I have always been very interested in traveling and tourism, both personally and from professional and business point of view. Fundamentally, traveling somewhere is one of the few ways to learn and get new experience directly, two other I know of are reading and talking to other people. But this post is about something else. It is about the ways in which we like or do not like to spend our time, specifically the time we consider to be dedicated to “work”.

Recently, I had an opportunity to work a few days as a tour guide in Tokyo and Shizuoka, sharing my knowledge about places I enjoy and helping first-time visitors to Japan to get the most out of their trip. I spent quite a lot of time doing essentially the same in the embassy when I travelled with business delegations or state officials visiting Japan. And what I found curious was that I liked those parts of my job much more than sitting all day long in a dark and stale embassy office (I have a couple of pictures of that office and will share them here at some point so stay tuned). The same I can say about my recent experience as well. It was so energizing and exciting to spend all day talking about my favorite topics with people who were also very much eager to learn new things.

But here I stumbled upon an interesting observation about my own preferred ways of working and doing things. When it comes to “proper” white collar jobs I have always been a relentless supporter of expanding work-from-home policies or at least true hybrid regimes when people can split their time 50/50. Working as a guide though is obviously something you cannot do “remotely” or even “hybrid” and can only be done in person. Why then was I so eager to do it and enjoyed it so much?

Because WFH is not about the location. It is about the agency and about being able to decide yourself when and how you spend the time to complete the tasks that generate value for an employer or a client who pays you back for it. What people usually enjoy about WFH is not just that you can do the meetings in bed or don’t have to spend time on the commute. They also get their agency back and can now decide on the best suitable way for them to allocate time on both work and personal matters. And once you get to understand that and truly find what you do well and in which environment, it is very hard to surrender that agency back to anyone. It can mean anything: working from your bedroom or from sauna, from trains or while running. Once you really know what it is and you get to experience it, it is intoxicating. You crave it. I have offers to work with tourists for my weekends now and I have to resist accepting them because I understand that I do still need to have some time to sleep and to rest.

Now, for many people being around others in the office or some other shared work location is enjoyable by itself. Some types of work are best done in certain environment and with other people present there. Even more so, for managers and leadership in any organization their agency can be manifested in being with their subordinates and around them in one physical space. That is an interesting contradiction that needs to be addressed if we want to have any chance at creating a truly efficient and productive way of working beyond locking ourselves in home-vs-office paradigm.

We won’t solve this here and now of course. But we can all start thinking more about it to search for the best ways for all of us to work and bring value to the clients, employers, partners and society in general. I am a radical opponent of the zero-sum game approach when it comes to the matters involving human interactions. If we all find a way of unlocking the potential for spending our time most efficiently and enjoyably, the gain will be shared across everyone in the society too. Am I ending this post with another famous marxist principle? I promise I was not planning to, yet here we are!

Now playing: Martin Carthy – The Folk Vault.

My photos: First two are from Yanaka in Tokyo, the last one is from Takayama.