On last week's earnings call, apartment landlord Equity Residential mentioned that the two US markets most impacted by a delayed return to office appear to be San Francisco and Seattle. They went on to say that San Francisco is the only market in which they operate where rents have not fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
According to Bloomberg (which is relying on employee swipe-card data), office utilization in the San Francisco area is sitting at around 25% as of October 20, 2021. This is compared to a national average of around 37%. The obvious rationale here is that large tech companies have delayed their return to office and/or been more aggressive in adopting remote/hybrid work.
Looking at these numbers, it is clear that as someone who has been going into the office every day since the start of summer, I am currently in the minority.
On last week's earnings call, apartment landlord Equity Residential mentioned that the two US markets most impacted by a delayed return to office appear to be San Francisco and Seattle. They went on to say that San Francisco is the only market in which they operate where rents have not fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
According to Bloomberg (which is relying on employee swipe-card data), office utilization in the San Francisco area is sitting at around 25% as of October 20, 2021. This is compared to a national average of around 37%. The obvious rationale here is that large tech companies have delayed their return to office and/or been more aggressive in adopting remote/hybrid work.
Looking at these numbers, it is clear that as someone who has been going into the office every day since the start of summer, I am currently in the minority.
This recent post by Benedict Evans talks about the firehose that is the internet. To illustrate this point, he gives the example of unread emails. If you were to look at your phone right now, how many unread emails would it show?
Since the summer, I have been using the lunch line at Jimmy the Greek (in First Canadian Place) as a crude measure for the reopening of the CBD in downtown Toronto. It is partially a joke. Those of you who know me will know I am a fan of Jimmy the Greek (and large filling lunches in general). But at the same time, it is a probably a fairly decent (but again crude) proxy for the utilization rate of the offices that sit above and around Jimmy. Pre-COVID the lunch lines were always long and there was usually nowhere to sit. In the spring of this year, I was often the only person there, single-handedly keeping Jimmy alive. But things picked up throughout the summer months and there was a significant spike this week, following Labor Day (see above tweet). This was the spike that many/most of us were predicting and it showed through in the Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index.
This recent post by Benedict Evans talks about the firehose that is the internet. To illustrate this point, he gives the example of unread emails. If you were to look at your phone right now, how many unread emails would it show?
Since the summer, I have been using the lunch line at Jimmy the Greek (in First Canadian Place) as a crude measure for the reopening of the CBD in downtown Toronto. It is partially a joke. Those of you who know me will know I am a fan of Jimmy the Greek (and large filling lunches in general). But at the same time, it is a probably a fairly decent (but again crude) proxy for the utilization rate of the offices that sit above and around Jimmy. Pre-COVID the lunch lines were always long and there was usually nowhere to sit. In the spring of this year, I was often the only person there, single-handedly keeping Jimmy alive. But things picked up throughout the summer months and there was a significant spike this week, following Labor Day (see above tweet). This was the spike that many/most of us were predicting and it showed through in the Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index.
My work email account is mostly read because reading and responding to emails is one of the ways that I manage to remain gainfully employed. But my personal email currently has 27,230 unread emails. Most of these are newsletters and emails from people wanting to somehow optimize this blog or help me reach 1 trillion followers on Instagram.
Whatever the purpose, it's almost impossible to keep up. And since having unread asymmetric emails of little consequence doesn't bother me in the slightest, I let it go.
This is one way to deal with the firehose -- acceptance. And in Benedict's post he makes the argument that maybe the push that we are seeing toward the metaverse is exactly that -- full acceptance. "When software eats the world, it's not software anymore."
But the opposite way of dealing with information overload is extreme simplification. And there is something so beautiful about minimalism in a world of too much.
Today I learned about a bookstore in Tokyo called Morioka Shoten (shoten = bookstore). It is located in Ginza (pictured above) and the proposition is "a single room with a single book." The bookstore consists of, you know, a single room and at any given time there is only one book for sale.
Each book is available for six days, after which time a new book is made available. In addition to selling one book at a time, the single room shop is used for things like events and exhibitions.
It's a radical idea and perhaps it is best suited to Japan. But maybe we all need things that slow us down and focus our attention on only a few things or even a single thing. Maybe we need it to offset the information firehose.
Image: Morioka Shoten
My work email account is mostly read because reading and responding to emails is one of the ways that I manage to remain gainfully employed. But my personal email currently has 27,230 unread emails. Most of these are newsletters and emails from people wanting to somehow optimize this blog or help me reach 1 trillion followers on Instagram.
Whatever the purpose, it's almost impossible to keep up. And since having unread asymmetric emails of little consequence doesn't bother me in the slightest, I let it go.
This is one way to deal with the firehose -- acceptance. And in Benedict's post he makes the argument that maybe the push that we are seeing toward the metaverse is exactly that -- full acceptance. "When software eats the world, it's not software anymore."
But the opposite way of dealing with information overload is extreme simplification. And there is something so beautiful about minimalism in a world of too much.
Today I learned about a bookstore in Tokyo called Morioka Shoten (shoten = bookstore). It is located in Ginza (pictured above) and the proposition is "a single room with a single book." The bookstore consists of, you know, a single room and at any given time there is only one book for sale.
Each book is available for six days, after which time a new book is made available. In addition to selling one book at a time, the single room shop is used for things like events and exhibitions.
It's a radical idea and perhaps it is best suited to Japan. But maybe we all need things that slow us down and focus our attention on only a few things or even a single thing. Maybe we need it to offset the information firehose.
