Work Booths

[whole diary]

[grahame]

From Tim McDonalds at the BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page)

Are pay-by-the-minute booths the future of work?

I don’t really like working from home.

Sure, there are advantages, but I find it isolating. I’m sick of sitting in my apartment. I prefer to interact with colleagues face-to-face.

I find the endless Zoom meetings draining. I’m tired of the lunch options nearby.

Also, construction noise is inescapable in Singapore, and I’m dreading the day when builders start tearing down the building across the street, or the neighbours start to renovate their kitchen.

In preparation for this, I tried out a new type of workspace. It’s a pay-by-the-minute desk in a booth at my nearest shopping centre.

The pods, which cost less than four Singapore dollars ($3; £2.15) per hour, have been created by a Singaporean company called Switch.

They follow similar booths that have been around for a few years in Japan, where a handful of companies like Telecube and Cocodesk have placed them in metro stations, hotel lobbies and convenience stores.

However, Switch's main competition in Singapore appears to be Starbucks, or any other coffee shop with free wi-fi.

This reminds me of the workspaces at Platform 14 at Bristol Temple Meads - though I have never used them, being there only for meetings in Brunel's Board Room.  It also reminds me of sitting in the cruise ship terminal in Newport, Rhode Island, in September 2019 and reloading our server's 4Gb databases ...

Coffee Shops, for sure - though not at present. Working from home works well for me, and on a nice day from the garden.  And I find it highly productive to work on a train as I travel ... and I know of members here who have made extended journeys as they too find they can work highly productively in that way.  But I find it almost impossible to work on a bus ...