Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study

When we moved office from one with actual rooms with max 4 people in it to an open space I cried a little internally. Our boss proceeded to extol the virtues of an open space for exchange of ideas and collaboration. Guess who was a stable occupant of one of the conference rooms after less than one month and stopped coming to the office altogether after a while.

Working from home now is bliss. If I'll ever start working in a shared workspace again I want an actual office.

I remember seeing a guy selling his book about practical software engineering and project management at a trade show some 25 years ago. One of his claims was that he had a statistic that showed that a closeable door and muteable telephone resulted in 10x productivity for programmers / sw-engs.

This. And a garden, and a microscope, and an electronics lab, and a mechanical workshop.

This is a really interesting question because I think the definition of a home office has changed quite a bit.

In North America, there was a period in the 80s and 90s where the Desktop PC was very much a shared device. You'd have it sitting somewhere like the living room or basement, maybe near the TV, you'd have a landline phone next to it, etc.

I think a lot of families had those, but it's very different from the idea of a "home office" where you have a separate/isolated work room.

Anecdotally, my grandfather had a more extensive home office than I do. He never took work home with him from the company office, which he exclusively worked from. This would’ve been the 80’s when he was employed as an engineer manager in aerospace

Perhaps more common than now, even with the resurgence from remote working, I'd say.

The Official Preppy Handbook (tongue in cheek, of course, but its observations are often basically accurate) describe a dedicated office as a fixture of (what Fussell would classify as) upper-middle-class homes. Nb that class has historically had more flexibility on working from home than the rest of us, and generally been accustomed to looser restrictions and more freedom to set their own agendas (this has shifted with the intrusion of MBA- and finance-types into the strongholds of this class, like universities and hospitals, but that’s another topic) That account was published in 1980.

My background is a mix of Fussellian mid- and upper-prole and regular ol’ middle, and an office space, if only a roll top desk tucked in a corner, but a room if space allowed, has always been a feature of my parents’ homes.

Pre-computer, that’s where paperwork and mail and other records that needed to be stored and worked with too long to live on the kitchen table (see: home space use studies, which spawned the misguided trend of building desks into kitchens in American houses) went. When desktop computers became a thing, that’s where the family computer went. (Yes, kids, even when we got the Internet at home, it was still located in a physical place you had to go and remain to keep using it—what a change smartphones have been!)

This version of the home office as a hub for personal document and important-paper-stuff management is basically dying, which is why it may seem surprising they ever existed. I don’t even need a laptop for most of this stuff, let alone an office—nearly everything important happens on my phone, and that’s becoming more normal. I don’t even need a kitchen table for it.

I am thinking of making this transition as well.

As I age I realize how much of life's moods are intertwined with physical places and their emotional associations based on what I do in that place every day.

The unbearable value of potential. Similar to a blank notebook or whiteboard. Or good land eviscerated for lawn.

The other day, after cleaning my own desk (~4 months of accrued detritus), I thought it would be good to invent a desk filing system where the benchtop can be moved out of the way and a different workspace can be deployed, similar to virtual desktops. A sort of 'physivirtual' desktop. I might just try that at home. My sketchy idea was a vertical cable-driven elevation, followed by a horizontal filing in to ceiling and wall-suspended racks for storing the array of out of use desktops. Electronics in particular is frustratingly object-laden, and any dense workspace array of test equipment tediously immobile. The biggest problem would be vertical space: in a typical room only 3m is available and 2 of that is taken for standing, leading to a maximum benchtop count of 2-3 which is insufficiently attractive to justify the investment.

No desk is truly empty, as each desk contains lots of spacetime, as well as particle-antiparticle pairs which exist only briefly.

Are you me?