Page 56 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Moving between places
they worked on a given day depended on what the intention was to do and how the places afforded specific activities, such as conducting focused work or embedding socially.
2.4.2 Affordances of nomadic work
The continuous travel inherent to nomadic work gave rise to specific challenges to create continuity of the nomad's work environment: working across different places, conducting focused work, and embedding socially (Table 2.5). We found that nomadic workers addressed these challenges by enacting the affordances of malleability, privacy, and instant sociality (Table 2.6, 2.7). Specifically, they interacted with the places’ physical and social aspects (described above), as we show below.
Malleability. The choice where to work, how long to stay, and what tasks to engage in is inherent to nomadic work and represented their professional freedom. By making the workplace a choice, the location where work is conducted was pushed into the foreground of nomadic work. For example, Matt's description of a typical day is representative for our nomadic respondents:
“I usually don't go to the same place the next day, I like to switch it up. So usually I go outside, even during the day if I work in the morning somewhere, and often I go and work somewhere else. Just to switch it up again, which is not really the most efficient way. There is travel time, and you have to sit down again.” (Matt, AB tester, #8)
Despite that working in such a variety of places - often even within the span of a day as Matt's quote illustrated – is a choice, it presented a challenge. This is because workers not only moved between the locations, but they also needed to pack and unpack their belongings before being able to work again. In each place, nomadic workers need to construct a new, temporary work environment: “I still get frustrated sometimes with workplaces, when I have to create them out of nowhere.” (Kai, blogger, #43).
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