Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Out Of The Office

Episode Date: October 14, 2013

Programmer David Heinemeier Hansson tells us about his Out Of Office experience, David is a partner at 37signals and a co-author (with Jason Fried) of REMOTE: Office Not Required. We also meet Ignacio Uriarte, he left his cubicle for a career in Office Art. And Ravenna Koenig, TOE’s newest correspondent, explains the difference between Facebook-Work & Work-Work. *********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment**********

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Out of the Office. Remote working is becoming more and more a fact of life. But, you know, there are some concerns that you might imagine employers have. And so what we are is really a tool for employers to use that gives them the confidence to allow for remote working. Brad Miller is the CEO of Awareness Technologies, and that tool he just mentioned is a piece of software called InterGuard. InterGuard makes it possible for companies to monitor their

off-site employees, the ones that don't work in the office. InterGuard can log keystrokes and take screenshots. Time-wasting programs like iTunes can be disabled during the hours of 9 to 5 or to infinity. With InterGuard, a boss can even access the video camera and microphone on an employee's laptop without detection. We all want to believe everybody works remotely exactly as hard as they would if they were in the office. But employers have a duty to supervise their employees and make sure that they're working productively. And our software just enables them to do this. So on one hand, you can talk about Big Brother.

On the other hand, if I'm an employee that wants to work remotely, you know, I'm probably willing to make that trade-off. Your boss can always see what's going on in your desktop. How just freaky is that? That's David Heinemeier-Hansen, a programmer and one of the co-authors of Remote, a book about remote working. Companies like InterGard are seeing phenomenal growth, David says, because more and more businesses are allowing their employees to work outside of the office. But, he insists, these businesses that are turning to spyware do not understand how remote work works.

I mean, I would not want to work anywhere where I have a 24-7 supervision from some boss sitting and watching my every movement on screen. I think it also just portrays an unrealistic expectation of how work happens today. Remote is David Heinemeier Hansen and his co-author Jason Fried's second book about work. David's also a partner at 37signals, the company Jason Fried founded and the company that built Basecamp, a popular project management tool that makes it easier for remote workers to collaborate. Fun fact, David did most of the programming for Basecamp working remotely in Copenhagen. My entire lifestyle is predicated on remote work, so for me it's just incredibly personal. After the successful launch of Basecamp and David's graduation from school,

he decided to move to Chicago, where 37signals and Jason Freed are headquartered. And I started coming to the office. And the first thing we noticed was I got a lot less done. The office is just an interruption machine. The office is simply a place to bother people incessantly. You don't have a work day anymore. You have work moments where you get 15 minutes here, 45 minutes there. Maybe if you're lucky, you get an hour and a half. Well, most creative work doesn't happen in bite-sized chunks like that. You need long, sustained periods of uninterrupted time to make serious progress. David left Chicago for

remoter pastures, and a number of employees followed suit. David says there's even one guy at 37signals who travels around the world working from his laptop. Jason and David believe that we will all eventually be working like this, and remote is a guidebook to help us make the most of it. Sometimes it can sound like a dream, like, oh my god, I can just not wear pants, I can just stroll around my home all day in pajamas and just work when I want to. It sounds like too good to be true, and it is, because it doesn't work like that. You do need some form of routine. We have a lot of employees who have all their own sort of special things to get them into the mode

of now it's work. Some of the funnier ones are, Noah, one of the guys that we have, when he gets up in the morning, he wears his home slippers. And when he's ready to go to work, which means just go into the room right next to his bedroom or whatever, he puts on his work slippers. It's not about making yourself uncomfortable. It's not about putting on a tie just because you're working from home.

But it's about just mentally making this transition to and from work because then you can go out of it too. It turns out that remote workers are much more likely to work all the time than slack off. But bosses who encourage this behavior, David and Jason warn us, will end up with burnt out employees. Married people, especially those with small children, make the best remote workers. Single people can pull it off too. They just need to make sure they spend some time around other people. Otherwise, they'll crack. This is why you see so many people working in coffee shops.

It's like the new office, where people can get stuff done without interruption from their co-workers. The big realization is that the social interaction that we as humans need do not need to come just from the co-workers we happen to work with. Of course, remote workers need to spend some time with their co-workers, and they do, thanks to technology. It's technology that makes remote work possible, and it's technology most of us are already using. It's email. It's instant messenger.

It's collaboration tools like Base instant messenger, it's collaboration tools like Basecam like we make for project management, Google Hangouts, video chat. There's a lot of software packages that are aimed at making teams more productive even if they don't sit next to each other. We have something called Campfire which is our virtual water cooler. It's a chat room where we all hang out, the entire company, all 40 people in a chat room. And we're there all day. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Okay. Campfire sounds fun. You know, I'm sure it's a blast to hang out all day and share funny links and stuff. But how is this different than InterGuard? Because at the end of the day, you have this real-time log of who is doing what and where and when. I mean, isn't this just the friendlier, happier spy program? Technology always has this flip side of it can be used for good or for evil.

