So yesterday I took advantage of the 50 degree temps and sun, and headed out for the afternoon to the Morning Glory Coffeeshop in Morningside to work outside my dungeon. It’s a nice place, and it was good to be out and about.

Of course now I want to go do it again today. Maybe this afternoon again. There’s definitely an attraction to working outside the traditional office.

I was watching a Frontline from PBS the other day called Digital Nation which you can find here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/ and there were a number of parts that struck me about it. The one that is in  my head now though is that they showed a big office park in the Hudson Valley that IBM built for it’s employees. The reporter walked through the place and it was a ghost town. Rooms with mobilitiy desks. Offices with furniture and phones but no people. Walking down empty corridor after empty corridor. All those people were working from home. Even holding meetings in Second Life.

They showed one group who had people on 3 continents all meeting together virtually. They had never met each other before in real life.

I’ve not worked in a traditional office now since 2002. I think I miss it. Oh sure it’s been great to work from home, and get to see my kids grow up. Heck right now I’m sitting by the front window in my living room, while my 7 month old is asleep upstairs for a nap, and my wife and 3 year old are in the kitchen apparently attempting to make bagels from scratch. If the noise gets too loud I can put headphones on, or head down into my office, or head out to the coffee shop. If I need to talk to people about work stuff I can IM them, or Skype with them, or just call them on the phone or shoot them a text. No real need to have them in the next room. Heck we can even have shared whiteboards, show each other our screens, etc in these things.

All that’s missing is the personal touch. I dunno. I think I miss that. I always think how cool it’d be to have some hip cool office space with neat furniture, lots of space, a foosball table, people working in the same space, going to grab some lunch together. Tall windows with lots of natural light.

I guess I’ll have to stop writing this blog and get going on my work today so that we can someday have that.

Working from home is great. I just really hope that it doesn’t become the norm. There’s something to be said for putting everyone in one place physically that lets us bond as a team together.

Plus it’s hard to play foosball with 3 other people if we’re all on different continents.