The Working-From-Home (WFH) revolution. I called it, over a decade ago, in 2011. Just sayin’.
We’re witnessing one of the most important changes in work culture (and lifestyle) in the history of human civilization. It was long overdue, we just needed a catalyst to trigger the avalanche of change.
The spurious Covid-19 pandemic mass-hysteria has triggered a dramatic transformation in work-life culture that was overdue. It seemed a long way off even in 2019, and it seemed impossible when I wrote this in 2011, lamenting the lunacy of commuting, a bad habit left over from the 18th Century:
“Working from home solves some of the key problems. … Huge numbers of people commute on a daily basis, driving cars, cramming onto trains and buses, etc — with the transport infrastructure subsidised by public funds. … Meanwhile, the preferred alternatives (especially working from home) receive no such subsidies! It is ridiculous, and it is unsustainable. A cultural change is desperately needed, but to achieve it will require a new infrastructure, along with a new mindset for smart 21st Century living.”
The pandemic has also accelerated the chat/messaging revolution I described in 2014:
“The future of business and personal communication is in chat platforms.”
When I blogged 10 years ago that a cultural shift to working from home was needed, I didn’t anticipate such a sudden and dramatic change as #TheGreatReset:
“Huge numbers of people commute on a daily basis, driving cars, cramming onto trains and buses, etc — with the transport infrastructure subsidised by public funds. We don’t do it for fun. Meanwhile, the preferred alternatives (especially working from home) receive no such subsidies! It is ridiculous, and it is unsustainable. A cultural change is desperately needed…”
Digital Nomads
Now, the latest fad is working from home in Spain, with its new Digital Nomad Visa scheme. The featured image at the top of this blog post shows the view from my roof-terrace office in Spain, downloaded from a recent Facebook post.
Other countries jumped far ahead of the UK with their internet infrastructure as I’ve been warning and predicted would happen for well over a decade. I am well set up as a Digital Nomad. I started off with Movistar’s 300 Mpbs symmetric broadband package, and recently upgraded to 900 Mbps. By the way, my 900Mbps connection in Spain is cheaper than my 30 Mbps in the UK! In fact, the latency in my connection to systems in the UK, from the top of a remote Spanish mountain at a distance of >1,500 km, is often faster than it is from my house only 30 km away. That’s fibre-optic internet with extremely low lag, at mi casa in the beautiful remote mountains of south-eastern Spain.
To emphasise my point, here’s a couple more photos of my workspace in Spain, borrowed from recent Facebook posts:-
From the archive: this post was imported from the previous version of my website, so this page is its new canonical home, but it is also archived on the Internet Archive, here.