Back to Coworking!

In 2011, I wrote a post about leaving the Brooklyn coworking space I'd been renting, where I'd met the co-founder of Plover, where I'd done my first stint of remote captioning, and where I'd spent many happy months in the company of other freelancers and entrepreneurs. That coworking space no longer exists, sadly, though I learned recently while listening to the podcast Startup that the same building housed the first offices of Gimlet Media, which was a disorienting coincidence. These past five years, I've had a home office in a huge two-bedroom apartment (with seven closets and an eat-in kitchen!), and it's been wonderful. I've done a fair bit of remote captioning in that office, though the majority of my work has been onsite since we moved here. That's all about to change, though. This Saturday, we'll be moving to a much smaller 2-bedroom apartment about 20 blocks downtown, with only two closets and a nice but narrow kitchen. We're downsizing almost everything -- ditching our kitchen table, buying a smaller couch, getting rid of hundreds of books plus several bookshelves, and leaving behind our three beautiful desks, which won't fit in the new space. The new space, you see, won't have a home office, because the second bedroom will be used as... A bedroom. Yup. We're having a kid. He's due in August. I'm currently trying to switch most if not all of my captioning work from onsite to remote so I won't have to spend 8 or more hours a day out of the apartment like I have been for the past many years. I'm also planning to work fewer hours in general, at least until we get our feet under ourselves as parents. That'll probably mean spending down some savings, but I can't think of anything I'd rather spend it on. The trouble with captioning, though, is that it doesn't coexist well with screaming babies, and there's hardly space in the new apartment to set up my equipment anyway. So starting July 1, I'll be hotdesking at Harlem Collective, a fantastic new coworking space that opened just a few months ago on 152nd Street. It's got 24-hour access, which is perfect for the early-morning overseas conferences I sometimes find myself captioning, and with luck, it'll only take me about 15 minutes to get there from my new apartment, which means I won't have to be away from the kid for long. I'm a little sad about losing my home office space, but I'm so excited to start this new adventure.