No Office? Why Not?

May 13

Rajasa related Add comments

I’ve been going around companies for quite a while last year and it bothers me to wake up in the morning, work, and then went home late at night so that I could repeat that routine the next day. Personally, I hate routines.. and I don’t really like waking up at 6 in the morning to travel 2 hours to my office So I question thee, is there really a need for an office?

For those of you who haven’t notice, my company doesn’t have an office. We rely heavily on internet and cellphones for communication. It really is troublesome to get used to if you’re an office person, well.. I myself still haven’t get used to it even after years of freelancing. It’s kind of weird that you cannot see directly the person you’re working with everyday. Makes you kind of nervous most of the time, especially if you’re the CEO

Aside from the trouble, I find it quite advantageous in some perspectives. Having no office means that you won’t have to be dealing with rent, maintenance, and security. I had a friend who is a Director of DBS, he has a nice 2 floor average-size office at.. i forgot.. but anyway, it costs him 85 million rupiah a year for rent, and about 2-3 million a month for maintenance which include internet, electricity, phones, security, etc. To sum it up, it costs about 10 million a month to take care of the office. Expensive? not if you make billions a month, but for a company like mine that only wage about 40-60 million a month, it’s quite a something.

Judging from the overall costs, i don’t think cellphone and internet bills could top that up. But how about the cost of stress of not being able to have a direct communication? well, it’s quite.. stressful.. at one point, but it gives you more time alone to focus on your work. I don’t know about you guys but I’d done a lot better jobs when I’m all alone without anyone bothering me about something either from IM or in person. Hell, even being around 10 meters of my boss is quite disturbing for me (that is why they invented cubicle office space!). On the other hand, because I don’t have another co-worker to create a conducive environment to work, I get kind of lazy..

How in the hell could I take away the lazy part? It’s really simple and yet complicated at the same time but in short, it requires a strong discipline and work ethics (which is something that I’m working out really hard..). You need to manage your own work time and place without a direct supervision. Plan your work thoroughly and be discipline about it! I usually plan my work time 4 hours a day on designs and another 4 hours to do some research, planning out things, tumbling with documents, and making networks (as in busy with IMs ). It needs a LOT of adjustments to get the feeling of it, especially if you’re surrounded by people playing NFS Most Wanted of DoTA everyday.. well.. either that or surrounded by pretty girls Moreover.. it’s hard, but doable.