Precision workspaces

In the beginning was the tool. One tool, in fact. The Oldowan chopper.

Made from a single stone core, with flakes shaved away to create a sharp edge, it was the ultimate multi-tool for our stone-age ancestors.

Cutting, chopping, scraping. You name it, the Oldowan chopper did it.

Of course, the general purpose tool was only a stepping stone on the way to tools made for specific tasks.

Step into the British Museum and you’ll see a range of intricately carved tools. Hand-axes. Bone needles. Fish hooks.

It seems that, after a while, stone age man figured out that when it comes to work tools, specialism beats generalism every time.

Now, however, most of us don’t work with our hands, but with our minds.

But the same principle applies.

In an experiment from 2012, researchers asked people to compete two tasks. The first was a “dull” task. The second, a “creative” one.

The variable that changed was the environment in which participants completed each task. One in an office cubicle, the other at a location of their choosing (usually their home).

In the office, the participants performed the dull task about 10% better. When it came to the creative task, however, productivity increased by 20% when it was done from the participant’s preferred location.

The environment we work in is a tool for the mind.

And, just as with tools, the specialist environment beats the general-purpose every time.

17 Gough Square.

Choosing your work environment wisely is a lesson that writers, musicians, and artists have known for a long time.

It’s why they tailor their locations to whatever stage they are in the creative process.

One of the surprising things if you watch Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary Get Back is how much time is spent discussing where they want to work that day.

They start in a makeshift studio in Twickenham, workshopping the beats of the album. They then move to Apple Studios to refine and record. And then up to the roof for the final performance.

In this world, the question about whether location x or location y is more productive is moot: what matters instead is what you’re trying to do, and which location is the best fit.

The reason was well articulated by music producer Jack Antonoff. As he points out, when it comes to creative work, there’s very rarely one simple trick:

“To make art is entirely random — you are out there in the wilderness trying to catch something. There’s no space, no thing, no time of day that makes it happen, so sometimes you go, “I’ll go there and see what happens.”

Historically, this was the default way that knowledge work happened.

Samuel Johnson wrote his famous Dictionary of the English Language from his home at 17 Gough Square. Most of the time he worked in an attic room, seated in an armchair missing one arm and one leg, with the able assistance of his cat, Hodge.

But for research, he had the newly opened British Museum; for meetings, his pick of London coffeehouses; and for his deepest thinking, he would retreat to Streatham Park, the country estate of his friends the Thrales, far from the city.

Johnson chose his location depending on the task and the day. This seemed to work pretty well for him, and for most of his contemporaries.

So why did we stop working this way?

East India House.

About a half hour walk from 17 Gough Square sat East India House, renovated in 1729 to become one of a growing number of new buildings designed specifically for work: offices.

These buildings were the home of the clerk, a growing class of knowledge worker.

One such clerk, the poet and essayist Charles Lamb, summarised his daily duties at the East India Company in 1821:

“to draw up the Buyers' Accounts; to enter all deposits in the Fair Books, ensuring that the amounts agreed with those entered in the Clearing Books and the Treasury Deposit Books; to keep a ledger of short and over payments, notifying buyers of such errors and settling them; to reconcile the total amount of all Private Trade sales with the amounts actually received in the Treasury; and to give a general attention to the business of the Journals.”

For Lamb, the job was not about generating knowledge, but copying, verifying, and disseminating it.

For this type of work - the archetypal ‘dull’ task - a single, generalised, office-space made sense.

There was no Ye Old Slack, so people needed to be in close proximity to share information at speed.

And it was work that was also difficult to motivate people to do: employees in the East India Company offices during Lamb’s time had to sign in every 15 minutes.

Hence the office was born: a single location for employees to do all their assigned tasks, together, under supervision. Okay for everything, but not best-in-class for anything: the Oldowan chopper of the mind.

A home in rural Oxfordshire.

But two things have changed since Charles Lamb’s day.

The first is technological. Until recently, it was impossible to work well from multiple locations.

Take early attempts to set up second workstations in homes.

British Telecom, in their 1986 in-house journal, detail their attempts to install home workspace into a pilot home in rural Oxfordshire.

The cost of the setup (a Merlin Tonto, printer, and combined fax and photocopier) was billed as highly affordable, coming in at just under “half the cost of even a modest executive car.” Bargain.

Even more recently, extreme lengths were necessary for some: whenever hedge fund manager Steve Cohen would need to travel, an extra hotel room would be booked and a forward-deployed team sent to set up an exact replica of his twelve-monitor workstation.

For most of us, at least, we're a long way from this world, and definitely don’t need to be co-located any more to share information as Lamb and co had to.

However, it's the second change that's most important: the type of work that occupies each of us during the day.

As ledgers have been replaced with spreadsheets, and hours and hours labouring with a pen replaced by Ctrl+V, more and more of us have moved up the cognitive stack.

