Guest post from a member’s husband. Coworking has far reaching benefits beyond what individual members gain from the experience of coworking.
Since my wife has started coworking it has unexpectedly improved my life in a few ways, and it has nothing to do with additional income. It has increased the quality of our life here at home, making me a huge fan. Not that we want to get rid of her, but we are thrilled that she is coworking! Here’s why:
1. Quality one-on-one time with the kids
I work all day and have few quality moments with my boys during the week. I get home during the chaos of dinner and bedtime routines. On coworking nights, my boys and I set up the living room like a movie theater, turn off all of the lights and wrap up with blankets and popcorn. We watch fun movies and eat candy that my wife probably wouldn’t let them eat during the day. We call this “Boy’s Party” and it’s the highlight of our week.
2. Decreases guilt/increases balance for personal activities
I am an avid fly fisherman and the river is my sanctuary. Being able to get out with my flyrod is really important and recharges me. With my wife having a dedicated night for coworking, I’ve been able to have a dedicated fishing night. It’s a great balance and we don’t feel guilty for having our own personal interests.
3. Moments of peace and quiet
On the nights that my wife coworks, after the kids are in bed, the house is silent. There’s nobody to talk to, there’s nothing to think about. It’s a treasured moment of true peace and silence, which is much needed after a long day at work. It’s quite relaxing and restful – everyone should have a few moments to themselves to decompress.
You’d think that with our busy life and day’s full of activities that my wife leaving for night coworking once a week would be taxing, but it’s not. It actually helps us balance some important aspects of all of our lives.
EXPENSES: Sharing resources in a coworking space (coffee, electricity, water, photocopies, phone & internet) lessens your individual burden of having to purchase all of this for your home office.
PERSONAL LIFE / PROFESSIONAL LIFE: Separating your job from your domestic life is the Rosetta Stone of the 21st century. Do you think it is good idea meet all of your customers & partners in your home office?
PRODUCTIVITY: Ask anyone who works from home about having to endure their neighbors, children, traffic noise, home sellers, postman, the washing machine. Almost all professions need a quiet, creative and inspiring work space.
LONELINESS: In isolation, a creative mind takes very little to become blocked. The synergy of a couple of coworkers helps you reach your fullest creative potential.
Enjoy this guest post from coworker Kristin Mastre on how coworking gave her much needed balance between being a stay at home mom and a small business owner. Having my cake and eating it too.
Member Kristin coworks every Wednesday night while her husband hangs out with the kids.
The other day, my kids and I were attending a birthday party for one of my older son’s preschool friends. As the kids were running around jumping in bounce houses and sliding down slides, another mom and I had a chance to chat.
“Congrats on all of the progress you’ve made with work! You deserve it. You’ve worked really hard. There are quite a few moms around town who are envious that you have it all. You have a balance of staying at home, but still working in a career both at the same time. A lot of people wish they could do the same.”
It was an incredibly flattering compliment, and it wouldn’t have gotten it without the help from my fellow coworking space members. I can live that double life while night coworking. I do have a great balance with home and work. I get to take my boys to everything they want to do – karate classes, attend school field trips and park days; I also plan meetings, collaborate and grow my business and passion. I get to have my cake and eat it too. Being a work-at-home-mom is isolating and frustrating, often times feeling like you’re talking to yourself (or the walls). When I was at my lowest point in motherhood, I joined a moms group and became an active member, essentially saving my sanity. When becoming an entrepreneur, it seemed like a natural step to join a coworking space to network with other professionals. Fortunately, my coworking space had the best membership for me where I could still keep my flexible work-at-home lifestyle and cowork with other local freelancers at the same time. It’s great! One night a week I leave the boys at home with their dad so they can have “boys party”, watching movies and eating popcorn. They enjoy sharing their special bonding time together. I get to pack up and head off to coworking where I get an incredible amount of work done while forming business relationships that are taking my career to the next level. Without my membership, my business growth would take a lot longer, not having those vital professional connections. Also, my kids would be missing out on some important one-on-one time with their dad. We really do have the perfect balance that way and it wasn’t difficult to obtain, thanks to night coworking.
