For the past month or so, as an experiment, I’ve been opening my calendar each week for video calls with whoever books a time. It’s been amazing. Wednesday is now my favourite day.
I’m calling it Unoffice Hours.(Everything that works needs a name.)
You can book 30 minutes in my calendar here. No agenda required, no need to mail first.
I set aside a couple hours each Wednesday Monday for Unoffice Hours. The 23 conversations I’ve had since the start of August run the gamut:
feedback on early stage startups and design projects
informal discussions about ways we might work together (here’s my old work site and my new one (2024), and I’m open to other patterns)
spontaneously reaching out to chat about a blog post
seeing old friends and colleagues for the first time in many years – and also people I’ve only ever spoken with using text.
And those are all good, so feel free. I’ll keep this going for a while.
Now office hours is an old idea. Here’s some history from a 2009 piece in the Harvard Business Review:
The concept of “office hours” for business goes back to a universal ritual from our college days. We’d take classes with professors who were busy, distracted from teaching with research in the lab or the library, and otherwise remote and unapproachable. But we knew that for a couple of hours, at least one day a week, we could stop by their office, ask for advice, try out an idea, and get the guidance we needed.
The article tracks the evolution of office hours into tech, with people opening their calendars for networking and mentoring. It’s pretty common now.
Office hours have become in a staple in startup support. Here’s how office hours worked for me when I was running the R/GA Ventures accelerators in London.
I loved those open conversations over coffee in the Before Times. There’s an ostensible reason to connect, so you talk about work, or compare notes about an idea, or whatever. But then the unexpected emerges. (Sometimes you have to hunt for it.) There are things in your head that you only know are there when you say them. And there are encounters with new ideas and new perspectives. 1:1 conversation is a vital part of my process in finding work, but also simply in thinking.
But with us all going remote in a giant forced experiment, I wasn’t getting that input. Could it work over Zoom? It turns out it can. And Calendly is a genius service to allow online booking and have the meeting appear automagically in your Google Calendar.
(One tip if you do this yourself: schedule the calls for 30 minutes, but add a 15 minute buffer after each. Otherwise you’ll have to end calls super abruptly.)
So I’m not in an office.
Secondly, the heritage of office hours is about professors and students. And it’s not about that hierarchy for me: grabbing coffee - my model for this - is an informal meeting of peers. The un- is there to signal that difference. The purpose, instead, is manufactured serendipity.
I know there are a few other folks doing this too. Call it Unoffice Hours, let’s make it a movement!
I’ve added a link to this post to the sidebar on my website. It’s there if you’d like to chat. See you on the zooms.
Update October 2024:
Four years on, I’m still doing these! To date I’ve had (checks Calendly) 383 bookings, probably ~340 actual calls.
Unoffice Hours has been a wildly successful experiment for me. I’ve reviewed pitch decks, given early product and go-to-market feedback, met monks, discussed work and careers with students, re-met old school friends from two decades ago, been dropped into surprise design crits, cracked complex technical architecture challenges, heard about pilgrimage in India and children’s playgrounds in Finland, compared notes with like-minded people who I never would have met otherwise – and also compared notes with people with vastly different life experience. I’ve learnt so much.
Sometimes I even feel like I’ve been able to help. By being a second pair of eyes on what the other person sees as ordinary, or even tangled and overwhelming, we can identify a way forward or point of focus for a project or artistic practice.
Although this started as a lockdown experiment, I found it became the highlight of my week. So I never stopped.
There was a recent thread on Hacker News (which is what prompted me adding this update).
There is an Unoffice Hours webring listing other people with open calendars – check it out and maybe even start doing this yourself. It has worked wonderfully well for me.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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For the past month or so, as an experiment, I’ve been opening my calendar each week for video calls with whoever books a time. It’s been amazing. Wednesday is now my favourite day.
I’m calling it Unoffice Hours. (Everything that works needs a name.)
You can book 30 minutes in my calendar here. No agenda required, no need to mail first.
I set aside a couple hours each
WednesdayMonday for Unoffice Hours. The 23 conversations I’ve had since the start of August run the gamut:And those are all good, so feel free. I’ll keep this going for a while.
Now office hours is an old idea. Here’s some history from a 2009 piece in the Harvard Business Review:
The article tracks the evolution of office hours into tech, with people opening their calendars for networking and mentoring. It’s pretty common now.
Office hours have become in a staple in startup support. Here’s how office hours worked for me when I was running the R/GA Ventures accelerators in London.
So why un-office hours?
Well, I’m not in an office, for one…
This all started because of lockdown and because I was missing the serendipity of grabbing coffee.
I loved those open conversations over coffee in the Before Times. There’s an ostensible reason to connect, so you talk about work, or compare notes about an idea, or whatever. But then the unexpected emerges. (Sometimes you have to hunt for it.) There are things in your head that you only know are there when you say them. And there are encounters with new ideas and new perspectives. 1:1 conversation is a vital part of my process in finding work, but also simply in thinking.
But with us all going remote in a giant forced experiment, I wasn’t getting that input. Could it work over Zoom? It turns out it can. And Calendly is a genius service to allow online booking and have the meeting appear automagically in your Google Calendar.
(One tip if you do this yourself: schedule the calls for 30 minutes, but add a 15 minute buffer after each. Otherwise you’ll have to end calls super abruptly.)
So I’m not in an office.
Secondly, the heritage of office hours is about professors and students. And it’s not about that hierarchy for me: grabbing coffee - my model for this - is an informal meeting of peers. The un- is there to signal that difference. The purpose, instead, is manufactured serendipity.
I know there are a few other folks doing this too. Call it Unoffice Hours, let’s make it a movement!
I’ve added a link to this post to the sidebar on my website. It’s there if you’d like to chat. See you on the zooms.
Update October 2024:
Four years on, I’m still doing these! To date I’ve had (checks Calendly) 383 bookings, probably ~340 actual calls.
Unoffice Hours has been a wildly successful experiment for me. I’ve reviewed pitch decks, given early product and go-to-market feedback, met monks, discussed work and careers with students, re-met old school friends from two decades ago, been dropped into surprise design crits, cracked complex technical architecture challenges, heard about pilgrimage in India and children’s playgrounds in Finland, compared notes with like-minded people who I never would have met otherwise – and also compared notes with people with vastly different life experience. I’ve learnt so much.
Sometimes I even feel like I’ve been able to help. By being a second pair of eyes on what the other person sees as ordinary, or even tangled and overwhelming, we can identify a way forward or point of focus for a project or artistic practice.
Although this started as a lockdown experiment, I found it became the highlight of my week. So I never stopped.
There was a recent thread on Hacker News (which is what prompted me adding this update).
There is an Unoffice Hours webring listing other people with open calendars – check it out and maybe even start doing this yourself. It has worked wonderfully well for me.