In my day, we used to work in open plan offices…

Not too long ago, 2017 to be exact, I was working as a copywriter for a global advertising agency. I have this vivid memory of arranging to go into work late one morning, arranging it formally, so that I could make progress on the script I was working on, uninterrupted by the colleagues who approached my desk with no subject in mind, just the half baked thought they’d hand over, hoping I’d know what to do with it.

‘I wonder who waters these plants?’

‘A plant watering service, I think.’

‘Oh, so you don’t?’

‘Um, not consciously. Maybe I’ve dumped some old water from my water bottle but nothing selfless.’

I didn’t always have the energy for generous responses, or the time. The morning I asked to write from home, I didn’t have either. It wasn’t easy to arrange, by the way. It took a bit of convincing. But I remember it being profound – how much I got done from my bed. Even I, who had rallied for it, couldn’t believe the contrasting productivity.

Cut to 2024, and the agency I work for has no office. Where you work from is where you choose to open your laptop. Currently, I’m opening my laptop on a deck chair, on a beach, on an island in Thailand. Cliched, I know. But the only interruption I’ve had is the tickle on my arm which turned out to be a tiny spider. And he was fine with me flicking him off.

It’s productive – to be able to work when you work, and not to have to be at work, not working. Which was often the case with open-plan office environments, before the world changed. And while we do seem to have lost our in-person social skills (well I have) at least we’ve stopped measuring our productivity against the number of hours we spend in a given building. That was nuts. But, like with most things in life, there are gains and losses.

Gain: Focused work, without interruptions.

Loss: Ongoing cultivation of in-person social skills. Just the other day, I had this interaction in a coffee shop:

Me: Hey

Them: Hey

Me: Cool

Them: Cool

It wasn’t great.

Gain: Better work life balance i.e., start your day with yoga, not traffic.

Loss: Some good old fashioned road rage – maybe our morning commute was a healthy channel for residual anger?

Gain: Teams comprised of talent based on talent, and not postal codes.

Loss: The in person interactions that facilitate empathy and understanding. It’s amazing what you miss on Zoom.

Gain: We have dogs now!

Loss: Our couches have dog hair now.

Gain: The biggest gain of all is not having to separate our personal lives from our work lives as much. We are, after all, people, not AI robots. And with that whole inevitable death thing, it’s probably best we inject our lives with more life.

Loss: If your personal life is a mess, there’s no escaping it. But perhaps that’s a gain too – failing faster.

This blog post was started on a deck chair in Thailand and completed in a Cape Town apartment, while trying to ignore the very sad and droopy houseplant in my peripheral vision, and wondering to myself “I wonder when last that plant was watered.”