Coworking Community NYC Meetup Update

I just sent this message out to the members of the Coworking Community NYC Meetup. Enjoy!


Hi there! If you’re receiving this, you’re one of the 1,854 members of the Coworking Community NYC Meetup. Whether you’ve been a member since 2007 or you just joined today or somewhere in between, we’re grateful to have you as a part of this group.

By joining this group, you’ve identified yourself as someone who is interested in this growing-like-wildfire-but-still-very-new notion of coworking. That means you have something in common with at least 1,853 other people in the NYC area. The reality is, there are a lot more of us out there too.

Coworking is important, because it gives us a way to help each other with things we might otherwise struggle with on our own. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve been conducting experiments into developing new ways for us to use the coworking model to enable us to connect and be inspired. Already, 13 organizers have hosted 21 gatherings in 10 venues around the city. Check out my rundown in this blog post: http://happymonster.co/?p=366

What kinds of coworking gatherings would you want to join for

While a lot of our gatherings have functioned as fun one-off field trips, some of the more sustainable gatherings are the ones that focus on one particular commonality. Whether it’s game designers and developers meeting after hours, or people working on side projects, or people who like working in museums, there’s always one common thread. I think we can take that a lot further. We could be gathering in tons of other permutations of interest, timing and geography. To that end, I’d love it if you could hit REPLY with your answer to these questions: What are you needing? What kinds of gatherings would you like to participate in? What kinds of gatherings might you want to help organize? Reply to this email and let us know!

My hope is that by fostering gatherings of people with something specific in common, we can develop a robust set of sub-communities that form strong bonds. This paves the way to more good things down the line. In the meantime, here’s what’s currently on the calendar:

Upcoming Gatherings

  • Take your online business to the next level
    Monday, June 30 at 1:00pm at Vineapple // Hosted by Patty // Free
    Have you just started your online business, have you been at it for a few years or are you somewhere in between? Patty wants to meet up with you and talk business as a group of online (solo) entrepreneurs. We’ll share our experiences and best tips and tricks and support each other to take things to the next level. Details & join the wait list: http://meetu.ps/2pyh68
  • NY Tech Meetup Simulcast
    Tuesday, July 1 at 6:30pm at New Work City // Hosted by Veronica // $10
    See people show off some neat new things they’ve built while meeting new people over some beers. This group just crossed 40,000 members! Details & RSVP: http://meetu.ps/2qzr9T
  • MoCoWo: Coworking on a Train to Beacon NY & Dia Beacon Museum
    Wednesday, July 9, departing from Grand Central at 9:30am // Hosted by Nate & Jen // Free, but there are train tickets and other costs.
    The second of our summer MoCoWo (mobile coworking) events is going to be a trip up north to relieve some of the summer heat. This time, we’re headed to Beacon NY (unofficial slogan; “Mmmmm. Beacon.”) which is located about an hour and a half outside of the city. Details & RSVP: http://meetu.ps/2qcbWd
  • Side Project Jam Session
    Monday, July 14 at 6:30pm at New Work City // Hosted by Tony // Free to NWC members, $10 to public
    You have a job to do. But then there’s also that other thing. That thing you can’t help but think about when you’re not supposed to. You doodle it into the margins of your notepad when you’re supposed to be paying attention in a meeting. You read about it on your lunch break. You stay up late, working when everyone else is sleeping. It’s your side project. Maybe one day it will be your main squeeze. If only you could squeeze out some time to focus just on that, amidst the endless daily distractions… Enter the after-hours side project jam session. Details & RSVP: http://meetu.ps/2qpMcv

Recruiting new members at New Work City

Back at our home base, we’re recruiting creative independents who are looking for a place to work and people to work with. If you’re interested, reply to this email and tell me your story. I’d love to help you go over your options.

Who are we?

I’m Tony Bacigalupo. I’m the one writing this to you. I’m one of the folks behind both this Meetup group and New Work City. Here at the Coworking Community NYC Meetup, fellow organizers Clarice Meadows, Nate Heasley, Jen Oleniczak, Patty Golsteijn, Nate Cooper, and Jim Hopkinson are all leading their own efforts at organizing gatherings. At New Work City, I work with Sarah Feliciano, our Space Captain extraordinaire, Leo Newball, Lara Schenck, and Patrick Domingo, our amazing Space Agents, Peter Chislett, my business partner and the guy who makes it all stick together, and Veronica Ludwig, who is developing new programming with us. We’re all people who, like you, are forgoing a traditional path in favor of one that’s in alignment with who we are and who we want to be.

