Branches

With little fanfare and even less furniture, I moved into my new office last week. It’s a 1600-square foot office in the Ravenswood corridor on Chicago’s northside, much too big for a little one-man shop like my own, but just the right size to host a collection of small upstarts. Right now there are seven of us: myself, Scott of Just Some, Andrew of Dead Horse Communications, and the four fellows of Humanized, Aza, Atul, Andrew and Jono.

The truth is, I have a perfectly good office at home. We’ve got three bedrooms in our condo, much bigger than we need, and it’d had been an office since well before I quit my job to go solo. With a little dedication and focus, I probably could have stayed there and run a successful web design shop for a good while. Plenty of others have done the same.

The key is that little word “focus.” I seem to lose grip of it with more frequency than I’d like. Working in that home office, with its cozy surrounding and close proximity to my kitchen, was not the right kind of environment for me. The line that divided home life—relaxed and full of kitty belly—from work life—focused and full of getting shit done—was blurry and getting blurrier.

Scott, who had gone freelance at about same time as me, proposed the idea of getting an office. I pushed back at first, thinking I had a good thing going, and not seeing the expense as something I could justify. I still looked around, in case something staggeringly cool presented itself. I didn’t know what that was at the time. I do now: it’s an office that not only gets me out of the house and into a workspace every day, but also one that I get to share with a half-dozen really sharp, creative minds, minds that I get to tap with a mere twist of the head and shout across the room.

It’s been just five days, and already I feel my productivity waxing. Those minutes that I spent idly making lunch, or getting up at coffeshops to ask the clerk to cycle the router, are now seamlessly stitched together with all the other minutes, forming long, continuous chains of productive work time.

The office itself still has a ways to go before it resembles a real workspace, and not simply the results of an IKEA shopping spree. Every day new pieces arrive. Monday it was a toaster; today we got our first water delivery. Andrew’s talking about getting an aquarium, which I hear does wonders for your feng shui. Scott’s on his way back now from Home Depot right now with some plants. No talk of a foosball table yet, though I have heard rumor of a Playstation. (Anyone who even metions the words “dot-com” or “bubble” will be taken out back and pummelled with our collection of corporate-branded stress balls.)

No office or team photos yet—our Sears Portrait Studio appointment isn’t until next week—so for the time being I leave you with this, a video Scott shot with his MacBook of our setting-up day. It answers the age-old question: How many college graduates does it take to assemble one IKEA Galant desk? Enjoy.