"My Best NewWorkPlace" has a view of the outdoors, which is why I love working from home. I have created a wonderful garden with a fountain right outside my home office window. But as my garden is shaded by trees, the office is a tad dark. I would prefer a little more daylight. Adding a skylight is on my remodel list.

When I to need to work away from my home, I look for place with similar component. The concept of “need” has various definitions – need to because I have appointments with clients; need to because I am out observing work and workplace patterns; need to because I’ve been home too long and am climbing the walls. So I am always on the hunt for places with windows on a great view.

My Best WorkPlace: Component #1 – A Great view
What constitutes a great view is also variable. My absolute favorite is directly overlooking water, preferably the ocean. That is why places like Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz are on My Best RoadWork Place list. Second, in my area, is overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Unfortunately for me, that usually means a trip north to San Francisco or the upper East Bay, as waterside development is scarce and highly restricted in the South, more newly developed areas of The Bay. But I’m willing to take the drive (on off-commute hours) or by public transportation, to be in a great workplace.

My Best WorkPlace: Component #2 – Distractions
As many of you know, I am a heavy Commons Worker. That is I like to work where there is a sea of ever-changing activity. One of my personal attributes is the ability to concentrate in this kind of environment. In fact, I have discovered that the very presence of sound and movement helps me to do so. It seems that by keeping a part of my brain busy blocking out what are considered distractions for others, allows another part of my brain to go into deep focus. In turn, getting me out of that mode is a struggle.

I became aware of this phenomenon in my twenties. I would often go out of my office and join the rest of the staff in the studio area. Sometimes I would look up from my work to be greeted by a peel of laughter. Seems they had been talking to me and trying to get my attention for quite a while and I just didn’t hear them. It took their laughing, a change in the noise level, to break my concentration.

I also know that this mental ability is coupled with an extreme bent towards internal visualization. When I listen to people, I create a picture of what they say in my mind. An experience in college made me aware of this trait. I was sitting in class working on a lighting design, when the instructor came up and asked me if I was okay and needed any help. Mystified, I asked why he thought so. Turns out I had been just sitting and staring at my paper for quite awhile. I then
realized and explained that I wasn’t just sitting there, but that I had been designing various scenarios in my head – internal visualization. Eventually when I had a version I thought would work, I would start drafting.

My Best WorkPlace: Component #3 – Community
Most people think that if I can concentrate so well, being a Cave Worker, closed up be by myself in an office or home alone. would be ideal. They are wrong. Remember above I mentioned that I needed something, noise or movement, to shut out in order to concentrate? Sitting in perfect quite doesn’t work for me at all. I usually have the TV, radio or a CD on when at home. But even with these occurring, my home office is not ideal. I crave one more component – activity of
others. This is why most libraries don’t work for my either. Sitting buried alone in the stacks is really uncomfortable. However, being out in an open reading area does work. There is usually enough activity to keep me happy and focused. Interestingly, more and more, libraries are offering a variety of work spaces.

What about the community part? This is the people component, the need to be among others while working. Thinking back on my life, I have always had this desire. I recall my struggle in high school to do homework. I would be sitting at the kitchen table, which was really a
“great room”, but we didn’t call it that then. Adjacent, but open to the kitchen through a wide pass-thru, it had our everyday eating table (we only ate in the dining room when company came) and also the family room set up with couch, the TV and stereo. There was always a lot of activity, this being the hub of the house, and I liked doing my homework there. But invariably, my mother would come by and say “You can’t get your homework done here with all of this noise, go to your room,” or some such version. So off I went, lugging my pile of books to my bedroom.

Disrupted by the move, or so I thought then, I found it hard to concentrate again so I procrastinated and usually turned on the radio. Again, in came my mother, professing that I couldn’t work with the music on and telling me to turn it off. Like a good little child, I did,
and it would take me sometimes literally hours, to get back to work. I always thought it was the distractions in my room. I’d open my closet and try on different outfits, or pull out a game or anything but do my homework. It is only in recent years, when I started studying where people really work best and what makes a good workplace, that I realized it was the closed, isolated and quiet environment that was the real distraction. I wasn’t a bad student, but just think, I could
have had straight A’s if study groups had existed then. So parents and teachers, apply these lessons when trying to understand why your kids aren’t studying. A learning disability, laziness or hatred of homework may not be their study problem, but simply that they are studying in the wrong work environment for them.

If any of you know of a public place with a great view and plenty of people around, please let me know. Of course, outlets, free WiFi and a good selection of teas are also needs, but that is just a given.