All of these wonderful tools we've gotten, Google Hangouts, Campfire, SpaceCams, email, IM and so on. They're wonderful because they allow us to collaborate even though we're sitting remote. Well, of course, there's always going to be this one jerk who says, well, if we can use all these tools for collaboration, maybe we can also use them for spying on our employees. Well, I think what's really so liberating about remote work is that it puts the focus on the work. If you stop caring about when people are at their desk, in their chair in the morning, whether they come in at 9 or 9.15, if you just care about what is the work that got done, if you can look at an employee and you can look at the

output that they have and you say, that was a good day's work, then it's so easy not to care about any of the other bullshit. It's so easy not to care about whether that guy went to the mart and played with his kid. Maybe that's why he made such a good contribution that day. Maybe that's why the work is so good. If you switch your focus and your quote unquote surveillance of people away from the person and to the work of that person, oh my God. I mean, it's like the sky's open. The artist Ignacio Duarte hasn't worked in an office in years, but you could make the case that he is still on the clock. I do something that you might call office art.

It's mainly in the medium of drawing, animation, paper installation, graphics in Excel and a couple of paper works and things on pinboards and PDFs. It might look quite minimalistic, but it always has a strong relationship to work. I enjoy working with Excel a lot. I've done quite a few drawings that are based on formulas or also just even using the little formatting palette

that Excel offers you. I'd really like to use the tools that a regular office employee would use. Many of my work start from a minimum creative moment. Let's say when you are in a phone conversation and you start to scribble subconsciously. I often take these little moments and turn them into art pieces. Let's say with a scribble I have a different series of works

where I just scribble in a very methodical way. I often make spirals and one single line that covers a whole page. In one occasion I recorded the sound of it, the sound of the making. And it's a triptych in black, blue, and red, like the basic colors of the big universe of this French pen manufacturer, Bic. And it's called Bic Monochromes. I got to see this piece, Bic Monochromes, when it was on display at the Drawing Center in New York City. It's really an incredible work of art. When I put on the headphones, I could see, hear, and feel the boredom, repetition, frustration, and loneliness of the office. One thing that I like to do that is a bit mean is to take these little creative moments

and convert them into a very structured activity again. You could call it a meta-routine. So it becomes something very similar to work. What used to be or was initially something like an escape from work suddenly becomes a very work-like activity. Ignacio never set out to be an artist, but he never set out to work full-time in a beige and grey cubicle either. So art school offered the possibility of something else.

I always thought I have no artistic talent, which I actually don't in the traditional sense. I'm not capable of drawing a man or something. So that's why I never thought of becoming an artist. I never saw it as an option because of this lack of talent that I saw in myself. But I always was very interested in the passive way. I was checking out exhibitions all the time, was very much into art history. Even though Ignacio was much older than his fellow art students, he felt like he had the advantage because he knew exactly what he wanted.

He studied script writing and filmmaking. And after graduation, he moved to Berlin with his girlfriend to start living the creative life. But within weeks, he found himself once again working in an office cubicle. So it was absolute, absolute failure. I was in this full-time position, a terrible job in an American corporation. It was pure suffering. And I did that for two more years.

And those years were the ones where I found this extreme motivation to find a way out. This is when Ignacio Duarte started making office art. When I started making art, it was sort of like a mirroring of the experience I had had the same day in the office. The Sisyphus type of work, this doing to undo again, this, I mean, what is a work, what is a routine to start with? It's a, it's an activity that gets repeated periodically. So that, those were, those are the ingredients of everybody's work life. You have a certain schedule to fulfill, et cetera. And those are the ingredients that are

always present in my work. The idols I had were, for example, Kafka. The fact that he always stayed in his job really makes you understand where he's at and really makes you identify with him, because we probably have all experienced this kind of suffering. Well, a few days, of course, I did do art during office hours. After a few years of this, Ignacio got a residency, a paid residency, to work full-time on his office art. He immediately quit his job.

I was the happiest man on earth when I left my last job. That residency was just the beginning. Ignacio now has gallery shows, museum exhibitions, famous collectors seek him out. But, he says, there are many things that remain the same. What I'm living now is the fantasy I had back in the day to finding a creative talent that allows you to escape from work routine. Having said that, the reality I'm living now

is starting to work at 8 and staying till 7 or whatever, you know, and working Monday to Friday, you know, because it just seemed normal to me. I didn't want to be the cliche artist that breaks out of the office and just does something really crazy. I wanted to work from, I wanted to talk and work from my own petit bourgeois experience and from being locked up in this cage. It was like opening the doors of a cage and deciding to stay inside and draw the bars of it. Even though Ignacio Iorte uses office tools to make office art, and even though he keeps the same studio hours as when he toiled away in

his cubicle, his artworks present us with evidence that art and work are two different things. Art has this great advantage against work. In work, everything has to be functional. Efficiency is quite important, and everything has to have a meaning, a direct meaning that you can translate either into money or material benefit, let's say. And art has this incredible advantage of not having to be productive at all. You can just do whatever you want to do. And that is a huge danger because I use the same tools to do something totally unproductive,

which puts maybe things even in question. And that, of course, is dangerous. If you show people that Excel is a means that you can use to make paintings, then this is quite a danger for bosses. I mean, they might forbid Facebook, but they definitely can't forbid Excel. It's raining in Upper Manhattan on the day I graduate from college. Everywhere you turn, girls in powder blue robes are checking their hair for frizz and dabbing their

high heels with tissues. In the entrance to the commencement hall, moms and dads feign modesty about their graduates' new job as an account manager at Google, a financial analyst at J.P. Morgan, a software developer at Microsoft. My best friend Rachel waves me over to meet her grandparents. We were in the creative writing program together. She's about to start as an editorial assistant at Vogue. Her grandma repeats this fact at least three times as we talk, almost hysterical with pride. Rachel's grandpa asks where I've been hired. Quashing the defensiveness that wants to creep into my voice, I say I'm pursuing creative work and plan to get by freelancing and waiting tables.

