Thoughts on Coworking
There are two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two groups and those that don’t.
Wait, no, not that one. *checks notes*
Sorry, let’s start over.
There are two kinds of people: those who find working from home fulfilling and highly productive, and those who don’t.
I had heard all the advice on how to separate work-life from home-life, even if they’re both happening in your home.
Keep regular hours. Set aside a separate workspace where work happens and non-work doesn’t happen. Actually wear pants, even if nobody can see you from the waist-down on Zoom.
I believe these things all work, and if HR is reading this, I was rock solid on that “wearing pants” bit. The problem is those first two things.
For various reasons, I was unable to find a work space that didn’t also double as a dining room table, a bed, or a furnace.
And regular hours might work for the childless, but I have four boys at home, ages 7 to 12.
Make no mistake: the kids are a joy and a delight. They are just not conducive to getting work done. And with four of them, odds are good that at any given moment, one of them is having a crisis that merits my attention.
For instance, I told the kids, “I know this looks like the furnace, but this is now my office and I’m at work. So unless it’s an emergency, please don’t come in here.”
Turns out I have a different definition of “emergency” than they do. My emergency is something like, “I’m on fire right now.” Their emergency is something like, “You said that Gus could have a 30 minute turn playing on the Switch, and as you can see it’s been 34 minutes.”
And even when they aren’t in my face trying to get me to officiate some kind of dispute, they’re just really loud.
The consequence of these interruptions is to make the hours highly irregular. So instead of 8 hours of focused effort, you get 8 hours of work split in to chunks of 10 or 15 minutes and smeared over 14 hours.
Without a place and a time dedicated to doing your job, “work from home” can easily into “living at work”. It was only my steadfast commitment to wearing pants that provided me with any semblance being “at work”.
Nebula
My lovely wife suggested I look into a coworking space.
If you’re unfamiliar, a coworking space is a large office with a few amenities for getting work done, like desks and internet. They rent out some portion of that space to individuals or small organizations. It’s attractive for entrepreneurs, independent lawyers, startups with just a few people, and disaffected people in large organizations who are unsatisfied with working from home.
After some investigation, I ended up signing up with Nebula. If you’re familiar with St. Louis, it’s in the city at Jefferson and Cherokee.
At Nebula, you can get an entire office to yourself, a dedicated workspace, or they offer a drop-in plan.
I chose the “drop-in” plan. They have an assortment of desks and tables distributed around the place. When you get there in the morning, you grab whatever spot suits your fancy, plug in, and get to work. It’s not unlike a coffee shop, only without the sidelong glances from disaffected baristas if you’ve been loitering for too long.
Nebula had several things going for it:
- It’s about five minutes drive from my house.
- It hasn’t been crowded since I’ve been going, and I’ve always found a spot well distant from other people.
- They have a working 8-bit Nintendo.
- It’s in an old building with lots of character and exposed brick, and has a 900 Spruce-y feel to me.
- Unlike 900 Spruce, it’s dog-friendly. I’ve declared Fridays “Take Your Bruno to Work Day”, which has been good for pretty much everyone.
The drop-in plan was quite affordable. It’s not as cheap as staying at home. But the coffee is free, and when you factor in the prodigious amounts of it I drink, this defrays quite a bit of cost.
It’s not perfect. The neighborhood around Nebula is kind of rough. My keycard works 24 hours a day, but I don’t think I’d want to leave my car there overnight. But the places in different neighborhoods are also further away and more expensive.
How’s it going?
It’s going well!
I spend most of my time in what’s called the “Big Room”, which is about the size of a basketball court. There are usually one to three other people in there, also working.
If I want more isolation, possibly for some serious pairing, there’s another room upstairs which is large, but not as big as the Big Room. It is often completely empty.
There are rooms for taking calls, which I use for Zoom meetings when I’m doing more than just listening in.
The number of interruptions throughout my day has dropped more or less to zero, other than the numerous bathroom breaks caused by all that free coffee.
Since it’s five minutes away, I usually come home for lunch. This gives me a checkin-in point in the middle of the day, to do some minor tech support, or break up a fist fight, or possibly act as Bad Cop, as the situation requires.
The internet is generally better at home than at Nebula, but Nebula’s is still perfectly acceptable. We have a ton of bandwidth at home, but even so, three people streaming videos while two people are trying to have Zoom calls will bring the network to its knees. This might also be true at Nebula, except that hasn’t happened. Most people seem to be there to work, not to binge JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure on Netflix.
But most of the problems with the current setup are really problems with not having the team collocated. Sococo is pretty cool and screen sharing has come quite a ways recently. But it’s not nearly as easy as rolling your chair five feet and talking to someone, and you inevitably lose some information when you’re talking to a disembodied voice.
Ask Your Doctor if Coworking Is Right For You
I feel that Nebula staff and the community have done well minimizing everyone’s exposure to coronaviruses. But nowhere is lower-risk than staying at home.
I weighed the tradeoffs between my physical health and my mental health and my continued employment. I’m in a fairly low-risk category for the virus and I have a robust immune system. In contrast, I’m high-risk for going completely stir-crazy.
So if you’re considering using a co-working space, consider the increased risk of getting sick.
For what it’s worth, lots of people have apparently decided that it isn’t worth the risk, which is why it’s less crowded than times I visited pre-COVID.
But if the above description of working from home sounds distressingly familiar, spending some time at a coworking place may be worth the cost and tradeoffs.
Nebula has a one-day pass, in case you just need a day for really getting things done, or maybe do coworking one day a week.
And if you drop in, feel free to say hello. Just keep an eye on the coffee maker and you’ll see me sooner or later. Probably sooner.
