All of it was made with high quality materials, like cast aluminum and rosewood. A hot trend in the world of office furniture is “resimercial” design, the word representing an awkward mash-up of residential and commercial. Resimercial items are intended for workspaces but that feel like something you would have at home, comfortable and familiar.

• Yeah, my former colleague John Herrman coined this term a while back to speak about the performance attitude of a lot of these chat applications, especially Slack.
• This is part of the messy part of being human, and it requires constant vigilance and constant inventory and a constant reassessment of is the way that I’m living my life in line with what I want out of it?
• The office, for all of its faults, it was this central institution where you would come together and interact with the same people on a consistent basis.
• The open office design has been around for decades, in a variety of forms.
• Resimercial items are intended for workspaces but that feel like something you would have at home, comfortable and familiar.
• And what really struck me about that was, to the conversation we’ve been having, a lot of hybrid arrangements are kind of a mess right now, and yet hybrid work is still outperforming full time office work on all of these measures, which I think is just really telling.

And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. Alright, obviously I haven’t put enough thought into this topic to be confident about whether this would be a good problem to spend your career working to solve. But I hope that it gives you some idea of what I would start reading about if I were going to go out and form a more considered view on better organizing knowledge work. Unfortunately, it’s jobs involving having insights, developing complex plans, or combining ideas in fresh ways, that are probably most negatively affected by distraction, and they’re the hardest jobs for which to measure quality-adjusted output. So this research could be tricky to conduct persuasively.

The Office is Dying. It’s Time to Rethink How We Work‪.‬

I think there will be all kinds of ways to take the ambience of the office and bring that into a digital setting, and those things very well might be transformative. One thing that I think about when trying to figure out what the office is for, I think the office is, to some degree, a place for people who work together to learn a bit about each other. And when I try to think about the case for the skeptical working from home podcast C.E.O., the thing that I keep going back to is this idea that we are obsessed in the working world. So many books get written about ways to innovate your business, ways to change, ways to adapt to a new information dominated, fast-paced society, what have you. I think one of the things that this whole control experiment has taught us is just to see how broken work was prior to the pandemic.

I can just sprinkle it throughout the week, and I think a lot of people really are desperate for that sort of thing. And it also makes it possible for me to sign up for things that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Now, obviously, some of that is just meetings that used to be offline happening online, but that’s clearly not all of it. And if you just talk to remote and hybrid workers, they’ll tell you that they’re in way more meetings now than before the pandemic, and it’s pushing their work later and later and later. If we change the way that we work, a lot of that data will just naturally start to appear in those remote spaces, or will be exchanged in digital channels that aren’t part of the corporate infrastructure.

Whether working from home or the office, a podcast can fuel focus and productivity

If there’s anything we missed, or if you have any burning questions you wanted answered about upcoming episodes, please send them to  with the episode title in the subject line. Each time that happens our focus is broken, killing our momentum on the knowledge work we’re supposedly paid to do. Yet with offices organised the way they are today, nothing could feel more natural. Without Nelson in the mix, the new furniture kit looked a lot more conventional.

If you look at surveys, the vast majority of knowledge workers prefer some form of hybrid or remote work, and executives are increasingly coming to accept that reality. Those numbers make it clear the office is at this inflection point. And that’s why, it makes sense that office designers are promising a lot right now, including an office of the future that’s more comfortable, more pleasant, and more tailored to the needs of workers. And this is not the first time that designers have tried to fix the existential malaise of office workers with furniture. In fact, back in the 1960s, we had a lot of the same problems — white collar workers weren’t happy, they didn’t feel inspired or satisfied by the office.

Ask Doist: I Like My Job But My Company Doesn’t Offer A Lot in the Way of Career Growth

How about whether you can bury someone in your backyard? Well, someone has—and Gimlet’s Every Little Thing podcast finds the answers to these listener questions and more, no matter how strange or obscure. Their willingness to tackle off-the-wall topics answers questions about the world that you never knew you had.

• Much like the 1950s, workers were arrayed together, sitting at long rows of connected desks, but this time around, the absence of fancy furniture became a point of pride.
• And so I think one way to approach this, for anyone who’s trying to do some inventories in their own life, would be to think of it through that lens of something like therapy or exercise.
• And of course, any changes will need to be discussed and approved by your manager to ensure it makes sense for your team and role.
• So I was wondering if you could just talk about that piece of it a bit.
• Another principle was that a small amount of clutter was productive (versus filing everything away).

But at the same time, it’s possible I go days, even a week, without seeing anyone face to face except my partner. So on a day-to-day basis, I feel fine and productive, but then over time, there’s this gnawing feeling of loneliness, this craving for human connection. And I worry about that not just for me, but especially for people who don’t have the level of familial and social support that I have. “Collision” is a term you hear a lot in office design and the design of public spaces generally. It’s the promise that unplanned encounters can lead to good things — between co-workers or neighbors, even strangers. Conversations that otherwise wouldn’t have happened; the exchange of ideas; unforeseen collaboration.

Podcasts in the work-from-home era

No backstories or promotions, just solid business lessons from the best in the game. This Is Your Life with Michael Hyatt is a weekly podcast dedicated to intentional leadership. The goal of the podcast is to help you live with more passion, work with greater focus, and lead with extraordinary influence.

But emotional trust is grounded in the understanding and the belief that people care about you, that they care about your interests, that they care about your difficulties, that your concerns are their concerns. The way to develop that, it’s actually quite simple, is to be able to have mutual self-disclosure, people sharing of themselves. Psychologists have shown that when we exercise self-disclosure, people find us more likable and approachable. So if you disclose more people will say, “Oh, this person is approachable and likable.” But the second part is also critically important, it’s about empathy.

How to Create Group Norms That Make Your Team Stronger

And we have this to some extent with headquarters, but these spaces would not be a place where hundreds, thousands of other workers are as well. It’d be more a place where you go to onboard, a place where you go for large events, a place where you go for conferences, for times of celebration, for commemorating who you are as a company, for that manufacturer of culture broadly. And then you have all of these satellite places, and this, I think, really facilitates real flexible work that allows people to live in more places than just expensive coastal cities, where you can come into these spaces and use them collaboratively. I think that’s such an important point, Anne, and I agree.

• This podcast takes a unique and interesting approach to history.
• We want everyone who works here to feel like they belong, whether they spend the majority of their time at home or in the office.
• If you’d like more Cal Newport there’s a huge amount of his work online, including his personal podcast Deep Questions and his blog.
• But emotional trust is grounded in the understanding and the belief that people care about you, that they care about your interests, that they care about your difficulties, that your concerns are their concerns.
• I think it’s pretty clear that the way most companies were measuring people’s productivity before the pandemic was time at your desk, was presenteeism.
• If your projects are more like a relay race, though, you need more time together.