Your Coworking Strategy Sucks During Big Events. Here Is How to Fix It.
There is a particular kind of panic you feel when you walk into your usual cafe at 9am, ready to work, and find it packed with people in jerseys watching a match that started at 7. Your table is gone. The WiFi is struggling. The barista gives you a look that says “read the room.”
Major events — World Cup matches, conferences, festivals — destroy your carefully cultivated work routine. Here’s how to stay productive when the city around you is partying.
Book Ahead or Suffer
During the World Cup, coworking spaces in host cities are filling up days in advance. During SXSW in Austin, every desk within three miles of downtown is gone by 8am. During Web Summit in Lisbon, spaces fill up a week before the conference even starts.
If you’re planning to work remotely in a city during a major event, book your coworking day passes before you arrive. Not the day before. Not the morning of. A week ahead, minimum. Most spaces let you reserve online. If they don’t, call them.
The people who show up assuming they’ll find a desk are the ones working from hotel lobbies with terrible WiFi at 2pm. Do not be that person.
Know Where the Urban Stadiums Are
This is a World Cup-specific tip, but it generalizes. If a major event has venues in your city, understand which ones are urban (surrounded by actual infrastructure) and which are suburban (surrounded by parking lots).
Urban stadiums in World Cup host cities — Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia, Seattle — have 6x more coworking spaces within a 3-mile radius than suburban ones. You can work downtown and still make match time.
Suburban stadiums — MetLife in East Rutherford, Gillette in Foxborough, AT&T in Arlington — are coworking deserts. Do not try to work near these stadiums. Work downtown. Commute to the match. Accept the travel time as the cost of staying employed.
Have a Backup Plan (Always)
Your primary workspace will fail at some point during a major event. WiFi will go down. A private event will book out the entire space. The cafe will close early for a staff party. This is not pessimism. This is pattern recognition.
Before the event starts, identify three workspaces: your primary, your backup, and your emergency option. The emergency option can be your accommodation if it has reliable WiFi. It can be a hotel lobby that’s too expensive to be crowded. It can be a library. What matters is that you know where it is before you need it.
Match Your Work Hours to Event Schedules
This seems obvious, and yet everyone gets it wrong. If you have a 3pm match, your 2pm client call needs to move. If you know the city will be chaos after 5pm, front-load your important work into the morning.
Block your calendar around the event schedule first, then fit meetings into the gaps. The people who try to squeeze work around events end up doing both poorly. The people who accept the constraint and plan around it do both well.
Next reads: World Cup host cities ranked for remote workers · Coworking vs cafe vs home: real cost comparison · How to stay productive without a home office