Coworking is considered by many to be an urban movement, with most coworking activity located in big cities.
But our recent census of U.S. coworking facilities shows that roughly 20% are located outside of the 50 most populated U.S. metropolitan areas (MSAs). And over 40% are outside the 10 most populated areas.
Examples of smaller cities with coworking facilities include Asheville (NC), Des Moines, Grand Rapids, Lincoln, Santa Cruz (CA) and Ft. Wayne.
We also found that a growing number of coworking facilities are located in suburbs – some well outside the urban core.
Altamont Coworking www.altamontcowork.com , for example, is located about 50 miles east of San Francisco in Tracy, CA. Another example is Satellite Coworking www.thesatelliteinc.com , located 31 miles south of San Jose in Felton, CA.
It will come as no surprise to those familiar with SF Bay Area traffic that both of these facilities stress the advantages of using their space instead of commuting.
Other suburban coworking facilities, such as Converge Coworking www.convergenj.com in Union, NJ, are located in closer-in suburbs.
The growing geographic diversity of coworking facilities reflects the broad appeal of the coworking movement.
Steve King is a partner at Emergent Research and is leading their current coworking study. www.coworkinglabs.com
A lot of people are talking about coworking. But does it really make that much of a difference?
Starting a business isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. Most entrepreneurs are so interested in keeping the bills paid, they forget how vital things like fresh air and conversation can be to their business’ success.
If you’re debating whether or not to give coworking a try, here are some compelling reasons to experience work outside the home office:
1. Motivation
Joining a coworking community is like getting a double shot of motivation right in the ticker. It might surprise you to know that there are people that will find your ideas/talents/products impressive and constantly encourage you to reach for more. They are called coworkers, and they are waiting to assure you that there is a reason to keep going.
2. Networking
Aside from those special souls that were born for cold calling, have you ever met someone that really enjoys networking events? There’s all that awkward glancing between face and name tag, painful small talk about the catered food, and the inevitable fumbling for the business card.
When you’re a coworker, networking ceases to be a traumatizing monthly event and instead becomes a natural part of your daily conversation. Each day, you’ll be sitting next to someone new, with a whole set of talents, ambitions, and business contacts waiting to be discovered.
3. Bartering
Money tight? Working in a community of small business owners and freelancers means that everyone can relate to clients who ignore invoices and struggling bank accounts. But instead of breaking down, coworkers barter. Chances are, within 20 feet of your laptop you’ll find someone that’s willing to trade you graphic design work for some help with marketing, or new head shots in exchange for a snappy press release.
4. Outsourcing
(No, not like that terrible show that replaced Parks and Rec). If you’ve got more work than you know what to do with, there’s no need to give up sleep or force your family into indentured servitude. As a coworker, you have a built in pool of talented, motivated people all around you that will probably be interested in picking up your slack for pay or barter. Not only will your clients think you’ve developed super human powers because of how fast things will get done, you’ll gain major karma points in the freelancing community.
5. Creativity
Traditional businesspeople swear by “location, location, location.” For coworkers, the mantra is “ideas, ideas, ideas.” Writer’s block, brain farts, and design paralysis are no match for a community of creatively endowed people. If a problem project has you stymied, try shouting it out to the built in focus group seated all around you (check to make sure they don’t have their headphones in first). You might be surprised at how quickly you’ll have more ideas than than ever.
These are the adjectives that come to mind when coworking in Omaha’s newest collaborative workspace, CAMP Omaha.
Snuggled secretively inside a former furniture warehouse that’s getting a creative make-over, CAMP has the feel of a 1950′s elementary classroom gone horribly right.
Gone are the intrusive fluorescent lights and clumsy chalkboard. In their place are giant windows, spacious desks, comfy couches, and a map of America so giant it’ll make you want to want to play Twister all over the Midwest.
In its own words, “CAMP is a dream realized through creative friends, late night pancake runs, Double Dead Guys, supportive parents, great friendships and a passion to give back to Omaha.” Translation: if you’re into private offices and library-like workspaces, don’t bother going to CAMP.
