Efficiency and workspaces

Everything needs to apparently be more efficient these days. This has started to include the workspaces, also. First there was a migration from offices into the cubicle hell that can be seen in a typical contemporary office environment of a... well, apparently a yesterday's company. Some brilliant bloke has apparently since then done some calculations and come up with the conclusion that people in fact travel and are away from the office, which means that their cubicles are still unused part of the time. What's the solution? Flexispace!

The flexible workspace concept is brilliant; everyone comes to work in the morning and the first ones get to pick the best seats. You won't have a fixed seat allocated to you. It also alleviates you from the burden of having papers and books and binders and personal belongings at work. Unfortunately, however, some of us might actually have papers that we need at work and without a fixed seat, it's quite tedious to clear up the desk every night you go home and then in the morning unpack everything again. In fact, the whole concept is sort of silly and at work it's being sold as "the internet way of working", whatever that means.

I actually came up with a solution to another related problem. Even with the flexible workspaces, they are still very much underutilized at least 2/7 of the week, namely during the weekends. This saddens me to a very great extent as people are no longer commited enough to come to work on the weekends. This is also a huge waste as the offices lie empty during the weekends and nobody is utilizing the space, be it offices, cubicles, or flexible space. My suggestion is thus to increase the typical work week from five to seven days to utilize the spaces more efficiently. When this suggestion goes through (and it will, believe me, since it's "the internet way of working", i.e. non-stop, you don't go home ;), I will then continue to push this idea even further, since due to silly things like free time and sleep the offices also are still underutilized. I'm not brutal and I understand that people need some sleep. So my suggestion here is to also introduce shifts into white collar office work! This way we can utilize the spaces at the office at near 100% efficiency! Think of all the whales and rainforests this efficiency increase can save! Think about it; with all this increased efficiency and decreased waste, every weekend enough killer whales are saved to cover the land area of Belgium... Three times over!

So, won't you join me in advocating an even more efficient space allocation scheme for the offices around the world? You'll be saving the environment and whales at the same time!