If you’re interested, you can follow me on Twitter, or connect with New Work City on Twitter or Facebook.

Looking for some fun further reading? Our good friends at New Worker Magazine just launched their second issue, which is jam packed with great reads written by members of coworking communities all around the world.

Thanks for being a part of this group. We’re in this together.

Cheers,

Tony Bacigalupo & the crews of CCNYC & NWC

 


Photo by Lee Semel.

 


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Coworking on a train to a museum (AKA my crazy coworking experiment at six months)

Towards the end of 2013, I found myself wracking my mind thinking about a major question that’s been bouncing around the coworking world for some time: how do we stop coworking from losing its identity to the workspace industry with which it is so deeply associated?

Coworking’s been continuing to grow into an established industry, with no signs of slowing down, but as it grows it seems to continue to lose its identity to its primary delivery vehicle: the office space rental business model.

This is important to me, because I (and many others) see in coworking so much more potential to help people than simply to allow it to become a slightly different way to cut up and rent office space.

For some reason, on January 1, 2014, I saw something I could do next from the moment I woke up. I told Amy I had an idea for what we could do now to make real progress in advancing the conversation. We immediately got to brainstorming and, shortly thereafter, I published a post entitled “27 ideas for hosting a coworking gathering that’s more than just people sitting around on laptops,” and followed up a few days later with “Crazy idea: 14 days, 14 different coworking experiences. Who wants to help organize?” — which led to the kicking off of an experiment in which I found people to lead coworking gatherings in the most diverse circumstances possible.

The objective? Develop a way to show people that coworking is about the act of gathering with people of similar interests, and that it’s NOT just about working at desks. And, further, to answer the obvious questions people have about whether one can truly get work done in sometimes very unusual circumstances.

Six months later, 13 organizers have hosted 21 events in 10 venues around the city, with more coming up. 242 people have RSVP’ed to meet up and work in places like a bed-stuy cafe that serves excellent kimchi, a wine bar with an insane sherry happy hour, the Q train, a high-rise Fort Greene apartment,  a fancy apartment in South Slope, the Met Museum, the Queens Museum, a super cute cafe in the East Village, and New Work City itself at less-than-normal days and times.

To help prove that work gets done at these gatherings, we developed To-DONE lists and challenged attendees to beat high scores from previous gatherings. The results?

People get a lot done when they gather with intention. Regardless of where they do it.

To-DONE Lists

The To-DONE list provided hard empirical evidence that people could be wildly productive in the most unexpected of circumstances.

We got work done. We got inspired. We had fun. And we formed healthy bonds discovering fun new places.

What’s next?

For one, more of everything. For example, two organizers, Nate and Jen, are now conspiring to mash up their respective gatherings to host a work-on-a-train-to-a-museum experience.

In the meantime, I am looking at how we can advance these efforts towards something more mature and sustainable. Three of the people who I collaborated with to develop events are now co-organizers of the Coworking Community NYC Meetup group, so they can schedule their own coworking gatherings now. We’re developing processes to help make it easier for current and future organizers to run great gatherings.

Ultimately, I’d love to shift what it means to be a member of a coworking community (starting with New Work City) away from one the emphasizes the space as the primary value and towards one that emphasizes the value people can generate by engaging in the act of gathering with intention.

The big challenge with that, I think, is that it’s not something that people know they and (and know they want to pay for). Space is tangible. It’s something we value. What I’m talking about is, I think, going to take some more work to prove out as a viable business model for a coworking space to successfully shift its direction.

By developing a network of sustainable, ongoing coworking gatherings around the city, we’re creating space to see how we might go about making progress in that direction.

If you’re in NYC and want to get involved, join our Meetup or consider a membership at New Work City (membership starts at $35/mo). If you’re outside of NYC, stay tuned here. I’ll have more to share soon.

Oh, and if you’re up for it, on July 9, join us as we go coworking on a train to a museum. We’ll also be visiting our friends at Beahive, a coworking space in Beacon, while we’re there.

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Kicking off an experiment today

Today, I’ll be joining my new friend Jen in organizing a gathering that merges coworking with a museum tour. The Met Museum, it turns out, has really really great wifi… and a lot of brilliant, inspiring art.

It will take about half a business day, from 1:00pm to 5:30pm. It’s currently at capacity, with 15 spots filled by friends, NWC members, and newcomers, with about a dozen people on a wait list.

