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The other day I was talking with a client of mine. It was after hours and I was out running personal errands. This client likes to talk, as in I spend hours on the phone with people at one time, and he was going on about a meeting. How the guy at the meeting said he couldn’t ‘read’ my client.

So my client, let’s call him Bud ((Because, great name.)) , asked me: “Am I hard to read?”

Now I replied that I think to so he was, to which Bud chuckled and asked: “Do you know why?”

Me: “Yes, because you never stop talking.” ((Bud’s a good client, and takes a ribbing well.))

Bud laughed again and told me: “No, well maybe, but it’s because I never know what I am thinking — and sometimes I just change my mind every time someone talks to me.”

And I can attest, Bud does change his mind often.

But so do I. In fact, and I relayed this to him, I see the ability to change your mind as one of the most intellectually honest things you can do. But I think I need to clarify that statement a bit.

It’s not intellectual in any sense to arbitrarily change your mind — simply for the sake of changing your mind. What is intellectual is if you know why you are changing your mind.

And in most cases the “why” is usually easily cited as ‘new evidence’. But that’s why I appreciate people who change their mind so much: I know they are listening, processing, and thinking constantly about new inputs they receive. They aren’t just hearing me for the sake of trying to figure out how to punch back at my argument, they are actively listening to my point.

To me, there is nothing more you can ask from a person than for them to keep the cliched “open mind” and hear you out. I’m wrong — a lot — but what keeps me alive (so to speak) is the fact that I recognize where I have wronged, why, and then try to change it (whether that be an action, decision, or thought).

Don’t be afraid to change your mind as long as you know why you are changing your mind. I cannot imagine a world where people were not willing to change your mind — all to often we are asked to make a decision on incomplete data. Imagine if you had to stick to that decision even after you get better data? That would be horrid.

Two hours after I talked to Bud on the phone I decided to join back up on Twitter. I waited a day just to make sure that I wasn’t missing anything, but I changed my mind.

In the post about rejoining Twitter I could have defended my action without ever admitting I was wrong. I could have. But that would have been wrong in itself.

So it’s good to change you mind, but don’t do so for the wrong reasons. And certainly don’t act like you didn’t change your mind — then you just look like a fool.

I tend to read a lot of posts about the future of the office — be it about office design, or working from home. I read these posts because not only will it eventually effect me, it likely will effect my business (being in real estate) much faster.

When you read these articles the facts you tend to understand after a while come down to:

• We all ignore that ‘open office’ designs are not the most productive environments because: they look pretty, they are trendy, and most importantly they cost less.
• Remote working, some people have it, some don’t, but everyone seems to want it.
• Did I mention open office designs? Those are really big.
• And then there are the posts about standing at your desk, which I love to do — though I am sitting as I type this.

There seems to be the consensus that open office layouts are here to stay, and that eventually at some point, working remotely will be the norm.

Ok, I guess.

But I have a little different vision of the ‘future’ office, and it’s certainly not working from home. While it is very nice to work from home, in general, working from home is a pretty bad idea. Forget all the ‘distractions’ ((I worked from home quite a bit for a few years, it was not ideal.)) that most people will point to and instead focus on just one aspect: space.

How much space do you have in your home to create an office? Ok, so you have enough for you, but what about your spouse, or your kids when they start working (but are still in school), is there room for all of you to have home offices? I think not.

Are we suddenly going to start remodeling our homes, and designing them, to accommodate the fact that we work from home? Are dining rooms, living rooms, eat-in kitchens, and garages all going to become ‘offices’? How long, if we will all work from home one day, until our home is nothing but and office?

Is the future really one where my commute is a hallway, and I never leave the house, let alone stand up? Where the work never ends because it is just two steps away and everyone, including your boss and clients, knows that? Is it one where we just work all the time because we feel pressured into it, or where we constantly fight all the distractions at home as we try to do some work that we are loathe to do?

I think not — at least I hope not.

The question that has been nagging at me is this: what happens to the millions of square feet of existing office space if, indeed, there are no corporate offices anymore?

That space won’t simply vanish — trust me, I manage far too much vacant space and no matter how hard you try it doesn’t go away.

