Coworking – renting an office together

Welcome, my dear readers of “Motivational tips”!

To tell the truth, I really enjoy writing articles about newly appeared words.

In fact, I don’t always know myself the meaning of every trendy word.

Thankfully, due to writing such texts I receive new information and share it with you so that you can nourish your brain with it (at least, I’m hoping for that).  😎

Today I’m going to tell you what is coworking.

This topic will be very interesting and useful for freelancers and people who work at home.

What is coworking?

I’ve got a friend who earns her living by copywriting – she writes different articles for money.

Obviously, at first she was not earning much, while she was gaining her reputation and trying to grasp all intricacies of her new occupation. However, after a while her income began to increase, she started receiving many orders and became popular among the clients.

Her hobby turned into a full-fledged job and she started spending 8-10 hours in front of the computer.

Read also: How to become a good writer: 10 guidelines!

As it turned out, working at home was not easy. My friend got distracted by her family duties – doing laundry, cooking and weeding the garden.

Apart from that, she also encountered with a strange attitude of her relatives towards her new occupation: her husband questioned why dinner wasn’t ready before his arrival (“You’ve spent the whole day at home!”), her mom was asking: “Why can’t you come and visit me? You’re not working anywhere!”

Besides, my friend stopped taking care of herself and lacked communication with other people.

And then suddenly, while gathering material for her next text, she came across the article about co-working.

Coworking (which means “working together”) is the process when people of different professions and specialties work in one joint environment.

My friend called to several coworking centers and rented a working place for herself.

She didn’t need a computer, because she always took her own laptop with her. Apart from a desk with a chair she received the access to high-speed Internet and technical support: local programmer updated her antivirus program and installed a better working browser.

After that she started going to work at 9 a.m. and returning after 4 p.m., or sometimes even after 7 p.m. Now nobody asked her questions about working at home. She could talk to her new acquaintances during break, or get to know more interesting people.

All in all, my friend has no regrets about paying a rent to the co-working centre, and she doesn’t even think about working at home anymore.

Coworking: when and how it was invented

People have always felt the need of grouping together according to their interests: they’ve created art schools, workshops, cooperatives, etc.

First coworking centers were called hacker spaces. These mysterious organizations appeared in 1990s in the USA and Germany due to the fact that talented programmers felt the need of working together with other crazy geniuses who would understand their computer slang and humor.

The first co-working center was established in San-Francisco, USA in 2005. It was inspired by Brad Neuberg, a talented programmer, who considered working at home highly non-productive and suffered from lack of communication.

Neuberg created a non-profit organization and started attracting clients during mutual lunches and bicycle rides, sincere conversations and yoga classes. It really worked: his coworking center gained unbelievable popularity!

Gradually more and more freelancers, programmers and other creative people wanted to share the same working space instead of sitting at home, wasting their time on television and degrading without communication.

Coworking centers began to appear in England, Germany, Japan, France, Russia, Ukraine and other world countries.

Interesting facts: 6 tips, how to start your own business

Why is coworking better than working at home?

Many freelancers don’t understand the point of spending money on renting working place.

Nowadays you can connect every single house to the Internet, and there are no problems with purchasing the computer. Besides, at home you may sleep as much as you want and work in your favorite stretched trainers.

What is the point of inventing something else?

The above-mentioned arguments are quite reasonable, but you have to keep in mind that working at home has many disadvantages as well. They are:

• You screw up your working schedule: first, you wake up at 10, and then have a nice long breakfast, switch on your computer, and start working only after noon.
  Thus, by doing this, you lose all productive working hours in the morning.
• You stop taking care of yourself.
  You don’t see the point of doing manicure and pedicure, wearing new clothes and taking care of your figure, because nobody can see you while you’re working at home.
  Women have to remember that they must never neglect their appearance!
• You cannot always work effectively: you want to lie down on the couch, watch something interesting on TV, or even wash a huge pile of dirty dishes, etc.
• You don’t communicate with other people and eventually you might start avoiding them. This may be very dangerous, because one day you may need to return to the office.

This is not even the whole list of disadvantages of working at home. However, you may improve the situation if you start renting an office.

It is quite expensive and unreasonable to rent a place for one freelancer, that’s why such workers like sharing the same working place and paying for it together (in fact, they don’t even need a lot of space).

Co-working: main advantages

• Working among congenial souls;
• Discipline and fixed schedule that prevent you from relaxing and idling;
• Live communication;
• Technical support, clean working place and the presence of the security officer;
• High-speed Internet;
• Opportunity to make new useful acquaintances;
• Availability of the place, going where you have to wear nice clothes, put make-up on your face and take care of your hair;
• Increase of work efficiency;
• There will be no need to explain to others how you manage to earn money while sitting at home.

I hope that you’ve understood what is coworking and memorized its main advantages.

Try renting a working place in such center at least for a month, and you’ll never want to return to your stretched trainers, dirty hair and loneliness.