Later this week and next, this experiment will be followed up by one at a wine bar, one involving a pot-luck brunch, one at a friend’s house, one at a cafe & kimchi restaurant, and more, all of which are at or near capacity now.

The point of all this? Twofold: to give more people a way to become part of a coworking community, and to wrest coworking from its perceived marriage to office space rental as its only delivery vehicle.

My hope is that people have a lot of fun, get a lot of work done, make some new friends, and, most importantly, want to get together to do it again soon. Good things should happen from there onward.

If you’re in NYC and want to dive into a deep talk about this topic, my friend Drew and I are hosting a talk at New Work City this Thursday to promote his new book, the Fifth Age of Work. Join us!

(Also, it should go without saying, but if you want to hear about future experiments, join my Meetup group. If you’re interested in organizing or hosting an experimental gathering, email me at tony at nwc.co!)


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Crazy idea: 14 days, 14 different coworking experiences. Who wants to help organize?

You could be appreciating art and then channeling your inspiration into your work in a museum café. You could be meeting with a few people who are committed to focusing hard on the tasks they need to get done, for short bursts of time, so you all get a ton of work done in a compressed period. You could be touring a new neighborhood, sampling the best of the cafés and restaurants, while stopping to work along the way. So what’s stopping you?

I think we can take this coworking idea so much further. It’s awesome to have coworking spaces to count on as reliable, consistent workspaces. Hell, the free coffee can sometimes be worth the price of admission alone. But we are in an unprecedented age of mobility. For so many of us, so much of our work can be done from just about anywhere. We should celebrate that! We should explore that! We should mess with that!

I think we could be taking this coworking thing a lot further. I think we could be having wonderfully diverse experiences that ultimately make us more productive, while having fun and meeting like-minded people all at the same time.

I’m going to push in that direction and see what happens. I’m super curious to see what would happen if we conducted an experiment where we tried coworking in the most wildly diverse ways we could think of… no one experience being too big of a production or obligation, just people getting together to work in a way that has a creative twist.

Most of the gatherings could follow a basic format:

  • 2-4 hours
    (Long enough to get something accomplished, but short enough to not take up one’s entire day. Most could get by without having to plug in their laptops.)
  • 5-10 people
    (Enough people to constitute a critical mass, but few enough that everyone could get to know each other without taking a huge amount of time to get around the table. Also, keeping gatherings to this size makes it easier to use a cafe or other public space with limited seating.)
  • A particular theme or focus
    (No gathering should simply be about working on laptops in the same place. There should be a twist that makes that gathering unique and special. This could be very simple. And there’s no shortage of ideas!)
  • Between January 27 and February 9
    (Ambitious? Hell yes. But doable. The ball is already rolling on a few gatherings, including one at a museum and one involving drinking sherry while working.)

To get primed up for this, I’m hosting a Work Sprint and a talk about collaboration in coworking spaces next week.

Am I totally crazy? Who wants to organize a gathering? Comment below or email me at tony at nwc.co!

Interested in learning more as gatherings are posted? Join my Meetup group!

Tony

 


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Unearthing a hidden movement

Coworking’s big, and it’s getting bigger by the day. As it continues its evolution from nascent concept to established industry, the original spirit of what made it special inevitably becomes more and more distant from the people who encounter it.

If all coworking ever did was birth a new industry of on-demand low cost workspace, it would already have made a huge impact on how people work and live. But there’s something far deeper happening that merits continued attention. If you’ve ever spent time in a coworking space, you know: the people who are migrating to these communities, what they’re doing, and how they’re organizing and interacting is all… well, very interesting. Coworking, the industry, is a powerful and valuable thing. Coworking, the movement, is another story altogether.

While nobody controls “coworking” and its many interpretations, one of the things that was agreed upon by the early members of the movement was that, while everyone can have their own take on what this new thing is, there are some basic elements that make it what it is. Anyone could do anything with the word, but if certain elements were weak or missing, it wouldn’t be embodying what this thing really is about. Conversely, people who use the word “coworking” to embody something that fully represents these basic elements would be on the right track to embodying what makes this thing really special.

They’re not precise. They’re not perfect. They’re open to interpretation. But they are a really really handy construct.

They’re called the Coworking Values. Here they are:

  • Community
  • Openness
  • Collaboration
  • Accessibility
  • Sustainability

If you’re organizing something around the word “coworking,” odds are you’d benefit from seeking to address each of these values in your own way.

