Is waiting for Friday the only way to keep going?
London, 2010.
I’m looking at the 300+ year-old walls of my office in Charterhouse Square, in the heart of the City of London, at the gorgeous fresca on the ceiling, and at the 1,5h grueling commute that is waiting for me at the start and end of each day from/to Richmond, on the other side of the metropolis.
While finishing my Master’s degree, I’m working in Business Development & PR for a clinic and medical research center. I’m tired. Really tired. I had a soggy sandwich for lunch, and I’m hungry. This isn’t all an uncommon story when you’re building a career in any of the world’s megacities. I ponder on the future, and work.
I’m in one of the most fabulous cities in the world, living a life of abundance (of opportunities, of possibilities), and yet I can’t see myself being in this “world” for too long. The world of long commutes, of non-stop hustling, of no work-life balance that you’re expected to be ok with for years before you “prove yourself,” the theoretically decent salary that still leaves you with too much month left at the end of your money (because everything is prohibitively expensive), the endless meetings, reports, the work-about-work, the massive burn-outs that seem to follow years of doing that, and are, again, accepted as a by-product of building a career.
All I can think of is: “This can’t be the only way.”
_
Fast forward to 2022.
For the past ten years, I’ve worked remotely in different shapes and forms and in unconventional ways (as a freelancer, a partner, an employee, a contractor, an entrepreneur).
For most of this last decade, I’ve lived in Bali for parts of the year and travelled as a digital nomad or location-independent entrepreneur for the rest. I arrived in Bali after a four-year stint in Baku, Azerbaijan, where I expanded and brought an event management and creative agency to market leadership in the Eurasian region.
I first moved to Bali “for a year”,to help my current business partner with a program aimed at startup founders. It felt like a good, productive “break” from the corporate-heavy environment I had been immersed in before, even if I had extensive autonomy in my role.
But then, I created the concept and built a digital and physical coworking and innovation hub. The four-floor building we rebuilt to house this project used to be a clothing factory, a glorified sweatshop, really. I’m so excited to have managed to give it a second life as a center for entrepreneurship, digital transformation, and impact-making.
A before and after photo of the hub.
And in January 2020, I founded the Remote Skills Academy, an education platform for Indonesians who want to learn to work remotely and acquire digital skills.
Why is it so important to be able to work remotely, you may ask?
For me, remote work has always been a superpower. The superpower of:
organizing your work around your life rather than the other way around
accessing opportunities on the other side of the world, rather than limiting yourself to a 20 km radius around where you live
not needing to relocate or move your entire life for work
using the ~500h I used to spend commuting every year on learning, development & doing things I love instead
being able to access the job market, even if, let’s say, you’re disabled or a parent who doesn’t want to be absent 10-12h/day.
And, during the pandemic, remote work became a necessity. It made the difference between having and no longer having a job. More so than anywhere else, in Bali, where most people used to work in the tourism sector.
Over the decade, these are some of the things I’ve been told:
“To be successful, you have to work from an office – and try to always be the last to leave.”
“Forget work-life balance.”
“You don’t look like an entrepreneur/someone in tech” (female? petite? Eastern European?).
“There is no such thing as a people-first company. Companies are always profit-first.”
“You can’t build a company while on the go; location independence is a fad.”
Has it mattered?
Hardly.
I am and do all those things.
I believe work is something people will do even when everything is automated, taken care of by algorithms, AIs, and robots, and countries pay out Universal Base Income to their citizens. Because we humans have an innate need for meaning, for purpose, for expressing ourselves, and often that takes the shape of what we call work.
But work (or the way we traditionally thought of it) is broken.
To name but a few aspects pointing to that:
Modern offices tend to be distraction-central; urgent requests make it impossible to focus on your priorities.
You need to “look busy” and fill those 8 hours to justify your salary – as if we’re still all working in factories, back in the ’60s. Instead of counting the time, we should make the time count.
So much about office work is meta-work, work about work. Meetings, status updates, planning, reports. There’s very little time left for actual work.
There’s a need for middle managers, whose job is simply to “parent” office workers and fill their days with chunks of meta-work. Otherwise, workers aren’t engaged, intrinsically motivated to do the work. So we have to bring in the stick and carrots
So I wanted to live and work in an environment where:
Work & play don’t come in contradiction to each other.
Working from the rooftop at Livit Hub Bali.
People or profit isn’t a choice you have to make.
You can work from wherever you want, whenever you want.
You can be anyone you want to be, irrespective of where you come from and what you look like.
Over the last years, while the pandemic unravelled, many have discovered (sometimes the hard, painful way) that these new ways of working actually… work. That, for example, you can be as productive from home (in some cases too productive; we are now talking about toxic productivity).
We’ve got a long way to go, though.
But day by day, block by block, bit by bit, there’s a profound transformation happening in the business and lifestyle arena, shaping the way people work and live. It started a long time ago but has sped up tremendously in the last few years. At its core, there’s technology enabling a better balance between work and the rest of our lives and the growing appetite for meaning and being part of something bigger than yourself (and money).
Productivity isn’t about getting more and more done, about turning into a machine. It’s about getting the right things done at work, so you can have plenty of time and headspace for all the other essential bits in your life.
I, along with others like me, am passionate about the future of work. When we design more purposeful businesses and lifestyles, we shape a more positive, balanced, sustainable reality.
And I’m, personally, really excited about it.
To enjoying Mondays,
—Lavinia
This story was edited by Oana Filip and published by the Upstairs Community.
