Three years ago I hit the road hard and learned about urban nomadism first hand. The biggest surprise…? How natural it felt… The second biggest surprise…? How easy it was.
Tony Bacigalupo posted links to two great articles on nomadism and mobile workers from The Economist to our Google Group. (Tony, thanks!)
The first article talks about the rise of mobile workers and the challenges that a mobile, always-on context introduces into lives which are/were separated into home and work.
Surprisingly (or perhaps not), the blurring of work and home can be viewed as a “‘historical re-integration’ of our productive and social spheres”. What we’ve lost and need to rediscover is the skill necessary to balance the two.
It’s important to remember that this article isn’t just about kids and the so-called digital elite. The earliest adopters of mobile technology were the original road-warriors—salespeople and on-the-move executives.
[Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO] leads by example. He usually carries only his BlackBerry and works from “anywhere that has Wi-Fi”. He has an assistant who manages his diary (”she recently put her foot down and has forbidden me to modify what she puts in”) so that “150% of my time is structured.” The difference is that he now rarely sees her, and that the venues for his scheduled meetings are flexible. He conducts many on Skype, a free internet-telephone service, or in person at cafés. “Time provides the structure, location takes care of itself,” he says.
Read that again… “Time provides the structure, location takes care of itself.”
The second article explains modern nomadism in more detail.
People confuse astronauts and nomads.
The old mental picture of a nomad invariably had him—mostly him, at that time—lugging lots of [gadgets]. Since these machines, large and small, were portable, people assumed that they also made their owners mobile. Not so. The proper metaphor for somebody who carries portable but unwieldy and cumbersome infrastructure is that of an astronaut rather than a nomad… Astronauts must bring what they need, including oxygen, because they cannot rely on their environment to provide it. They are both defined and limited by their gear and supplies.
Compare this with the nomad.
Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online.
What I learned when I hit the road was that the technology that others saw as modern shackles to the office, was that same technology that allowed me to work where and how I wanted. I never looked back…
- Bandit
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