My grad school, University of Maryland College Park, had a program earlier this year for graduates of the School of Public Policy (that’s me) to informally mentor a new student for the fall semester. I signed up, partly because I thought it would be fun, and partly because I thought I might actually have good advice for a new student.

They paired me with a young woman from Argentina, with an engineering background and at least as much of a career history as I have. Beyond some class and professor tips and gossip, and a little proofreading for her resume and cover letters, we didn’t have all that much to do in terms of the program. But we met every month, as the program required. Our usual spot was a coffee shop in Hyattsville, Maryland, a couple of miles south of campus.

One day I brought my computer and bag, and after our meeting stayed in the coffee shop for a few hours to work. I mentioned that I was staying, and she thought that was a little curious. In Argentina, she said, coffee was social, and coffee shops were places to chat and hang out. They aren’t really seen as places to work.

I work in coffee shops quite often, at least a couple of days a week, generally. It’s just like going to work, actually—I get up early, dress more nicely than if I’m at home, and sit there for about eight hours. My usual spot is a coffee shop in the lobby of an office building. There’s a microwave and a fridge along one wall, a bunch of seats in different configurations, and a bathroom along the far wall.

You can sit there for awhile after the coffee shop technically closes, too. The place never quite fills up at any one point during the day either, so I don’t feel bad buying one drink and claiming a table for as long as I want. It’s basically a sort of coworking space for $5 a day. It’s a good deal, because I’m very productive in that setting.

What it’s like is having an office without a boss watching you. I like being around people, and having the low-stakes social interaction that comes with that, but also being free from the distractions or tasks of being at home—feeding the cats, mindlessly looking in the fridge, feeling something of a domestic gravitational pull. I guess the coffee shop reminds me of studying in the library back in college and grad school.

It’s interesting how I never really got used to having a commute and a fixed, identical work day. Six years of higher education, where every day is a little different, makes it really hard to organize your work day differently than that. When I do my assorted tasks in the coffee shop, I feel like I’m returning to my most natural way of working.

Last year, for The Bulwark, I reviewed Hulu’s documentary on WeWork, which portrayed the company almost like Enron: a lot of lofty, idealistic rhetoric hiding an unprofitable and almost fraudulent business model. But like Airbnb, which is, at least according to its CEO, a big part of the flexible-work future, WeWork is still around and may have a new lease, as it were, on life.

The pandemic, of course, is the big driver of that; WeWork imploded in 2019, and if remote and flexible work had not become a huge phenomenon for the next two years, the company might have folded ignominiously. Now you have to take what these company people say with a grain of salt, because they’re describing what they want to happen, but for a lot of people this may be the future. From this 2021 news story:

“One size fits all is dead. The corporate headquarters as we knew it, 9-5, five days a week, corporate HQ, I don’t think we’re ever going back to that,” Marcelo Claure, the executive chairman of WeWork, said at last week’s CNBC @Work Summit. 

And here’s one about the pandemic bringing WeWork “back to life.”

Assuming that remote work really is a major feature of post-pandemic life, I wonder which impulse will ultimately win out: larger houses with real home offices, or flexible offices, coworking spaces, and “third places” like coffee shops? The need to focus on work and the need to have some sort of social stimulation are both pretty non-negotiable in the long run, whatever less-than-ideal arrangements people have made do with during the pandemic.

Of course, the other possibility is that widespread remote work will wither away in the next year or two. My governor, Glenn Youngkin, just announced a new, extremely restrictive telework policy, effectively ending work-from-home except for a day here and there. It’s a shame—I suppose working from home has gotten coded as a COVID thing, rather than a pro-family policy and a big driver of worker productivity, if you believe a number of studies from the last two years. Even this local Northern Virginia news site describes the policy as “return-to-work,” a common but misleading euphemism that conflates the office with work itself.

Maybe it is a little odd to sit in a coffee shop all day, and maybe all of this will be in the rearview mirror soon. But I hope not.

If you’re self-employed (like me—your subscription helps!), or if you have a flexible or remote work arrangement, what sort of routine/setting do you need or prefer? I’m curious how people have replicated some of the regularity of the office in their own ways. Leave a comment!

Related Reading:

A Man’s Home Is His Office

WeWorking Here!

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