BUT! If you like comparing musical playlists, longboarding to the bathroom, and pulling all-nighters with freelance fashion designers, software programmers, writers, and photographers…CAMP has a bunk with your name on it.
Wanna learn more? Follow @CAMPomaha on Twitter or join their page on Facebook. If you’re passing through Nebraska, be sure to stop in and say hi to Megan and the whole CAMP gang. (And be on the lookout for the wandering mannequin!).
@GoneCoworking is the adventure of Beth and Eric, two crazy kids traveling the country to find out whether it’s really possible to be a location independent freelancer! The coworking community provides a unique opportunity for traveling telecommuters/freelancers/business owners to have a professional workspace and remain connected with their peers while away from home. Here’s an inside look at some of the coworking people and spaces we’ve met along the way!
A few months ago, I decided that Beijing really needed a coworking location, and I would be the one to build it. I immediately started to look at office leases here and quickly became discouraged because of the extremely high cost. At the same time, however, I’d been reading about lean startup techniques and customer development for my own startup. Lean startups focus on ensuring product-market fit before investing a lot of resources, so I decided to apply some of these ideas to my coworking project. I’m glad I did, because they forced me to slow down and saved me from making an expensive mistake.
If you’re also starting a coworking space and would like to know how I’m starting small and building up, here is the process I’ve used so far:
1. First, you have to find out who in your area is interested in coworking and what they are looking for. I set up a free survey on Wufoo.com to ask some simple questions and so I would have a link that I could forward people to.
In my opinion, the most important questions here are ‘Why are you interested in coworking?’, ‘Where would you like us to be located?’, and ‘What’s your email address/name?’. These tell you who what types of people will form the core of your community, where they are, and how to contact them. I also asked a lot of other questions including ‘How often would you want to work at a coworking space?’, and how important each of a whole list of possible amenities would be.
One mistake I made on this survey is that I asked about price in a multiple choice question – everyone chose the least expensive option. A better way to ask the same question would be to only ask ‘Would you be willing to pay $X per day/month?’ The best would probably be to randomize the price that gets shown to people, so you can tell when people actually start to hesitate.
2. In order to get answers, you need to start distributing your survey, so start by thinking about where you think potential coworking are hanging out now. Twitter can work if you get someone with a lot of followers to retweet, but coworking is very local, so other techniques might work best for you. If you just start talking to people at coffee shops and events, you’ll probably find a lot of people who are interested. Get their contact info and follow up by sending them a link to your survey. If you want to spend money, you can also put up an adsense campaign for things like ‘<name of city> coworking’ ‘<name of city> shared office’. This has the added advantage of letting you know how actively people in your area are looking for coworkiing.
3. You can’t have too much context on a survey, so put up some blog posts as well. Especially if your area doesn’t have anything coworking related, it should be easy to start ranking highly for important keywords. This is much cheaper than an advertising campaign if it works. Make sure your survey and your blog link to each other; you wouldn’t want people who come to the blog to not be able to find your survey.
4. As soon as you have some responses, you should start an email list. I use MailChimp to manage mine, and it’s really easy. This is far better than BCCing people on emails like I did at first. For one thing, it gives people an easy way to opt-out just by clicking a link in your email. Another is that you can keep track of how many people are reading your newsletter and manage your users easily. I now automatically add people to an ‘important updates’ email list; basically, I’ll email them when we’re about to officially open.
5. Once you’ve done all these easy steps and have found a few interested people, think about the minimum, most valuable part of what you are offering – generally, that is the community that you want to build. You should see if there’s a way to get people hooked on that without needing to invest in real estate immediately. For me, this is getting people to work together informally. I have a second email list for people who want to start working together right away. I actually think Google Groups might be a better option for this step because it supports discussions, but that’s blocked in China, so I can’t use it here.
There are lots of coffee shops in Beijing, so every week I decide where I’ll work each day and send out an email on Sunday evening. This has been really helpful in getting community around this idea and we can also start appreciating the benefits of working together sooner. In person, you have much more in-depth conversations with people and gauge their interest better, so maybe you can even find some of them who are really excited and can help by suggesting locations, paying for a month in advance, etc.