To put some numbers on that, courtesy of Morgan Housel:

“Thirty-eight percent of jobs are now designated as “managers, officials, and professionals.” These are decision-making jobs. Another 41% are service jobs that often rely on your thoughts as much as your actions.”

Which means the most needle-moving tasks for knowledge workers now involve making decisions, problem solving, and coming up with ideas. In short, creative work.

But this means working in a very different way.

Here’s how Georges Simenon wrote a Maigret novel:

“A Maigret novel came on Simenon like an illness: he would feel the pressure of an idea building to a point where he had no choice but to write it. At that stage he would go to his doctor for a check-up, then shut himself up in a room and write flat out until the novel was finished. This would take around seven days, plus two for revision.”

And here’s how Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the Remains of the Day:

“For a four-week period, I ruthlessly cleared my diary and went on what we somewhat mysteriously called a ‘Crash’. During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone.”

It might feel strange to admit it, but the valuable work that most of us do now is more like the work of Simenon, Ishiguro, and Johnson, than that of Charles Lamb.

Precision workspaces.

This type of work doesn’t happen well in an office. That’s why writers, artists, and musicians don't work in them.

Because when it comes to creative work, it’s our ability to tailor our spaces and patterns to perform at our best that makes the difference.

In 2016 researchers tracked the day-to-day lives of 62 entrepreneurs to see how big the differences were between the most and least creative.

The differences in day-to-day creativity for a single entrepreneur were three times greater than the difference between entrepreneurs.

It didn’t matter which of the 62 you were, if they got their conditions right, any one of them could go on to do great creative work that day.

Despite this, many of us are stuck working like clerks, in general-purpose offices that don’t maximise our creativity

Instead, we should think of the places we work as precision workspaces, chosen explicitly to match the cognitive task at hand.

Because whether a space is productive or not is not an innate quality: it entirely depends on what you do there.

Try to plough through that really tricky bit of code in the company office at 6pm on a Thursday? Good luck.

Get your team of sixteen together in your living room for a day of focussed work? It ain’t gonna happen.

From co-working spaces, to hotels, to shared offices, to coffee shops, there are a lot of precision workspaces out there already.

But the real opportunity lies in going a step further: developing spaces entirely suited for the kind of work we now actually do today, at the highest possible level.

The Studio.

I think we can break down great knowledge work into three broad types of task.

The first is solo, creative, thought.

Here, I think we need to turn to our homes: spaces that we’ve already seen outperform offices by 20% for this type of thinking. This is not a ceiling, but a floor.

Technology will help as we see VR continue to improve and the first wave of devices designed specifically for home working (such a the Opal tadpole and the Daylight DC1).

But ultimately, the home’s advantage over traditional offices isn’t just technological.

Nor is it because you’ll be interrupted less (which, in an office, happens once every eleven minutes).

It’s because in an office, you work in public.

You’re observed by others, and that locks you into a very specific set of norms. As Morgan Housel writes, great work now looks like lazy work, and so there is a stigma in doing it publicly:

“Productive work today does not look like productive work did for most of history. If your job was to pull a lever, you were only productive if you were pulling the lever. But if your job is to create a marketing campaign, you might be productive sitting quietly with your eyes closed, thinking about design.

The problem is that too many workplaces expect their knowledge workers to pull the proverbial lever – today in Microsoft Office form – 40+ hours a week when they’d be better off doing things that look lazy but are actually productive.”

This is why artists, writers and musicians seek out private spaces when they need to focus, away from the critical eye. They call these places studios.

The best home workers already think of their homes in this way.

Not as places for casual work and checking through emails, but for studio time: intense, focused, thinking, away from the public eye, in the style that we ourselves do it best.

And it doesn’t need to be in our own home, either. Sometimes a change of scene can be revolutionary.

The best example here comes from Bill Gates.

Since the late 80s, he’s retreated twice a year to a cabin in the Pacific Northwest and to spend an entire week doing nothing but reading. He calls the practice Think Weeks:

"Think Week is a time when I can be creative and push my own thinking. It's a time to step outside the day-to-day demands of my job and really focus on the big picture."

It’s this kind of work that our homes can excel in: precision workspaces for solo creative thought.

The Workshop.

The second type of task is creative work that happens together.

Researchers at the University of Texas found that the best way to come up with great ideas is not to do it alone, or together, but to blend the both.

In other words, to solve your hardest problem, nothing quite beats throwing out the schedule and getting the team together to bash things out.

My favourite example of what this looks like in practice comes from the 1970s.

At that time, if you were staying in a hotel in rural Oregon and took a wrong turn, you’d risk ending up in a room of six blokes screaming at each other about running shoes.

These were Nike’s first leadership retreats. They called them buttfaces. Phil Knight, Nike founder, explains the name in his his memoir Shoe Dog:

“[Jeff] Johnson coined the phrase, we think. At one of our earliest retreats he muttered: “How many multi-million-dollar companies can you yell out, ‘Hey Buttface,’ and the entire management team turns around?” It got a laugh. And then it stuck. “

He goes on to give a good sense of the flavour of the gatherings:

“Buttface [...] not only captured the informal mood of these retreats, where no idea was too sacred to be mocked, and no person was too important to be ridiculed, it also summed up the company spirit, mission and ethos.”

