The cottage was already the office.
The Starlink dish on the cottage roof is a small white object that has been there long enough that I do not notice it from the dock anymore. It was the last component of a setup that started as a vacation tax and ended, sometime late last year, as the office itself.
Five things from the most recent run there. A list-breakdown rather than a piece, because the through-line is too quiet to carry an argument. The breakdown is the argument.
The kitchen table at six in the morning. Coffee, monitor, the same posture I have at the desk in the city, the cottage version of the chair, the same email queue. The light is different. The sound is different. The work is the same. The work has been the same for some time. The cottage version of the table is older than the city desk, but the work surface that now overlays it is the work surface that overlays the city desk, the airport desk, the hotel desk. The work has decoupled from the surface.
The mid-afternoon walk. I used to think the mid-afternoon walk was a vacation thing. The mid-afternoon walk is now an operating thing. It happens at the cottage. It happens at home. It happens between calls in cities I am visiting. The walk is the walk, the meeting before it was the meeting, the meeting after it will be the meeting. The mid-afternoon walk did not move with me; the office moved into the walk.
The Tuesday-night call with the team. It runs from the cottage the way it would run from the city. The Starlink handles the call; the team does not notice. There is a clock somewhere in my head that used to tell me which days of the week were cottage-days versus office-days; that clock has gone quiet. The team meeting on a Tuesday in March is a Tuesday meeting whether the wallpaper behind me is the kitchen tile or the home-office bookshelf. The team has not noticed because there is nothing to notice.
The repair on the dock that I postponed for the call. This is the part that matters. The cottage used to be the place where the repair on the dock got done. The repair on the dock now sits in the queue of cottage-things-to-do alongside the next quarter's planning doc, and the dock waits because the planning doc is on the same calendar. The cottage and the office have not converged because I imported the office to the cottage; they have converged because the operating model that defines what is and what is not work no longer makes the distinction. There are days. There are commitments. The dock is one commitment among them; the planning doc is another.
The drive back on Sunday.I notice the drive back less every year. The drive used to be the marker that vacation was ending. The drive is now a routing decision. The work is in the car with me. The work is at the destination. The work was at the cottage. The drive does not do the thing it used to do. The car is just the way I get from one operating-environment to another.
This is a small piece. I am not making a claim about the future of work. I am noticing a thing that already happened, in this house, on this lake, in this small unremarkable way, before the term anyplace was on a consultancy deck and before the operating-class read on remote-and-hybrid had settled into the discourse it has settled into now.
The cottage was already the office. I think it had been for a while. I noticed it most recently in March.
—TJ
—TJ