Working Everywhere

A few weeks ago, I decided to finally start the process of searching for my first home. It's an incredibly daunting task and a little demoralizing, but also just so much fun. I had an idea in my head of what I wanted it to look like on the inside, and obviously, I took a lot of inspiration from my recent love-affair with Pinterest.

I knew that aside from having an immaculate living area, I wanted an office space. A place where I could sit down and get work done. A desk with drawers and everything neatly filed away and properly stored. But that's when I realized two things - I already have that in my room. I have this beautiful desk, this whole section that's dedicated to nothing but work, but I actually rarely ever spend any time sitting there. For instance, right now, I'm in my bed, drinking tea, and writing this as I have an episode of The West Wing playing in the background (I'm trying to watch in tandem with The West Wing Weekly podcast, but it's so hard not to watch ahead).

The second thing that I realized is that as much as I wanted to be someone who only worked at his work desk and only played elsewhere, I've never been able to do that. As nice as it would be to have one of those heavily curated, Pinterest-looking spaces to get things done, I've always been someone who can get things done anywhere. Well, not anywhere. I've never been able to work in a coffee shop or on a plane - they just never felt right to me - but I can just as easily get work done in my bed, in my kitchen, or on my couch. I've never quite needed a dedicated work space.

I think that's because I've situated myself in such a way that everything I need can be accessed from anywhere. All my my notes and important files are stored in Drive and Keep, I find things to read through Flipboard, sync and listen to my podcasts through Pocket Casts, and have all my passwords stored in LastPass - all of these a mere fingerprint scan away. If you were to give me your phone, I could turn it into mine by downloading a few apps and logging into them. Everything is everywhere, and it's kind of incredible how I've managed to make my life service, and to an extent, device agnostic.

There are some weird hangups though. Emailing on my phone feels as weird as messaging my friends on my computer. Things still feel segmented in certain areas, but that's mostly just a me-thing and how I've done things for so long. What's interesting is the little changes I've noticed. I no longer need to get my laptop to watch Netflix or YouTube just because the screen is larger. I do most of that on my phone now because it's there and it's convenient. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while it is nice to have a dedicated space to just sit down and get stuff done, whether it's work or cleaning out your inbox, it's also nice knowing that you can do that just about anywhere these days.

I think that this is the way the world is going now - everything is going be both yours and not yours. You own the information, but it doesn't matter what device is being used to deliver that information to you. Everything we use is becoming increasingly more powerful and connected, which only blurs the line between them even further. We just need to unlearn the old ways of thinking how these things work. That and to make sure we don't forget our master password.