Tag: Global change

The changing workspace

Posted on by philipdodson

For centuries, for most of us, work has been associated with a physical space, now work for many has become an activity that you can do anywhere.

This is a much more significant change for the world than the one sentence it took to describe it.

Workplace

This fundamental change is and will have many impacts on our lives, from commuting, to working hours, family time, how we collaborate and communicate with others.

Human beings essentially thrive on being social and a big impact on our well being is being part of a community and having something to belong to. This for most of us was or still is, between 8 – 6 pm, if not longer, Monday to Friday, a company and a physical workplace, our own desk, pedestal, even for the few, our own offices.

There were people to interact with, people to share ideas, people to get support from, people to manage us and people to eat lunch with.

This environment for many in the rising world of self-employment has gone and has been replaced with mainly solitude.

Solitude at home, where after a prolonged period of this solitude, normally leads to a lack of motivation, a feeling of isolation and a good old dose of ‘cabin fever’.

Often the only interaction is with the cat/dog (delete where appropriate), you find daytime TV has crept in (we’ve all watched a bit of Jeremy Kyle), washing to put on, a trip to shops and if you’re like me a quick game on the PlayStation whilst eating lunch.

So often the freelancer, solo-preneur etc., ventures out in search of interaction, motivation and a break from the isolation. They typically head to a coffee shop, where there will be people and a place to work.

However, for those of us who have done the regular coffee shop caper, it’s poor Wi-Fi, too much coffee to ease the guilt, and noise. What you won’t get is any less distractions and you certainly won’t get any meaningful business interactions. Oh and the trip to the toilet means packing up the laptop and losing your seat.

If predictions of as many of 50% of us becoming self-employed within 10 years prove true, then there will be millions of us with this dilemia and need to do work other than at home or in a coffee shop.

The solution is co-working communities, where not only can you get a proper working environment, decent Wi-Fi, good coffee, but you can get the meaningful business interactions that you crave/need to succeed as a freelancer/entreprenuer etc.

Good co-working spaces will go a step further than just providing a desk to work from, they will have that real community, whereby serendiptiy thrives and those chance interactions lead to new ideas, new partners, new suppliers, new customers and just a person to share a bad/good day with.

This where the fundamental change starts to happen, as more and more of us start to work in these communities and experience the huge benefits that working around others brings to our businesses and ulitmately our soul. We will see a massive acceleration in the abandonment of the corporate paid for employment world.

Most importantly, we will see a shift from that old corporate world to a more prosperous collaborative world, where through a community working together, true sharing and helping will make work an activity that we all love, rather than for many of us, an activity we dislike.

We will become liberated from this 9-5 corporate machine that sucks us up from early in life until, once we are completely used, spits us out into retirement to wait to die.

This will change the face of our cities and communities too, as the current commercial real estate will be used very differently and we will see more residential communities being meshed together with working and educational hubs/communities. So that local communities can be re-formed.

We are living in exciting times, where we stand at a line now drawn in the sand, where back one way is the old school corporate/capitalist world and if we dare to step forward, is the collaborative, co-working, sharing world, where prosperity will be measured in relationships – putting people ahead of material wealth.

My 30 day challenge, day 5 – by Philip Dodson

Posted on by philipdodson

So it’s day 5 and all still on course, no slip ups yet. Although, I am sat in my kitchen at home at 20:40 just starting to write today’s and the temptation of the ‘vices’ are there, distracting me. So it’s head down and focus.

Today’s picture came from standing waiting for a tube and the yellow line, that you MUST NOT CROSS really stood out.

photo (5)

There are restrictions in life and some of them are sensible, like here. Although, I for one would not stand right near the edge of a train platform, with or without the yellow line being painted, or someone announcing “please remain behind the yellow line as the train approaches”.

My thought for today is, that we live in a world that now, more than ever, is all about restricting, about confining and ‘prevention’. Yet no one is willing to look at the root cause or if they do, they would rather just restrict, than face the challenge.

The people who hold the power want to protect the status quo in the world and therefore stifle any real change by imposing yet more control.

The cause of most of the challenges we face globally is, the self-preserving old school system. The one that will only do whatever is needed to ensure re-election and to satisfy their sponsors, usually mega wealthy/mega large corporations.

The thing they fear more than ever and are desperate to restrict, is the Internet and the unregulated networks that have formed. Social media is now connecting like minded, disenfranchised souls, who may rise up and challenge the old school establishment. Uh oh quick, shut that down and fill children’s and parents’ heads with nonsense about the ‘dangers’ of the ‘wicked’ online world.

Well, we need a massive global revolution to get rid of the greed, the materialism, in fact all the ‘isms’, that have all run their courses and lead mainly to failure. We need to bring back community, where people share and collaborate to help everyone. We need to remove restrictions and encourage true creativity and innovation. We are going to need some special technological advances to cure the issues the 7 billion souls on this planet are facing.

It won’t happen by restricting, controlling, and continually creating a dependency on a system, which aims to keep us in a state of never ending consumerism, purely for the financial gain of the mega wealthy old school minority.

So I urge you all – throw off the restrictions, cross that line, not in front of the train, but stop accepting what has always been the way of doing things, as the only way of doing things. Rise up and get others to do their bit to change the system that controls us.