Complementary Cultures: 2 - It's Not Quite Office Work

It’s remarkable how quickly you can settle into a space once you’ve established a solid routine. Once you’ve figured out where to eat and sleep, once you’ve determined how you’ll be supporting yourself financially, then you can decide on an exercise routine and those are your basic pillars of support. Ideally of course you should enjoy your work, I’ve gotten lucky in this. There’s something about the feeling of doing what you want that I imagine being similar to riding a wave. This feeling of propulsion shooting through you as you feel not only motivated but also efficiently able to apply your capacities into an arena where you want to prove a point. Working with SOLS I’ve been fortunate enough to find a team which supports and allows me to work in a largely self-directed manner. The support means that there’s always someone watching my back unafraid to provide commentary when I’ve made a mistake or require greater focus. The self-directed manner of working allows me to push into areas which I consider to be most useful, and my motivation is much higher accordingly. Office work is odd, there’s an unspoken amount of time which seems to be spent recharging the batteries after staring at a screen for so long. An unspoken amount of time spent understanding extraneous sites as opposed to directly building up on your body of work. Most companies despise this. Most companies want you to keep your nose in a spreadsheet or word processor from nine until five, without ceasing to slam away at the keyboard. Most companies don’t provide flexibility; they rigidly constrain you into whatever arrangement their market analysts have touted as most effective. These companies are short-termists doomed to inevitable failure. The issue they face is the concept of the worker as a machine versus a human. A photographer who spends some time browsing photography sites will produce better images as a result. A copywriter who reads articles will have a wider range of sources to draw on. A financial analyst who takes a break from the numbers will come back to find that they fit better with fresh eyes to analyze them. The same logic applies to sleep. Some people need more some people need less, but we all need some and while in the short term it could be argued that a worker who never sleeps is most productive, this logic will not last a week. Likewise, while all workers ought to be continuously analyzing how best to aid the organization they represent, each worker knows themselves better than any cookie cutter model can hope to. By now, I’ve begun to understand the challenge which is in front of me in much greater depth than previously I could. It’s not yet possible for me to write for 8 hours per day, even with an hour of lunch during which to recharge. Instead, it’s a matter of slowly training myself to maximize the amount of quality content I can provide within the given time frame. As opposed to browsing Facebook in order to develop myself, I can browse articles on educational theory and leaps in solar panel technology. These readings allow me to passively absorb information while at the same time providing material for future writing. Not only this, but such readings also allow me to examine others’ compositional techniques so that I can emulate certain strategies in my own work. Not everyone does this of course. Not everyone ties down their spare time into noticeable parcels and analyzes exactly how to apply breaktime to work. This is fine. Just by taking breaks as they consider them to be necessary they allow themselves the capacity to compose better creations in future. Nobody wants to spend their time staring off into the depths of cyberspace. Nobody wants to waste valuable moments of life. Everyone, I assume, enjoys the feeling of pushing quality product as opposed to dealing in bottom of the barrel trash. It takes time to build up to the level you want to be at, and chances are all you’ll ever do is get increasingly close to that point, but so long as you realize your ultimate goal is to be useful, with time I think I’m sure to succeed. Written by Marcomms Intern, Jack Seaberry.