Have a “ My Best WorkPlace” of your own? Please let me know and also, include why and whether you are willing to share it with the rest of us. Thanks.

For the past 100 hundred years, “office work” has been performed either in an individual closed room or a large, single open area. The Boss or upper level management sat in the closed room, the office, usually with the door shut. Everyone sat elsewhere.

For the first 50 or so of these years, everyone else, the others, were open bull pens. There is a wonderful picture on the National Building Museum’ s web site that illustrates this perfectly. The Sears Roebuck Chicago Headquarters photo, circa 1913, shows one large room with rows upon rows of typists. All are seated behind the same kind of desk, with the same type writer, facing the same direction, performing the same job. Not a modern office work as we think of it today, rather the factory-like production of piece work created on a typewriter. This “office” is structured for single-tasking, in one location, with one environment and one set of support equipment in a
vertically hierarchical organization.

Since the 1970’s, this other work is done in open office systems, now infamously dubbed Dilbertville – rows upon rows of same size cubicles. Originally designed as an improvement over the open pit, the rampant proliferation of the cube has nothing to do with altruism. Now considered a workplace evolution of the open bull pen, the change that took place was not so much in the office structure, but in the work performed within the panel walls. Leaving repetitive, single-tasking behind, work has become multi-tasked, varied and different, changing on a daily, even hourly basis.

As we begin the next century, the work and the workplace are changing again. Enabled by technology, the transition out of the Industrial Age to the Space/Knowledge/information/internet Age (the era to be named by future generations) is complete. No longer constrained by the four walls of an office, cubicle or office building, work occurs wherever and whenever, across the boundaries of space and time.

Thus has emerged a new worker – one who can work anywhere, plug in anytime. This person revels in infinite variety, is motivated by the change of scenery and is more productive surrounded by an ever-shifting sea of activity. Who are these workers? They can be seen
sitting in your local coffee house, the town square or an airport lounge with cell phone to ear and PDA in hand.

Unfortunately, these workers can not be found in today’s office building. Maybe companies can be forgiven for not providing a workplace for this worker, having only recently been discovered
sitting in coffee shops with a laptop and a latte. Like a newly found species of bird, corporate anthropologists are mystified by what exists in these environments that draws such workers there in droves.

Equally unfortunate is the phenomena of lack of perception on the part of the worker. In other words, most have no idea what species of worker bird they are, blindly migrating from one company to another or from cube to cube. Haphazardly assigned work space based on job
title rather than personal productivity, they have been forced to adapt and accept their environment, never given the opportunity to discover their personal work mode or know in which office conditions they best thrive.

Do you want to know which type of worker you truly are? Or whether you became that by way of purposeful intent or unlucky happenstance? I have a process for discovery.

Think you know your species. Please fill out my ‘Work Mode’ survey. I am tracking migratory patterns.

The New Work Places – Challenge:
Use 10% Recycled Material in your New Work Place

I know that the rest of the world thinks of Northern Californians as “tree huggers” – bleeding hearts when it comes to preserving the environment. It’s true. The reason is we live amidst such
beauty that we have a special understanding of the need to take care and preserve it. An integral partner of preservation is recycling – reuse of already harvested and processed natural
elements – wood, ore and fossil fuels, in order to reduce the consumption of limited resources or keep them from the landfill.

In our area there is another method of recycling that can help in a big way – the reuse of construction materials. A company in East Palo Alto, Whole House Building Supply and Salvage, makes this possible for the average person. In our area, because the price of land is often worth as much or more than the house on it, people are buying property just for the land, then tearing down the house. Whole House partners with the home owner or contractor and holds a sale the weekend prior to demolition.

Anything in the house is available for purchase. Prices are usually way below what it would cost to buy new. Everything from kitchen cabinetry and appliances, doors, the door jambs and hardware, plumbing fixtures and lighting, to wood floors and baseboards are available. You can even purchase the wall studs if you have the inclination. Bring your tools and a vehicle to haul in. Payment is cash or check.

Don’t find what you want? Get on their email list to be notified of the next sale. Or visit their warehouse with additional building materials that have been donated or salvaged from area homes and businesses. They always have a selection of hardwood flooring, used bricks and more.  There is nothing like the feeling you get from knowing you may have saved a tree. House recycling – it’s good and its fun.

Whole House Building Supply and Salvage
1955 Pulgas Road  East Palo Alto, CA  94303
Warehouse 650-328-8731    Donations 650-322-3090
www.driftwoodsalvage.com