When I checked the stats on the market recently, after the COVID-19 office system collapse those people who came back to offices still never wanted to remain working in them. Since they already felt how cool may it be having free schedule, being able to work only when you can. So they moved to freelance lifestyle and kept on working remotely. However, with hunger danger for US and Europe because of Ukrainian wheat and war along with the crypto collapse, people shifted from remote to on-demand work. What does that mean and how we in design world go through that?

Yao Hu Unsplash image

Office Vs On-Demand Remote

What’s cool in office work? First of all, you always see people around you working on similar tasks or at least for the same company together. This creates kind of the working atmosphere, where people who are not self-motivated enough can easily start working effectively and complete their tasks.

Moreover, office makes you move. You no longer sit at home all the time and anyway you will go outside to get somewhere and most likely you will see interesting places and even day will seem more “busy” and “productive” to you.

Office makes you feel yourself serious. Like you have some place to go and work and home remains only a place for the rest. So you have an exact switch between home and office, so your life seems more well-organized to you. However, all of these things become advantages only for those people who find difficulties in organizing themselves well.

On the opposite, while working remotely you also may find numerous advantages. For example, making your schedule just like you want it — personally I find it cool to start working at 1pm. Moreover, I can easily work until 2am and feel myself absolutely comfortable. When my schedule wasn’t matching schedule of others in the office I was kind of upset just because they were leaving home while I was still sitting at work.

Moreover, I like talking to others, so instead of doing my work, I was just talking to my employees and chilling on our balcony. So most of the day was spent with coffee at the kitchen or in dialogues that never seemed to end. And that’s why I was less productive. Even while sitting with others in one room I always found it hard to focus.

And finally, office makes you less free: you can’t work from cafe, you can’t go to another country to work from there. You can even catch a flu because someone brought the virus and always argue about someones bad mood or too cold air in the room. Office is a lack of freedom. The issue is only in the ability of managing this freedom.

How to Manage Your Freedom?

To feel yourself happy while working with on-demand remote, which means not strict 8h per day on remote, but task-based mode, you need to organize yourself well. Organize some kind of routine:

• make a workplace for yourself at home with a comfortable table and laptop;
• start exercising before the workday to wake yourself up;
• work with an exact schedule — make yourself alarms for the tasks and write tasks out before the week starts. Having Notion.so with a weekly schedule helps a lot. Moreover, once you have to-do list you will no longer need to focus on the issue of not knowing what to do;
• plan calls depending on the tasks in your agenda in advance;
• stop working at the fixed time — for example at 7pm and simply re-schedule everything you didn’t manage to finish.

You can become more happy and free if you just will organize your time perfectly. And not to feel lonely, write in common Slack chats more often to see how others also work on the projects. Find places where many freelancers work together like cafes for example and support them. Start following nomadic lifestyle Instagram accounts to feel aesthetics of this routine and you will see how cool not having an office may be.