These get-togethers are the best fit for the second type of precision workspace: the workshop.

There are a few reasons why offices are a bad candidate for this.

First, getting together in your default place of work during the working day simply doesn’t deliver the same returns as getting away together, out of the routine, for multiple days.

One study found that people who had their routine disrupted produced 58% more ideas than their counterparts: not just during the disruption, but in the three weeks afterwards. Many companies have already figured this out, hence the rise of the company offsite.

But in almost all cases, the teams involved are too big. There are too many handshakes work in the candid, punchy and hyper-engaged way the Buttfaces did.

The optimal unit for the offsite is not the company but the team.

Workshops are the ideal precision workspace for these small-team creative retreats.

We don’t need to imagine what such a place would look like, because fortunately Mark Zuckerberg has already built it.

He has designed Ko'olau Ranch in Hawaii as not only a family home, but also the best place to gather Meta’s leadership team: with 30 bedrooms, a boardroom, and full catering facilities.

It goes without saying that not every founder has access to a Hawaii ranch. But fortunately the world is full of beautiful properties in stunning locations, more and more of them specially adapted to hosting teams.

The hub.

In a world of precision workspaces, can traditional offices survive? I’m optimistic.

Offices are the ideal precision workspace for a third, and final, type of work: time spent together with colleagues, partners or customers. To better reflect this, we might refashion offices as ‘hubs’.

It might seem odd to emphasise the social aspects of offices, but this was something that Jensen Huang had figured out all the way back in May 2020.

In an interview with VentureBeat, he was asked to give his read on what the future of work would look like:

“And I think that there’ll be a lot of our employees who will choose to want to work from home many days during the week, and they would still want to go in because maybe they’ll have co-op meetings. Maybe there is some really close collaboration meetings that they’d have to do. Maybe go into a lab or just go hang out, take a day off. Ha, we’ll take a day off of work and go to the office.”

It’s this thinking that was behind Voyager, Nvidia’s new office that opened earlier this year: a 750k sq-ft space designed specifically to facilitate collaboration, gatherings, and events.

Dropbox, too, has taken this approach, turning their offices into primarily collaborative spaces “meant for in-person teamwork and strengthening connections with colleagues.”

By accepting that the office doesn't have to do everything, we can adapt it for that which it’s truly great: time spent together, working casually, checking in, and catching up.

This might seem less important than the heavy-duty thinking that is the focus of studios and workshops, but I’m not sure that it is.

Just having an ambient space to meet casually and ambiently work together is valuable in itself.

A lot of great work is done - and social capital that can then be cashed in in the forge of the workshop built - in these small, quiet, moments.

Making movies.

We’ve defined three precision workspaces: the studio, the workshop, and the hub.

But this doesn’t mean that these are the only three spaces that people can and should work.

Whether it’s spending time on-site with users, finding a coffee-shop to get your head down and plough through emails, or simply taking a walk around the block (a 60% boost in your creative output, for free, whenever you want).

The point is to choose your space according to what you want to achieve.

Right now we are locked into a fruitless remote-work debate, in which the options are binary: your home, or the office.

And if you’re not on team one, or team the other, you’re blending both.

But this is the wrong question to ask.

Because there is ultimately no right answer to which workspace is best.

A better question would be: ‘which workspace is best for what I want to achieve today?’

I truly believe this is the productivity version of a trillion dollar bill, sitting on a pavement, that we’re collectively all walking past.

Some companies are already onto this. Shortly after Huang’s interview in 2020 Nvidia moved permanently to an “employee’s choice” model: combining deeply intentional time spent both together and apart with access to best-in-class meeting spaces.

As I’m typing they’re now the third largest company on earth by market cap.

They are doing what all companies need to do in a world of precision workspaces. To figure out what types of work you value, and set expectations about time in each space accordingly.

NVIDIA have devolved this choice to the individual, but some companies might choose to set this at the company, or team, level.

Once again, there is no one right answer.

Because ultimately this is a question of performance: how we turn the spaces around us into places to create great things, just how our ancestors saw them.

And we’re only at the beginning of this journey. For the best part of three centuries the office – the general-purpose workspace – has been refined and optimised.

But when it comes to the precision workspace, we’re just a handful of years in.

So there’s no telling what this might end up looking like.

In the middle of the pandemic, Ben Thompson interviewed Matt Mullenweg, Automattic CEO.

During the interview, Thompson asked him about how he thought people were adapting to the changes so far.

Mullenweg came out with a great analogy:

“It’s kind of like when they first came out with movies and people would just do plays on the screen, they wouldn’t actually make a movie.”

The future belongs to companies that make movies.

aled@ashore.io

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Once a week I write about lessons in creativity from unexpected places. You can see the rest of what I write, and sign up to my email - Crossover Creativity - here.