It sounds very hip, Rachel's mom ventures. Rachel's grandparents look confused, like they're expecting me to confess that I just forgot to look for a real job in the crunch of finals. We're all silent for a second. Suddenly, Rachel's grandma's expression clears. She gets a look of excitement. She opens her mouth. So, she says, is there a special man in your life? Fast forward a few months.

I'm waiting tables and making measly tips at a Manhattan steakhouse. Rachel calls and asks me if I want to grab lunch at Balthazar. I suggest meeting up in the park with a $2 bag of Trader Joe's popcorn instead. A few hours later, Rachel is updating me about her job. She recently got to tape Emma Stone's boobs to her dress at a photo shoot and has started power lunching with her managing editor at places like ABC Kitchen and Bouvet. How are you, she finally asks. How's the restaurant?

The way she says restaurant is totally different from the way she says bouvet. I want to tell her about the men who snap their fingers at me for the check, the tables that tip six dollars on a hundred dollar tab, the co-workers who screw me into a double shift by not showing up. I want to tell her about the manager who thinks grabbing my ass should be taken as a compliment, and the bartender who's always mumbling things like, women are not good people. But I don't tell her any of that.

Instead, I tell her about the night a friend of the owner tried to pick me up when he was visiting from LA. He had a graying Kurt Cobain haircut and a pot belly that strained the cloth of his t-shirt. He'd spent the whole evening drinking at the bar, and as I was closing, my tickets came to sit on the stool next to me. Almost falling over, he asked if I wanted to come home with him. I told him I had a doctor's appointment early in the morning for an ovarian cyst. This, as I had hoped, puts Rachel in stitches.

I tell her I'm thinking of turning it into a story. So you're getting to do a lot of writing, Rachel asks, a hint of jealousy in her voice. Yeah, I say. You? Oh, tons, she says, and then before I can ask her for more details, changes the subject to a trip she recently took with some of our friends to Maine. We were so bummed you couldn't come, she says. Me too. They stayed in a cottage by the sea, eating lobster and picking blueberries while I browsed their Instagram photos and moped over my bank account balance online.

I've been counseled that there's no better time to be broke than in your early 20s, when you can still have fun without any money. But the hermit saint who gave me that advice was never 23 in New York. Sure, there's fun to be had, but all of it costs. I've missed five birthday parties now

because at the one I did go to, the cheapest cocktail was 16 bucks. I spend Saturday nights at home working through my reading list or watching cam versions of the movies my friends are seeing in theaters. But the most depressing moment arrives one day in late September, right after my boyfriend and I break up, as I sit in bed, crying and crunching the numbers to see if my budget can accommodate binging on a pint of ice cream. These are also things I don't tell Rachel. My goals are not that different from hers. We both want to write.

She thinks Vogue will help get her there. But though she gets to spend time around creative types, it seems to me that the most creative thing she does each day is generate chatter about the week's 10 best dressed on Facebook. But who am I to tell her she's wasting her time? I know a journalist with a Peabody award who started as a copy editor for a glossy fashion magazine. I wonder if it's possible that the entire premise upon which my creative life is built is totally wrong. Maybe I should just suck it up, Try to get a job like Rachel's.

Perhaps I could write captions for the fashion shoots. Strumming her banjo outside a Montauk cottage, Kate Winslet wears a Zac Posen aubergine jacquard floor sweeper. Price upon request. Rachel glances at her watch and balls up the empty bag of popcorn I have to get back to work, she says You mean back to Facebook, I say I can't help it, my tone is perceptibly harsh

Her eyes narrow Well, I'd rather sit around all day doing Facebook work Than doing what you do, you know, work work. As I ride the subway home, I think about work work, the menial tasks, the rude customers, and the male cretins I'm forced to interact with, and how at the end of the day, I still have no money, and my friends call me less and less. But I'm not quitting. Rachel is convinced that Vogue will lead to a book contract eventually.

But WorkWork gives me the freedom to work full-time on my future now. you've been listening to ben Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Out of the Office. It featured Brad Miller, Davy Denson, Ignacio Uriarte and Ruvana Koning. It was produced by Benjamin Walker, with assistance from Bill Bowen and Ruvana Koning. You can get more Theory of Everything, I'm in Walker with assistance from Bill Bowen and Ravenna Cunningham. You can get more theory of everything, including text,

audio and video extras at toe.prx.org. And this is where you can subscribe to the theory of everything podcast. Radiotopia from PRX