If the coffee shops in your city aren’t very good for working, maybe you can find some other way to begin creating the community. Perhaps get people together for dinner or run a jelly in your apartment every once in a while.
Right now, this is where I am in Beijing. My next step is to look again at places to rent. Two or three people who have been participating in our informal coworking group have already said they’d like to be core members in the beginning. Unlike when I first looked at offices, I think I’m going to concentrate on finding an apartment to convert – these are generally smaller and less expensive, with more flexible leases, so three people is already enough to make the cost per person very reasonable. Boston’s Betahouse also works out of an apartment, and it was great to visit. It’s relatively small, but everyone is productive and there’s a very strong community, which is exactly what I’d like here.
I hope that if you’re considering starting a coworking location, some of these tips will be useful to you as well.
If you’d like to read more about coworking in Beijing, feel free to check out my blog at http://blog.mpdaugherty.com.
Wood Project / Meeting Table (Jay and Tom at their desks)
Short History
A couple of years ago, I read an article on coworking. After reading it, I thought to myself…wow, this is just like the old Neighborhood Telecommuting Centers of the 1980’s.
Having co-written the first “Telecommuting Plan” at LLNL, I became a staunch advocate of telecommuting and in the early to mid-90’s, I pondered opening a Telecommuting Center in Tracy, CA. Hey…205 was getting busier, 580 was packed most days, lots of commuters complaining about their long commutes, and these commutes were getting longer and longer. I thought “Wouldn’t it be perfect to give commuters a place to work, close to home?”. However, not having money or support, that never happened….probably a good thing.
Fast forward 15 to 20 years or so….
Now “retired” from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (but, still needing to make money) I opened the Tracy Virtual Office (now AltamontCowork) as a “coworking” location on May 1, 2009.
Did I understand what coworking was? Ahhh….No. My mind was stuck in “telecommuting” mode, and commuters. But, that’s ok…I’m great at learning on the fly. I did.
Originally, as I sort of said above, I thought opening a coworking location was a great way to get commuters off the roads, reduce traffic, save dollars, be closer to home, improve their quality of life and increase productivity. All the benefits of telecommuting. In other words, a modern version of a Neighborhood Telecommuting Center…my dream.
Scratch that….
Fast forward, 14 months (and change)
I now understand “coworking” (at least from my own experience).
Before I move on, let me get the following out of my system, as I still believe VERY strongly in the benefits of telecommuting (working at home or, now, at a coworking location). There are ZERO commuters using AltamontCowork. ZERO. Let me rant on that point for a few seconds: If you are happy commuting over 4 hours a day from Tracy to the Bay Area, great, BUT, I DO NOT want to hear ANY complaints! If you complain…then DO SOMETHING about it. TALK to your Old Fashioned Boss (OFB) about telecommuting. Believe me, your OFB will NOT talk to you…he / she does NOT care one whit (maybe with an “s” in front) about your commute or quality of life. If you are too chicken to do something about your commute (assuming your job allows you to telecommute)…don’t complain, pure and simple. Ah….there, I’m done. I feel better? Arrrghhh….
Back to coworking. 🙂
A coworking location IS an open collaborative space where independents, freelancers, small / micro businesses can call “home”.
It is NOT a boxed 10 x 10 office, it is NOT a virtual office…which is just a time-shared boxed office.
Likewise it is NOT Starbucks or McDonald’s or Barnes & Noble where you can sit and work on your laptop (in isolation except for the noise) until you get booted out.
And it is NOT your home. This means you have to get dressed and go to work. It does help you stay away from the refrigerator, helps you avoid distractions (honey-do lists, kids, pets, laundry, lawn, garbage), and fight off isolation.
It IS a place where you get to know your fellow coworkers, where you can work in environment similar to a company, but, you are your own boss.
It IS a place where IDEAS flow freely (you are no longer isolated).
It IS a place where you can get help just by asking. “Can someone help me?”.
It IS a place where you can give seminars, teach a class, or have a meeting.
It IS a place where you and your coworkers can (and do) go out to lunch together, enjoy birthday parties, have family nights, laugh, and enjoy other social events. It is kid and pet friendly, and, geeezzz, you could field a softball team in your town.
