating codes and files and logic and non-tangible structures out of bits and bytes of thin air, all the physical aspects of office disappear and what matters exponentially more is every small little mental concern. Are you focussed, are you foggy, are you sad, are you happy, are you introspective, are you circumventing?

I have always had a difficult time separating work and life, once I am obsessed, which every founder is with their company, I am constantly thinking, deep in sleep at 3 am, my mind was still working. I have had even more difficulty separating work-life friends, my cofounder is my younger brother, and I like to build companies and products with people who have same value system, same north star, are frustrated by same problems of the world, and have the same vision of the future, and hence naturally they become my close friends. And like every person suffering from the perennial founding disorder, whenever I am hanging out with friends, my mind goes "dude ! let's build this", "girl, let's build that", "what do you think about this idea", "oh you are a graphic designer, you want to build this". And, why shouldn't this be the case, for they are your friends, you know them, trust them.

As soon as we drop the vestigial ancestral vocabulary of work colleagues, friends, employees, employer, and all the subdued inequalities embedded in the segregation concept; you find yourself back in the college days when you were doing an assignment with friends while gulping martinis smack in the middle of the day.

The question, I want to pose to all of you the reader (which will be few, coz no one no longer reads ??), what will you do if left to your own devices, if you had no concern of "money", what do you do if you are alone and no one is watching, no one is clapping or critiquing. Since my brother was 6 years old and disassembled a car toy into the tiniest screw and bolt that it was made of, I knew he would be an engineer. And honestly, when I gulped the whole 1395 page Atlas Shrugged in one month, I should have known I was destined for a writing future.

And all of this for future of work, actually means end of all of this segregation. End of the work school segregation, where you study for 4 years and then work for rest; to a system where you work and study and work and study constantly all through your life.

This means the end of avenues of work aka "office" and avenues of interaction & fun aka "clubs, bars, restaurants, and cafes". And for global real estate, this would definitely mean not an end but a massive restructuring; well lest the overconfident suited booted bosses of the world don't learn anything from this disguised opportunity of a pandemic.

A new model for real estate would actually be something that WeWork, my last employer, and an epitome of ethic-lessness, started with. A place which is open to public like a cafe is, has a series of services with high-speed internet, and has varying models of annual or monthly membership coupled with daily access like you can walk in and use all the infrastructure services and the best part, is focussed on decentralizing and dedensifying the world and reinvigorating the inner-cities and small towns.

The solution to global sustainable economy doesn't like in overpriced real estates and this derivatively inflated human capital; but in the innovations and Blue Sky thinking of minds and souls of small lost towns in middle of nowhere with clean air and people down-to-earth, with close-knit communities and an inherent sense of social and environmental responsibility

"At the same time, cities are a key contributor to climate change, as urban activities are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Estimates suggest that cities are responsible for 75 percent of global CO2 emissions, with transport and buildings being among the largest contributors." : Quoting UNEP word by word.

So, in a few years, if I come with a refined and improved and more ethical version of idea as my last employer (WeWork), fund me with $20 billion to build infrastructure for future of work and living in small not-so-lost towns and villages and forgotten cities of the world. Future of work and world are its people and their health, mental and physical, not the fancy buildings or dense downtowns, not overbearing old managers but young independent workers, and future of climate action lies on leveraging this blessing in disguise left by the Covid-19 pandemic.