My first month co-working

Last year I set out to take my personal hack time a little more seriously and wrap a business around it. I held an office in Grand Rapids and labeled it a “man cave”, and used it all of about 6 times with a total of about $400/mo.  Despite the solitude in my own office, I failed to get to the mental kick start I was looking for out of the environment.

So I’ll cycle back to what I really wanted out of it:

• A place to escape the (somewhat toxic) workflow of the day job and adopt new methodologies for getting my work done.
• A place for the academic practice of my profession to get back to the drive that got me here in the first place.
• A place to dedicate the entire day to tomorrow and be progressive with my future.
• A place to “hang out” with potential clients and collaborate with folks in the similar industries.

Did I get that?

Not really, for one I was surrounded by least interesting person to bounce ideas off of, which was myself.  Secondly, I found myself still scattered and attending meetups and tech groups looking for the same things I stated on the list previous. Which does not work as most of these meetings are limited in time, and sometimes more structured than I wanted (but interesting all the same).

So we closed up the office and moved the operations to U.S. Signal, leaving me at Panera bread wearing out my welcome and with github issues, or worse yet at home where the life balance gets all convaluted.

In April I decided to give co-working out at elevatorup for a spin.  Things were ramping up with development sprints for Dev Arboretum and my need to break out for aggressive Spectrum Health development was growing.  I have some relatively  small windows to produce and nowhere to do it.

Here is what I ended up with:

• Surrounding myself with people with an incredible drive to do stuff.  Some I understand, some I dont, but that kind of energy is catchy.
• Ability to concentrate in a SILO, but mingle in a tech soup.
• Overhearing an occassional “F-BOMB” which reminds you that you are truly free (at least for a day) from a corporate environment.
• Well kept surroundings, no more carpet stains or in office servers spinning.
• No more Tori Amos looping continually.
• Being a developer of sorts that has been in a target industry for years, its so nice to be surrounded by other industries.
• Somebody  (@zmoazeni ) actually asked what the hell I was doing.  You underestimate how awesome this is until nobody does it for a year.

The experience is positive, economically makes sense, and is achieving what I wanted over a year ago.

If you haven’t at least tried co-working, here is my best shot at explaining it to you:

Have ever worked in an office, and felt that you were on a perpetual conference call,  all day, everyday?  Well, co-working is kind of like that, except it doesn’t suck, and is kind of like being at a perpetual conference for something you enjoy, while working all the same.