If you don’t like them, you can of course set your own values that are specific to what you want to do. But if you ignore the values driving the trend that you want your business to be a part of, you expose yourself to missing the mark and failing to engage the people who you want to help.

You might not mind one day finding yourself managing a big boring room of people sitting at desks with their headphones on all day, but you might want something better.

Let’s talk about what something better looks like to you and to the rest of us.

The industry, right now, is overshadowing the movement that’s driving it. But maybe it doesn’t have to. Maybe the two can fuel each other.

A new effort is forming to advance the core values of the coworking movement. Get a sneak preview here.


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What could happen if every member of a coworking community committed to supporting each other’s efforts?

So many great things happen in coworking spaces, just sort of by accident. I wonder so much about how those phenomena could be developed into deliberate efforts.

One example: when a member launches a new project, all the other members in the space are potential supporters and evangelists. In one recent case at New Work City, a member offered her new Skillshare class free to all members and kindly asked everyone to sign up. As a result, her class got a ton of students in it, lots of people were exposed to her teachings who otherwise wouldn’t have been, and we all felt an emotional investment in the success of her class.

Same goes for Kickstarter projects. What better way to get a project’s momentum rolling than having 150+ people ready to help? If all of the members of a given coworking community put their collective weight behind something that one of them is working on, the concentrated impact could be enormous. A simple pledge of a couple of dollars to a campaign, or a retweet, could have an awesome snowball effect. (One of my friends, Brian Papa, is garnering support from fellow members for his new wrestling game app’s campaign right now!)

This could be done in a lightly structured way. Members can nominate projects they’re working on for collective support, and those who opt in can commit to supporting each other’s efforts at the appropriate time.

Pretty simple, potentially very powerful.

 


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27 ideas for hosting a coworking gathering that’s more than just people sitting around on laptops

A few years ago, I participated in an experiment called the Breakout Festival, in which we organized coworking gatherings in public spaces. It was awesome. I wonder what it would be like to revisit efforts to gather in new ways? Some potential gatherings, off the top of my head:

  • … go to a museum, appreciate art, then do our own creative work in the museum cafe
  • … get up really early and get a bunch done before 9:00am
  • … go on a photo safari, then settle somewhere to edit and publish
  • … pomodoro work sprints
  • … late night coworking with a DJ
  • … coffee snob coworking. meet at a high-end coffee roaster. order coffee. discuss coffee. drink. work.
  • … wine snob coworking. meet at a high-end wine bar. order wine. discuss wine. drink. work.
  • … commit to doing something you dread. do a pomodoro. reconvene. recommit. repeat.
  • … cafe crawl of (insert neighborhood here)
  • … coworking space crawl of (insert neighborhood here)
  • … coworking + drinking (infinite possibilities)
  • … coworking + brunch (no explanation necessary)
  • … coworking + saturday morning cartoons
  • … coworking + watching football games on Sunday
  • … everybody bring your pet
  • … enjoy a podcast / TED talk / etc, talk about it, then work in a way related to that topic
  • … co-workout. coworking + yoga/cardio/soulcycle/etc
  • … coworking while you wait for your stupid laundry
  • … inbox zero sprint (using the Email Game?)
  • … coworking road trip – split the cost of a zipcar, ride out to somewhere obscure and fun, work, ride back. maybe use the car time for brainstorming.
  • … coworking at a cool company’s office. fun experiences crafted around the cool company.
  • … shared interest coworking. pick a category: a particular programming language, photography, design, marketing, anything. Each person is there to work on something relating to that interest. Before starting, each person states the thing that they’re working on and one challenge they’re hoping to solve. Everyone coworks and checks back in with each other periodically to help each other out.
  • … coached coworking: one expert offers up some advice or guidance to kick off the session, then everyone works on that while they go around helping out.
  • … coworking in an Apple store until someone kicks you out
  • … coworking on a BoltBus to Philly
  • … coworking field trip: meet in a neighborhood you might never have been to before. immerse in the local culture during a group lunch break.
  • … combinations of the above

What would you attend? What would you organize? Tony


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Work Sprints: Let’s do better work in less time, and love it.

I’m running a high-energy, high awesomeness productivity sprint at Brooklyn Roasting Company on Thursday, October 3. Grab a spot here!

A funny thing happens when we start working for ourselves that I think too few of us recognize: we implicitly hire ourselves as our own bosses. We’re suddenly the CEO, the middle manager, and the worker bee all wrapped up in one little brain.

