Coworking Spaces

Coworking spaces are an interesting phenomenon of modern history. According to my favourite source Wikipedia, the concept of coworking spaces is less than two decades old.

So we basically all became freelancers and digital entrepreneurs in order to be location independent. Summer in Europe, winter in South East Asia. Or maybe summer at the beach and winter on the ski slopes. Or…Well, there are millions of constellations, but you get the idea.

So now we are location independent and we can live where-ever we want and work from home, the coffee shop or the beach. We don’t have to waste our lives any longer commuting to an actual office building.

So what do we need coworking spaces for? After all, we need to commute there. And they give us the sort of office feeling we tried to run away from.

Well, it turns out that offices are not all bad. The feeling of community and the chance of grabbing a quick coffee with a colleague are drawing us back to these sort of modern office environments.

Humans want to be part of groups, communities, tribes. That’s always been the case. Good coworking spaces want to replicate exactly that feeling.

Years ago, when I worked from my home office in Germany, I felt the most miserable ever.Why?

Well, I woke up, went downstairs to the kitchen, made a coffee, went back up, entered my home office and started working. Then back down, another coffee, some breakfast, back up to do more work. That journey between the ground floor and first floor in our house repeated all day long. Every day. For more than a year. No need to dress up, shower, get ready, commute to work.

Nowadays, I wake up, do my morning routine that includes a shower and getting ready to actually meet other human beings at the coworking space, get onto my bicycle and have a 10-15 minute commute along the beach to get there.

Well, that’s a 180 degree U-turn from my setup in Germany. And yes, most commutes to your coworking space don’t include a 15-minute ride along the beach. However, getting some fresh air and a bit of exercise before sitting down to work all day is really refreshing and helps to actually wake up your body.

I still can’t handle working every day of the month in a coworking space. So me being me I end up with some work from my home office, some work from the living room, a lot of days at the coworking space and a few days in various coffee shops around town. As soon as I’m too much at one place and things get too predictable I go a bit crazy. 🙂