April Fools’ Day Is Still Upon Us, So The Bold Italics’ Naked Office Must Be A Joke — Right?
 The open-office trend began in Silicon Valley and caught on like a greyish-fabric-thirsty wildfire, burning down cubicle walls worldwide. At one point, given the trend’s loudly touted benefits, such as improved communication, transparency, creativity, and productivity, if you weren’t opening your office, you were essentially against innovation. But in the past few years, there’s been plenty of backlash against the open-office layout: article after article about how it’s actually detrimental to productivity, riddled with distractions, and damaging to workers’ attention spans, creative thinking, and satisfaction. The Bold Italic’s headquarters utilizes an open-office floor plan, and I think my coworkers would agree that there are pros and cons. Throwing ideas around is as easy as swiveling your desk chair, yet people started to work from home more and more frequently, somehow getting multiple days’ worth of work done in a single day, and returning to the office feeling refreshed. We took a moment at the beginning of this year to reflect on the situation: what was it about working from home that made everyone so productive and happy? Most people cited a lack of interruptions, which allowed them to deeply focus on certain tasks — an argument that was, of course, immediately ignored, since “disruption” has been hailed time and time again as the be-all-and-end-all element of modern success. When it came to light during post-work happy-hour chitchat that nearly all of us worked from home sans pants, it clicked. Perhaps it wasn’t the lack of walls that was hindering our work at the office; maybe there were simply more barriers that had yet to be unbuttoned. Clothes: the last obstruction to the truly perfected working environment |
