Ever heard of the Japanese term Hikikomori? Well, basically it’s something that happens to you if you’re cooped up in your room, or an enclosed spot, for days and weeks at an end, with little external stimuli and social interaction. It’s an actual thing – you go batshit. You start snapping at those closest to you, grow irritable and are always frustrated, but at the same time, because you’ve grown used to being in a fixed spot, you don’t make any efforts to go out even if you can. You physically detain yourself.
I know, a lot of you freelancers must be reading this quite nervously and rapidly, sifting through your memories hoping to avoid catching evidence of it in your behavior. Most likely, you’ve experienced it, if not in an extremely drastic way, in the littler ways. When was the last time you remember stepping out? Even though the very purpose of having embarked on the freelance lifestyle was to offer yourself the freedom to do so, have you seized on that freedom yet? If the answer to that is ‘no’, then it’s likely that maybe you’re not meant to be working alone, as a freelancer. This doesn’t mean you should go back to a corporate life, but what if you stumbled upon an alternative which truly marries the best of both worlds?
There’s a whole bunch of scenarios under which working out of office-like spaces with a bunch of other individuals who aren’t colleagues — co-working, if you will — would really benefit you.
Get Out Of That House
The biggest appeal of this is that it gives you somewhere to go everyday with the idea of working. It gets you out of your house and into the real world, and because you go there with a set objective of working, you are more productive as a result. At the end of the day, you can even stop by a bar or a coffee shop with friends. This is something you might be a little lazy about if you’re at home in your pajamas all the time.
Meet People, Socialize
We’re social animals. Some more so than others, but either way humans need company to function well and rationally. Coworking offers that. It’s really hard to make friends in offices. But shared office spaces aren’t offices in the strictest sense of the word. Coworking spaces are generally quite laid-back mostly because the people who inhabit it — primarily freelancers, but even startup businesses and entrepreneurs — aren’t either your boss, or colleagues desperately trying to ‘one-up’ you. They’re simply other individuals like yourself trying to find a nice and convenient location to work out of. Instead of locking yourself at home and Instagram-stalking all your close and even not-so-close contacts, you could actually connect with people on a daily basis. And who knows, you might even find some clients out of the pool of people co-working in the office space while speed networking during these interactions.
with like-minded people.
Distraction Free And Balanced Living
It is very important to cultivate the right mindset for any job. While working a 9 to 6, an individual generally tries their darndest to complete their work for the day so they can go back and relax. The office gets equated to work, and home to leisure. The vibe back home has been cultivated as such through years of living in it, and is hard to break from. You get distracted by little things – food, television, bed, etc. This means you take twice the amount of time to complete a task back home as you would otherwise take.
Alternatively, you could assimilate your work into your home all too well. Which is perhaps even more dangerous. Because then you start stretching that time frame from 5 to 6 to 8 and eventually there’s no difference between work and home anymore, because the former has entirely devoured the latter. So much so that even when you’re not working, your home feels too much like work and you can’t entirely let your hair down. Either way, this sucks. Co-working offers a space, relatively easy-going in atmosphere, but still a place you know is meant for you to work. The timings are flexible and the space is available 24/7 so you can still format your work around your life which was the point of freelancing, but now you can do so without having to throw your work-life boundaries into imbalance.
Of course, people have different individual needs. Some people prefer the stability of an office/corporate job. Some prefer the lazy casual lifestyle of working from home. And some like a half-way point. Whatever your personal needs may be, co-working offers quite the ideal setup.
