Freelance and remote work is a reality in my everyday life: at the moment I’m in Northern Ireland and I work for Italy, soon I’ll be moving back without companies and agencies even realizing it 😉
Since this is part of my life, in this blog I’ll talk a lot about this topic; actually I already wrote about this some weeks ago, reviewing the book “Remote – Office not required” by Jason Fried and Davide Heinemer Hansson. Now some time passed from my reading, I left it settle for a bit and I thought about other observations. One above others never stopped to go around in my mind: remote work is the new luxury. I thought about all the things I can do while I work, in my case most of all because of the possibility of geographically moving: I work all day, but I can pass my evenings with my boyfriend; if I was working in an office I couldn’t see him but during the holidays. I learnt a second language, which now I talk almost as italian, and I went deep in a different culture. I visited wonderful places and learnt new point of views. These, in my believe, are luxuries. Not the giant offices in a good position, not the leather armchair, not the big car. Opinions. Mine agree once again with Fried and Hansson’s ones.
The “out-of-the-office” phenomenon is growing, as a research by oDesk.com (freelance jobs platform) on the future of work by the millennials (the so called “Generation Y”) point of view demonstrates: even if a year passed from the results, I find the infographic is very interesting; it doesn’t stop on the datas on how many would want to leave their jobs in officed (and they’ll do, or probably the already did that), but says even why.
A freelance has more freedom to work:
- from any place
- at any time
- following his/her interests
- while traveling
So, not even to be said, the motivation is indeed in that freedom of moving and self-management that I would not exchange for anything in the world.
Infographic by odesk.com
Read more: MILLENNIALS & THE FUTURE OF WORK, Spring 2013
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