Cubatory

Generally I work from home and juggle a bunch of clients at a time so that I get a lot of variety and freedom in my work routine.

But every once in a while I land a bigger freelance gig which requires me to be onsite with a client during work hours, full time, for a while. The upside to this arrangement is that I get to be part of exciting projects with big clients who can afford to hire a freelance writer or editor for weeks at a time. The downside is that I have to go into an office.

Going into an office makes me mental. I truly don’t have the fortitude for it. It’s not the commute. I just finished a month of commuting to the East Bay every day and it honestly wasn’t as bad as I had expected. I finally got a chance to catch up on my podcasts (The Moth, Risk and Radiolab in particular). It’s not the fluorescent lights, although they are abominable and should be outlawed. And it’s not the fact that going into an office makes me feel like I’m on The Office.

It’s the interrupting.

I’m used to working at home, with my noise-canceling headphones on and the phone off. I concentrate poorly even under the best of circumstances, and to be creative on command takes pretty much everything  I’ve got. It requires a perfect amount of sleep, the exact right caffeine-to-hydration ratio, a finely tuned blood sugar level and a steady thrum of white noise. Only when conditions are perfect am I truly productive.

But working in an office is all about interruptions. The upside of this is that you get your questions answered quickly and you can collaborate more efficiently. It has its advantages, especially when you’re crunching on a big project and things need to get figured out lickety-split. but as Jason Fried explained in his Ted Talk “Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work,” it’s productivity murder for us creatives when we’re trying to actually get something done.

“Especially with creative people—designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers—people actually need long uninterrupted stretches of time to get something done. You cannot ask somebody to be creative and really think about a problem in fifteen minutes.”

Over these last few weeks, as I worked on an admittedly very fun project with some wicked smart people—and yet felt utterly frustrated much of the time—I developed a few sound strategies for getting through it:

1. Pretend I have to take a call then lock myself in dark conference room for ten minutes and watch kitten videos 

2. Retreat to bathroom stall for a little P&Q about every 15 minutes

3. Bring 3-5 beverages to work with me every day and take turns drinking from each (helps with #2)

4. Passive aggressively move things around in fridge to accommodate my lunch when I come in at 11

5. Text whine to Vanessa until she makes me a drawing to cheer me up:

I am happily back to working from home and super grateful to that last gig because it afforded me the standup desk I’ve been going on and on about it forever, ordered, finally, from this great company in Oakland called Tinkering Monkey. 

Also, it turns out I concentrate better without shoes on.