- Joined
- May 2, 2017
- Posts
- 4,344
Office is a couple miles away about to change clothes and hit the the mtb trails on my way home.
In the past few weeks, I have gone from home (Florida) to Malmo, Sweden, Sankt Polten, Austria, then home for two days, then to Wisconsin, now in Munich, next week in Paris, then home for a week, then the UK for a month (Scotland, England, Wales and back to Scotland), then home for two days, then Charlotte, then back to Munich, then Alborg Denmark, then Prague, then home for two weeks, then Villamora Portugal, then Newcastle in the UK.....
I think I win the prize for the worst commutes, each of those are for a week at a time.
On the travel thing, one of the guys who used to work for me, and travel a lot with me, was THE best tour guide on the planet. If we had meetings cancelled, or had a big block of unscheduled time, he always had a plan. I'd make some excuse like checking my email, and he'd say "NO!" or "Take a look at your BlackBerry." We'd end up at some gun show, or some obscure museum, a civil war fort, a minor league hockey game. You name it, it was great. The New Mexico HS basketball state tournament. A D3 lacrosse game. No matter where we were headed, he had made a few calls and done his homework. The guy is the best. I catch up on the phone with him and we just laugh like crazy about some of the experiences. The bars and restaurants.....ending up in the kitchen. Hysterical.
Trying to work out what you do for a living based on that schedule - beer?
After I moved to Maine, I was working in an office on the third floor of my home. Yay! Mostly I've been working in home offices since. No commute, but I do need to travel to visit clients and pick stuff up like mail and parts. Most of the time that travel is by car.
With open office plans, you're in a weird position where often they'll say to feel free to stay home if you need to focus. Which seems batsh*t to me - that's what an office should provide, among other things.
That's why I moved my office over my garage as soon as it was built. Being in my actual home in a spare bedroom provided way to many distractions as well as someone else worked there, too.Forgot to mention - lots of people have children or roommates at home, in which case staying home does not guarantee the opportunity to focus. I'm lucky in that I have relatively chill pets and no one else is typically home during the day. Sometimes my husband comes home for work phone calls because he is in a cubicle farm.
I find it annoying that companies choose to save money on office space by forcing you to use your own home that way. They also never have enough shared offices, and inevitably, starting from the top down, people ignore the scheduled calendars or run late. If you're going to have open office space, there should be a ton of small offices for collaboration or heads-down work. They never ever allocate enough.