During my master’s studies in electrical engineering, I visited a course named Sustainable Mobility. The course was all about evaluating contemporary means of transportation and performing impact and lifecycle analyses, that allow comparing e.g. a VW Golf Diesel with its electrical pendant in terms of emissions. While the champions of sustainable mobility were clear (hint: use trains and bikes whenever you can), we also talked a lot about the future of transportation, concepts like hyper loops, and of course autonomous cars.

The impression I remember most from the course was the professor’s vision of the future of work, which would be an inevitable consequence of the emergence of autonomous vehicles.

According to him, in the not so distant future, a typical workday would look like the following:

• You get up in the morning take a shower, prepare some coffee-to-go. By 8 am you enter your car where you open your laptop and start working.

• Your self-driving car would then bring you to your office which is located anywhere between 30 and 200 km of distance to your home. After 2 hours of deep work in the car, you are now ready to attend meetings, have lunch with your colleagues, and do work that requires your physical presence.

• At around 3 pm you would re-enter your vehicle and do another 2 hours of solitary work, and be home with your family by 5 pm.

Back then, I was convinced that this vision of the future of work is both appealing (no time wasted for commuting) and inevitable.

I finished my master’s studies right at the beginning of the first lockdown. While many people were far more negatively affected by the pandemic than me, it was not exactly a great time to finish one’s studies and search for a job. Still, I was lucky and found a nice position at an interesting startup. The only problem was that I did not want to move and the company was located in another city.

While being skeptical of taking a fully remote position, I knew it would be a position that would allow me to grow. And after all, I was forced to stay at home most of my time anyway, no matter if I had a job or not.

I was worried that constant home office could make me less productive, but to my surprise, everything turned out fine and I managed to stay as focused as under normal conditions.

I attribute this to a set of habits that would allow me to switch between a work and a leisure mindset. My setup to do that was not ideal, as I am living in a shared flat without a dedicated office room and a daily commute from bed to the desk of about 1,83 Meters.

My rules were:

• Take a short walk outside before and after work to simulate the commute to the office.

• Keep a rigid clean desk policy. When you stop working for the day, put your laptop and notes into the drawer.

• The desk is only used for work. Leisure time is spent outside, on the couch, or at the kitchen table.

Thinking back at the professor’s vision, I then leaned more towards the opinion that fully working remotely is the future of work (for digital jobs at least).

After all, commuting several hundred kilometers a day seems neither necessary nor appropriate when half of your workday is spent remotely anyway.

Nevertheless, the remote aspect was the reason to quit my position and search for something new. Even as I was productive and was able to do interesting things, over time I felt like something was missing.

I learned that for me, never seeing your colleagues in person makes it much harder to develop a meaningful connection to your company. At least one that is more than a purely transaction based work relationship. Even with the pandemic still ongoing, starting my position at craftworks felt like a 180-degree shift in my work environment.

Coffee breaks with colleagues, short breaks of table soccer, after-work gatherings, regular team events, you name it. And on top of that the flexibility to stay at home, if it better suits your schedule at the moment.

At craftworks, you can feel that a lively company culture is of great importance to everyone, and the management is actively thinking about how to make employees feel comfortable so that they are willing and able to provide their best work.

In the end, I learned for myself that going to an office and meeting colleagues in person is of great importance to me.

But I can also see great value in the time saving and convenience of working from home every now and then.

In a way, being able to take this hybrid approach gives the essence of what working from your autonomous vehicle provides – meeting people in person while minimizing the hassle of wasting a great deal of your time on the work commute.