7 geeky things I love about coworking

One of the coolest things about coworking to me personally is seeing how others manage their workflow and taking the things I learn and integrating them into my own methods. Call me crazy geeky, but here some of little things that I love that I’ve experienced at Conjunctured so far:

1. Taking a glance at how other coworkers have setup their labels differently in Gmail or organized their bookmarks and comparing it to my own methods.
2. John Metcalf excitedly asking me what Firefox addon I have that shows a site’s Google PageRank + Alexa rating and me excitedly sharing it with him.
3. Watching Cesar Torres design a client’s business cards in Adobe Illustrator and me watching his fingers go crazy with keyboard shortcuts that I never use.
4. Seeing that Dusty Reagan, as tech-savvy as he is, still keeps his to-do list in his handy little Moleskine. And also, that I got to excitedly share with my him how I manage my own to-do lists with Todoist.
5. Seeing live demos of useful web apps (and iPhone Apps too for that matter) that I had never seen in action. In this case, Microsoft Office Live, thanks to Robert Starek. Most of these demos don’t result in me installing the programs, but it’s just a lot more efficient to get a demo by an avid & passionate user, rather than seeing a tutorial online.
6. Watching how Cullen Wilson handles client proposals so quickly and easily—a task that I normally dread and find time consuming. Maybe some of that will rub off on me!
7. Realizing that productive work really can happen while lying down on a couch for hours at a time. (Scott Bellware prefers the ‘lounge room’ to the tables and chairs of the ‘coworking room’ any day of the week.)

Coworking is a constant reminder to me that being consistently exposed to difference is a powerful thing. We all have our unique way of doing things, but if we learn from others as well as share with others our methods we all become more successful in our own rights. It’s simply impossible to have the time to discover everything on our own, so it seems coworking provides an innovative means to in-person crowdsourcing.

–David