Workspace Matters

Today (and perhaps tomorrow) Tony and Todd will be at New Work City sifting through pictures and laying out the design of the book.  We don’t have enough high res pictures, really, so we are having to resort to the friends and family plan.  We want to go heavy on the pictures for a simple yet important reason.

Workspace Matters

While we all know that the cultural vibe around coworking is radically different than the hiearchical vibe that one encounters in most companies, there is a visual element that is crucially important as well.  The physical space in which a person works…matters.  Space and culture are inseparable.  If you are isolated in a cubicle with no contact with other people, then, well, you are working alone.  If, on the other hand, you want to or need to actually communicate with other hominids (for collaboration or just simple human contact) then working in a truly open space will make that more possible.

Built environments are never neutral.  Work spaces reflect assumptions about human needs and human behaviors.  You can tell a lot about a company or organization by just looking at the workspaces they provide their employees.  For example:

  Most coworking spaces, as we show in the book, are pretty much the opposite.  For example:

Time and again, each coworking space we discover counters the cube-farm with an open-space environment where people can get their work done AND interact with other hominids at the same time…

Imagine that.

Monday Morning Quarterback

Composing our book–The Work/Life Revolution–has been an experiment in long-distance collaboration. As Todd spoke about the other day, we have been heavily dependent on Google docs, for better or worse. (Some day soon, I suppose, someone will release a truly user-centered collab writing platform, but that is for another entry.)

Last night we met up, by phone with the Google doc in front of us, to talk about… images. Pictures. Of people and spaces. Now that the text is more or less complete, we realize that a LARGE part of the story will be pictures of the spaces where creative coworking is taking place, and of the people making it happen. We have some pictures, and are using the best we have.

Now that we realize what a central narrative role the pictures should have–ideally pictures of coworking in action– we are keen to see if any friends out there have pictures that we can use in the book?

For example, below is a pic I took this past summer while working at Conjunctured, in Austin. Any such image, from where you work/live/play etc, would be awesome.

And thanks!

Collaborating with Google Docs

With few exceptions (book layout), we used Google Docs (specifically the Documents component) to write The Work/Life Revolution.  This was result of one part need (Drew lived in Birmingham; Tony lived in New York City; and I lived in Birmingham and later in New York City) and one part curiosity.  Bottom line, we weren’t just writing about a highly mobile group of workers–we were a highly mobile group of workers.  In the process, we pushed Google Docs to the limit.

Is Google Docs ready for prime time?  I’m not sure.  That depends on what you need for prime time.

The final manuscript for the book was 30-40+ printed pages, without images and boilerplate.  During the writing and editing, we kept multiple revisions of each story around and at times the page count climbed much higher.  We cursed a lot.  We also learned a few things.

1. You cannot keep everything in one document.  Google Docs has a roughly 500K limit on document size.  Markup counts against this limit.  In cut-and-paste scenarios between Google Docs and word processing applications, the invisible embedded markup and styling can easily outweigh the actual text.  When you hit the limit you will lose content.
2. “Clear Formatting” is your friend.  The invisible embedded markup and styling will eventually drive you crazy.  On more than one occasion a single backspace at the beginning of a paragraph resulted in a cascading failure in which the paragraph was slammed to the left margin, lines of space were added after the paragraph, and the entire paragraph changed to another format.  If you cut-and-paste from another word processor, get used to selecting the entire pasted region, clearing the formatting, and reformatting.
3. Beware the simultaneous edits.  Google Docs will punt when it detects edits to the same part of the document at the same time.  This is reasonable and expected, however Google Docs also punted for less obvious reasons.  As a general rule, only one person should edit the document at a time, even if you are all viewing it.  But, see part two, below.
4. Beware the simultaneous edits, part two.  Google Docs had the annoying habit of jumping to another section of the document at unpredictable times when more than one person edited the document at the same time.  This probably was intended to call attention to parts of the document that just changed, but it made it nearly impossible for two people to edit the same document at the same time, even if they were editing different parts of the document.
5. The user-interface will change.  During a long project you can count on the Google Docs team adding features to and removing features from the application.  I had intended to include a few screen shots in this post to show you what I meant, but they’ll be out-of-date in two months, so forget that.  Sorry.
6. Back up (download) the documents you are working on early and often.  I can’t define exactly how and when we lost text, but I tell you with absolute certainty that we lost text.

The experience wasn’t bad in all aspects.  As a free, lightweight collaboration tool, Google Docs works well.  In fact, for small documents that you want to share, it works extremely well.  Even for large projects, it’s far far better than passing a document around by e-mail and merging the edits by hand.  I’ve done that and that’s the path to madness.

A common concern is availability.  The availability of Google Docs was never a problem during the entire project.  I worked on the document from multiple computers, in places I wouldn’t ordinarily have been able to work.  Google Docs was always there.  That’s a big win!

Todd Sundsted