While the events of the past twelve months have provided plenty of reasons to be pensive, persnickety and petulant, I am feeling optimistic and inspired at the moment. It has been a year of limitations, worries, uncertainty and introspection, but as the calendar year ticks over and we try to imagine a new post-pandemic normal, I cannot help but feel a sense of optimism for what urban professional living and working will look like if and when we get to the other side of all of this.
As a white collar office worker – a knowledge worker, as Peter Drucker would describe me – I need to be near a computer and a telephone to do my job. In the before times, this meant long days in the city, and daily commuting from home to work and back again. I guess I had always accepted that the price of full time employment was daily tripping to the city and back. But 2020, and the hundred day hard lockdown that Melbourne endured in the name of ensuring a public health victory, rewrote a lot of these rules by proving what was possible.
Reconnecting with my colleagues at work over the past few weeks, we have had some boundary-pushing discussions about what work really needs to look like, and what our future workplace can be as a result of all of this. Rather than going back to work as we knew it, we may well be going somewhere new, where work is less about where you are, and more about what you do. As a circadian slave often energised at weird hours, the idea of being able to fully flex both time and space is truly mind expanding. Here is hoping the adventurous vision holds.