I try to look at this problem of remote working and current office space from the perspective of what I would do to fill the space. Open office space layouts has proven that companies love saving money, even if it is at the expense of less productivity. ((As contentious a statement as it is to say that open plans are less productive, but just put your headphones back on and enjoy that collaborative open office while rocking out and trying your best to ignore the people around you.)) It comes down to what’s cheaper for corporations: offices, or no offices?

To that end I think corporations will actually be keen on having people work from home, rather than having to pay for an office — and the admin staff that is required of you having an office. ((Janitors, office managers, maintenance.))

So if I were running a property with a bunch of vacant office space, I’d start leasing out the individual offices in the space to people who “work from home”. That thought got me a little excited about how the future of office work could really play out.

Maybe corporations don’t have offices anymore, but maybe individuals do have offices. Sometimes that is a desk in the corner of a room full of desks, sometimes that’s an office in a building full of offices. But I see it working like so:

• I have my own office, setup the way I want it.
• That office is paid for by whomever I work for as part of my salary.
• If I leave the company, I simply go to another company, and that company doesn’t have to pay for a new workspace, as I already have it. I can move jobs without having to move offices.
• Or, I can move offices, cities, countries at will, and never have to change my job.

Offices become “Ben’s office”, instead of “X Company’s office”. That could be cool, and it makes far more sense than everyone working from home. Each employee having their own dedicated office space would allow for:

• Personalization
• The correct environment for that employee. Be it ‘open’, or private — or somewhere in-between.
• Cheaper costs, as a company now has 100% flexibility with lease rates (they aren’t locked into a 10 year lease for a 1,000 people even if they just laid off half the people). Instead their employees assume the risk of a lease, or work from home.
• Employees get to choose their location, and move whenever they might want to.
• Employees get to choose the people they spend their day with. Don’t like the other people in your office? Get a new office. Don’t like your city? Get a new city.

There are more, but you get the idea.

To me this is a powerful idea. The idea that we reverse roles to a degree. We don’t have to live with our future office being in our homes — because there is going to be abundant space available for us to rent out. Want a nicer office? Pay for it.

I still have doubt about how much remote work will play into the future of business, but there is no doubt that it already is a substantial amount of people. Therefore, I can only assume that number is going to increase with every technological jump we make.

The biggest hurdle now is simply paper. If we can find a way to reduce paper transaction between business (checks and invoices) then we can expedite this change in workspace.

This should be exciting.

James Robinson has a post of questionable truth up about Google removing search results for Vivint (a Nest competitor) from Google search. Now, Matt Cutts clears up that this was part of a SPAM thing and says it has nothing to do with the Nest acquisition.

This though will always be a problem. When search results are as important to finding good information as they have become, then there will always be questions around integrity for companies that run anything other than just a pure search engine. This is one of the reasons I like sites that are member supported, and why I like DuckDuckGo so very much.

Who knows what the truth here is, but that in itself is the real problem. We, as users, should never have to question if the search results are being refactored to better support the companies other products. With Google ((And probably Bing too if we look hard enough.)) there has been a lot of smoke (and some clear instances) of the company gaming search results to better support their products. ((See: Google Plus))

That simply shouldn’t be the case, search accuracy is far too important.

For a while now rumors have been swirling that Apple is gearing up to introduce multi-tasking on the iPad — the kind where two apps run side-by-side. The thing about it, the solution seems rather unApple to me.

Perhaps you disagree, but how in the world do you run two apps side by side in portrait mode? What, you disable portrait mode? Unlikely.

There’s little elegance about it, and far too much complexity. Perhaps they have something amazing I am not thinking of ((Not a big reach there.)) , but I am more inclined to believe that if Apple want’s to improve what ‘business’ users call ‘multi-tasking’ that they would approach it in a different way.

More specifically, I think Apple would approach it in a similar manner with how apps can access the Photo Library, Twitter compose, Facebook compose, or new Email compose screens. I’d imagine something like being able install a blogging app, and having that register with Safari. Then, via the Share sheet, I can call that app from within Safari to create a new blog post as if I was emailing the page to someone.

That seems more elegant, and honestly, more useful than two apps running along side each other. In fact adding such a system seems like it would really work well as it wouldn’t be just an iPad feature — the iPhone could use that system just as elegantly.