What happens next is even more curious: our inner bosses often find themselves imitating the very behaviors that we tend to despise in traditional industrial-era bosses.

We tend to, for instance, value face time as a measure of performance. If we sit in front of our keyboards for 10+ hours a day, we figure, we must be satisfying our inner bosses, right?

We know intuitively that it’s wrong, yet we struggle against it constantly. And we egg each other on, too. We can get into a competitive loop of who can lament about working more hours than whom. It’s honorable to bust your ass day and night. And that can be an awful way to live. (Many folks in the startup world struggle with this mightily.)

But we’re in charge. That means it’s up to us to define the rules. If we are intentional about the boss we’ve created for ourselves in our heads, then we can create a working relationship with ourselves that is nourishing and healthy. We can break the culture of treating work like a cross to bear.

But doing it alone is hard. It’s also no fun. So I propose we work on being better bosses for ourselves together.

There are a lot of ways to tackle this, but the most simple and obvious one to me centers around time management. (The guy who kicked off the modern coworking movement was hip to this, by the way.) If, by virtue of gathering and setting some intentions for ourselves and each other, we can get a better handle on our workdays, we can build on that.

To that end, I’m going to organize an Intentional Coworking gathering where the attendees commit to shifting their focus away from the number of hours worked and toward the quality of hours worked. Tony Schwartz, of the Energy Projectframes this mindset perfectly:

“For my first three books, I sat at my desk for up 10 hours a day. Each of the books took me at least a year to write. For my two most recent books, I wrote in three uninterrupted 90-minute sessions — beginning first thing in the morning, when my energy was highest — and took a break after each one… Writing just four and half hours a day, I completed both books in less than six months and spent my afternoons on less demanding work.”

He continues:

“More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace. Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less.”

Let’s commit to helping each other do better work in less time. Let’s celebrate our successes and enjoy the freedoms we’ve afforded ourselves. Most importantly, let’s do great things together.


RSVP


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Intentional Coworking

For a long time, I’ve been trying to hone in on something that’s been bothering me about the way the coworking concept has been growing over the past several years. It’s awesome that, in such a short span of time, it’s gone from an obscure thing to a nearly household name, but I can’t help but feel that some signal has been lost to noise over time.

In my perception, most people see coworking as not much more than a different way of splitting up office space. This isn’t the worst thing in the world: this allows people to associate coworking with something already familiar, which can be necessary to get non-early adopters to stomach a new idea. You have to start somewhere.

But I’m constantly thinking about how to drive more of the spirit behind what coworking is really about. Thinking back to the earliest iterations of coworking, the Brad Neuberg kind and the Jelly kind, there are some intriguing clues. In both cases, there is an explicit intent involved. You’re not just a member of a space; you’re choosing to attend on a specific day with explicit expectations that are shared with others.

The earliest versions of coworking were heavier on intent.

In the case of Neubergian coworking, you’d arrive and leave at a designated time. You’d do yoga and take a lunch break as a group. You were essentially opting into a structured day of activities with others. This wasn’t just you showing up and sitting on your laptop with your headphones on for 10 hours straight alongside others doing the same. Your interactions weren’t restricted to the occasional trip to the bathroom or the coffee pot. The intent to interact with others was baked into the thing from the start.

In the case of Jelly, it is an event that happens on a specific date. When you RSVP, you add your name and what you will be working on to a list where others will see it. While it’s far more loosely organized than a Neubergian coworking gathering, with Jelly it’s clear that you’re not just going there to sit and do work. You’re there to share a bit about what you’re working on and see what others are doing too.

In both cases, there’s a clear mandate for valuable interaction that extends the base model of sharing common space while working. The issue with modern coworking is that, because of its workspace-based business model, someone could go to a coworking space, sit and work, and leave without ever having spoken to anyone else– and they could think that’s a perfectly acceptable way to cowork.

A good coworking community, of course, has safeguards against this. They make it rather hard for you to be anonymous, because the staff and the members are so engaged. But it can be a constant fight, as each new person who walks in the door has to be educated why, really, this is more than just an office space!

So what would happen if we made an explicit effort to practice “Intentional Coworking”?

To combat this, I gravitate to the concept of “Intentional coworking.” I’m borrowing from the world of intentional living communities, which face a similar challenge. Any living community– any neighborhood– should, obviously, be one in which its residents intend to live near one another and interact with each other, right? Intuitively, that might be the case, but we know that in reality many people are total strangers to the people who live around them. The theory of a neighborhood falls victim to various failures of urban planning and such.