It IS a place where you can meet clients without cleaning your house! And feel safe.
By the way….a coworking location IS ALSO CLOSE to your home. You can be with your family, you won’t miss important plays, games, doctor visits, etc. You can ride a bike to work or walk (good for your health and the health of the world). You will probably spend more of your money in town (good for the fiscal health of your town).
Coworking has MANY benefits….and it is super affordable for starting out.
One coworking location came up with a great description:
“Work FOR Yourself, Not BY Yourself”
I thought of another while running….rats, walking one day, we are:
“A Community of Independents” (since there are no commuters / telecommuters).
Summary
Coworking is a NEW way to work, and I predict it will be THE way to work 10 years from now as box offices and virtual offices knock down walls to become coworking locations.
The benefits of coworking are simply too compelling to ignore.
Commuters?…..hmmmm, well. Have fun. Until you get the nerve to talk to your OFB (Old Fashioned Boss) to start telecommuting / coworking, have a good life on the road. No complaining!
Driving through Iowa on our way to Des Moines revealed exactly what you might expect about a midwestern state: corn, tractors, wind farms, and more corn. But nestled inconspicuously in a warehouse just outside the downtown area is a hothouse for creativity and technical innovation called Impromptu Studio.
As Iowa’s first home for coworking, Impromptu is proud to have inspired others with the spirit of coworking and led the way in igniting growth in Iowa’s technology scene.
The mix of coworkers that call this comfortable space home is eclectic and refreshing. From artists and writers, to developers and remote workers, many different types of people have come to depend on the community and collaborative potential of Impromptu Studio.
Chatting with @catrocketship, it was easy to see that a common coworking problem affected the professionals in this space as well: the inability to avoid coming up with new projects, business ideas, and website themes on a daily basis. Coworkers are constantly inventing and creating, a process that is effortless when working an elbow’s length away from likeminded people.
The other half of this delightful spacecrew, @scottrocketship, was clearly passionate about what coworking can do for the still-developing cultural and technological scene in Iowa. Striving to push the envelope, whether it be throwing rockin’ parties or offering the only voice of criticism in room full of yes-men, it’s creative thinkers like Scott that will continue to reinvent coworking into something even better.
@DanielShipton is the space’s founder, and dedicated advocate of the coworking lifestyle. CEO of @BitMethod a company that has quickly grown to support five employees, Daniel refuses to retreat to private office space. Instead, his company proudly inhabits the upper section of the loft space, happily brainstorming and inventing out in the open at a long conference table.
In the future, Daniel sees coworking as a recruiting tool for technology companies like BitMethod. Companies that contract out their work to freelancers can offer a cafe-like space on the company grounds as a way to take the “remote” out of remote worker. Morale and productivity go up, while the company is able to keep wasted space and resources down. And the company will have a built-in pool of awesome people to pick from when it’s time to expand.
If you’re ever passing through Iowa, I highly recommend stopping into say hi to the coworkers at Impromptu. Even if it’s just for an afternoon Mario Kart tournament.
We have been making great progress cleaning up the coworking wiki and eradicating spam. The first step is to start a moderator group that approves/denies people who would like to make edits. This is a pretty easy step as folks who are not interested in coworking and only want to add links and such generally don’t try very hard. Will Bennis from Locus Workspace in Prague personally writes everyone who doesn’t include a message in their sign up request and only one in four write him back. We also keep a close eye on the changes RSS feed and jump in and clean house when someone mucks things up.
The space listing has been cleaned up too and moved into a specific Directory page. We have also kicked off The Coworking Database Project aimed at creating better searching functionality. The end result will be a fully decoupled data set with APIs to hook into various interfaces around the net. For example, imagine the data behind Coworking in Deutschland was centralized and they were able to pull just the German spaces to power their list and map. If you would like to get involved in that project we have a mailing we use for collaboration and it’s all listed on the project splash page.
If you are interested in helping out with the wiki cleanup work, or would like to make suggestions, just drop me a line at jacob [at] officenomads [dot] com.
