Where will our offices of the future be?

WE used to say, “let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages.” Some of us still do. But I think most of us now let our fingers wander through the internet instead. As I discovered recently, to my embarrassment, there’s a lot of fake stuff out there in cyberworld but there’s a great deal of thought-provoking stuff too.

I was interested in a recent feature (I forget whether it was on Twitfaceor P-Tube) headed “What offices of the future will look like.” It showed airy, open areas with very few actual desks or work stations and plenty of clusters of comfortable easy chairs and small coffee tables.

I think the idea was that people would sit around in groups and pool ideas and plan strategies, creating a network of linked ideas. I suppose that’s a wonderful idea apart from the fact that it involves people. And people are not always as focused as we would like to believe.

I suspect those clusters of comfortable chairs might develop into serious discussion groups dealing with subjects like the best route to take to get to the Kenilworth Shopping Centre from Diep River, or whether the Cheetahs have a chance of winning Saturday’s game, or what’s the most economical 4x4 vehicle to take on the next family camping trip to the Kalahari? I suspect offices of the future may not look like offices at all.

In fact, they may not even exist as physical places. Offices could simply be a collection of people spread out anywhere in the world. Why go to a particular building to do your work? You can chat face to face from anywhere in the world, write reports, send accounts, exchange photographs, sketches and graphs at the tickle of a keyboard.

My own working space has shrunk over the years from a newsroom containing at least 100 desks to a single rented room in a building in Muizenberg and then to a desk-top computer at home and, finally, to a small tablet computer I can take with me wherever I go. I suppose you could say my office is me.

I have written this column in a aircraft over Africa, in a pub in England, an island in Greece, a snowbound inn in Canada and a motel in Arizona. I often write it in bed before getting up to make my first cup of coffee. I believe I am more productive now than I ever was when I went to an office every morning. I do not have to battle rush hour traffic or hunt for a parking space, so I start my working day smiling.

Theoretically, the office of the future could be worn on the wrist like a watch, but I think we will need a slightly bigger keyboard.

When my son, who is the headmaster of a large school in England, came to visit me some time ago, he managed to run the school quite easily for a week sitting on a patio in Marina da Gama with an iPad on his lap, sipping a glass of wine and watching the coots swim past. The wine probably helped.

Last Laugh

“I hear you had to leave your job. Was it because of illness?”

“Yes. The boss got sick of me.”