So intentional living communities emerge as a way of compensating for the shortcomings of any community which fails to be intentional. (You could argue something similar for “social enterprise,” but that’s another conversation.)

What would an Intentional Coworking community look like? It would take the base vanilla model of coworking and add at least one explicit layer on top of it: some clear expectation of a shared interaction. It could be as simple as agreeing to all show up at a specific time or as complex as a completely choreographed workday. It could be centered around a shared activity or a similar goal. It could be a lot of different things.

I’m keenly interested in exploring this concept further. I think at the other end of this conversation are concepts that would advance the whole movement and help coworking spaces continue to claim their rightful place as champions of a new way of defining work as we know it.



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I’m going to ask you to go ahead and come in on Saturday.

Edit: Updated for IndieCon 2 for October 2014!

But Sunday… Sunday you can stay home.

OK, seriously though, I’m sick of beating around the bush. We work for ourselves, we’re on our own, and we secretly suffer from so many things that wouldn’t be so damn hard if we just bothered to open up and share with each other a little.

You haven’t done your taxes in four years? The very thought of it makes you want to crawl under your desk? Guess what. You’ve got plenty of company. Maybe it wouldn’t be quite so hard if you fessed up and found other people who were in the same boat, and banded together to commit to getting it all over with.

You’re a freelancer but you’re not comfortable trying to go out and get clients? Then when you do, you’re afraid to charge what you think you’re really worth? You’ve got tons of company there too. Maybe you can feel more secure putting yourself out there and giving yourself the respect you deserve if you find other folks to pump you up a bit.

You don’t know what the hell to do next? Of course you don’t. You don’t have a boss setting quarterly goals for you to hit. You don’t have a promotion to gun for. You’re in charge. That means you can steer the wheel in any direction, captain! The ocean has a lot of bearings. 360 of them, in fact. Did you know it’s okay to not know exactly where you’re going? Do you need someone to remind you and help you stay on course, even when all you have is your own intuition and the stars to go by?

You start work too late, work until too late, have no concept of a lunch break, weekend, or vacation? Of course you don’t. You don’t work at a job where someone tells you when to start and stop. That was the point of forgoing that lifestyle, right? But being the boss and the employee at the same time is sometimes not so easy, especially when it’s 2:00am there are so many episodes of Dexter to catch up on and nobody to remind you that you’re probably going to regret starting your workday at 2:00pm the next day.

Your client refuses to pay you? You have no idea how you’re going to make next month’s rent? You don’t really even know how you made last month’s rent? You’re worried you’re going to get sued by that crazy former client? Being able to make as much money as you want sometimes feels like a double edged sword. If you could step back from the day-to-day and stick to a plan that helps you stay steady, maybe the tumult could be mitigated.

You forgot to eat breakfast *and* lunch again and now it’s 4:00pm and you need to eat more quickly than Seamless can get the food to your belly? You don’t even want to think about health care or that toothache you’ve been ignoring? You’re wondering if you made a mistake going out on your own, because having to figure all of this out yourself is starting to wear on you?

You.
Are.
Not.
Alone.

But you might think you are, because the millions of us who identify with the above scenarios have no good way to gather and work on these things together. That’s a problem, because our ranks are growing every day as traditional 9-to-5 salaried jobs are going away and opportunities for us to make a living doing things in different ways continue to grow.

The fact that so many of us can be in charge of our lives now is awesome. But if we learned one thing from Spider-Man, it’s that with great power comes great responsibility. It sucks to have to figure all of this out ourselves.

It’s time for us to change that. I’m hosting a brainstorming session on Saturday, September 7 to gather independents to share their best practices for how they manage their lives, and to learn from each other. But I’m also hoping to have a bigger conversation about how we can organize to support each other in ways that we would struggle to do on our own, while still preserving and reinforcing the independence and freedom we value so much.

Could we have a replacement for a 9 to 5 without feeling like we’re dragging ass to an office every day? Could we replace the idea of management, bosses, quarterly goals, or any of the other things that we kind of hated about the old office but now maybe kind of miss a little?

I don’t know the answers, but I do know the questions are ones worth asking. Let’s ask some questions and play with the answers.

 

IndieCon – An unconference for independent workers!

Saturday, October 18 from 9:30am to 6:30pm

Location: New Work City – 412 Broadway, Floor 2, NY NY 10013 (map)


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