Office Spaces

Welcome to another week dear friends. I hope you had a wonderful week last week and a great week so far this week.

So this is how my week went, thanks for asking. I changed my job schedule to weekends with fill-in(s) on the weekdays if needed to free myself to do my marketing, investing and blogging as well. This will also give me more time for local travelling and relaxation.

Newsflash

Ponder this: You go on a cross country road trip with your mate and you returned home without him/her with no explanation then you turned up missing? You have lots of explaining to do. They found a female’s body in a camp ground and yet to identity her to see if she is the missing person. This case is sad since you never know what a person’s real intentions are when it comes to reconciliation or a need to change his/her ways as means for forgiveness. Not really sure what happened here, but it was a cross country trip gone bad. Be careful. If something seems strange. Don’t just ignore it.  Treat it seriously. As I’m writing this, this is the outcome: Gabby Petitio: Girlfriend: Dead… Brian Laundrie:Boyfriend: Wanted.

On another note, you can’t seem to go anywhere without proof of vaccination. Jobs, restaurants, movie theatres and more need to see proof that you are. No proof, no service. Now they are saying that there are more deaths from COVID-19 than the 1918 flu pandemic.

Conventional vs the unconventional

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Is this the new normal? Yes. I’m talking about office spaces. Where are they holding meetings these days? Are employees still working from home full time or part time? Or, are there no meeting place at all, like, work in the field? As I look around my City, I still see empty office buildings. Some buildings are now being torn down and being rebuilt. Some stores still remain shuttered as of today. Where is everybody? Is there a shrinkage in the work force offices these days. Are people still skyping or by popular demand, Zooming these days? or As I mentioned above, buildings being torn down and rebuilt. But into what? I won’t dig deeper into this for now. I must move on.

The conventional

I remember back in the days that if you said that you have a business, you are expected to have an office and a building to house that office. The same goes for shops, salons etc. You have a place, you are for real. You have arrived. Online only businesses? Not so much. Working from home in a job was reserved only for the elite employees. Not to mention the ones who travels around the world to conduct meetings. The things that most were scoffed at are the things most are doing since the pandemic: Working from home: where normal working office hours are beginning a very slow and treaturous comeback. I still don’t see a full back to office routine in the near future.

The unconventional

I first learned of working from home in my time with the MLM(multi-level marketing) business, where you could run a business from home. I tend to like that concept. Never to leave home; or, work from anywhere in the world when possible. I went on my own and tested that concept. Worked from the Philippines no less. I was on vacation at the time, but I put in a few hours since I was there. With the internet at it’s boom these days, many are relying on websites to run their businesses. Don’t forget that you can reach anyone in the world at anytime of the day or night. You can run your businesses 24×7. I also adopted this principle, “Stay local, think  global”. That works fine for me.

Slow and easy

As cities slowly get back to some normalcy, I still believe that traditionally, business will adept to their old ways of the office. Offices are meeting places. The gossips at the water coolers, the cubicles where you can hear every word from your fellow employee through it’s partition. It’s your office where you can place pictures of your family and love ones to prove why you are there in the first place. Your aspiration of moving up the ladder to get your own office with couches and nice furniture to show the world you are an executive. That people now answers to you. You are in a real business. Not a internet only, work from home, where nobody sees you going out early morning and coming back home late at night. You are seen night and day, mainly frustrated from all that traveling. But frustration or not, it pays the bills.

Here are my reasons for not liking an office concept: well, this is my blog. These are my thoughts.

• Rent: It pays to work from home in the unconventional sense of business. The money you save from renting an office, you can put to use elsewhere. When I started my Investment Club, our meeting places were parks and public spaces. We were planning on renting a low budgeted office for the day just to get together for a feel of some privacy with the perks, but that never materialized. Nevertheless, the money we saved helped us a lot in the end before we parted ways.
• Fun: Meeting outdoors on a nice day gave us a sense of adventure each time we met. Even public enclosures were fun places to meet since it’s still away from the traditional sense of having meetings.
• Control: We ran our own and made all the decisions. Not subjected to a boss even thought I was the presiding partner. Feeling the difference made us think outside the box, not schooled or anything done by the book as in a traditional business.
• Working from an office in a conventional sense can feel stressful and like any other jobs. Working from home in an unconventional sense  gives you freedom, achievement, leverage and the opportunity to not just work from home, but from every where else imaginable.

Working from your home or working from your mobile devices as my blog’s reason for being, can have it’s disadvantages if you are not set in your ways of working through distractions and chaos. But you are the boss nevertheless. Is it sad to see those office spaces go? Yes. Am I worried that jobs are adapting the work from home concept? Yes. Because it gives employees a false sense of freedom and stability. A job is a job since you have a boss and if chances are you have to arrive at the office for good, you don’t have a say in the matter. For others, we’ll see you at the office.

“Office spaces”

Thanks for reading folks!!

Have a great weekend.

~AP