Working Out While Working Up the Org Chart
Ever feel you're working with a bunch of dumbbells? You don't know the half of it.
According to "The Hottest New Office is the Gym," a recent article by Anne Marie Chaker in The Wall Street Journal, posh gyms are adding cubicles and privacy booths to their Nautilus Ab Crunchers and Stairmaster StepMills, making the hottest office space in town also the sweatiest.
It's all about co-working spaces -- places that are not the official office you don't want to go to and not the home office you're sick of.
There are formal co-working spaces popping up in empty downtown buildings all across America. These communal work spaces allow you to work next to a horde of certifiable weirdos, thus providing an authentic office experience. There are also informal co-working spaces like coffee shops, libraries and the waiting room at your psychiatrist's office.
While all these co-working spaces have their advantages and disadvantages -- just try to get a librarian to serve you a rose petal beetroot latte -- none of them make it possible to recover from a convo with your dead-head boss by doing a super-set of Romanian dead lifts, or to celebrate your failure to rise up in the company with a vigorous hour of working hard and getting nowhere on an elliptical trainer.
On the negative side of the ledger, working where you work out can be expensive. For audit manager Jessica DiGiovanna the cost of her gym-adjacent office space is $499 a month. Pricey, yes, but it is "scented with notes of bergamot."
(I'll pause here while you ask your company's facilities manager to add a note of bergamot to your office space. When they finish laughing, we can continue.)
For DiGiovanna, working at her gym "lets her toggle between self-care and her job." If you like a good toggle, but don't want to shell out for a gym membership, ask your manager to bring exercise equipment into your office. Normally, a company would balk at the cost of putting full-cage power racks in the conference room or replacing the marketing department with a Zumba studio, but with management completely moo-moo-goo-goo about getting their employees back to the office, the concept could receive a warm welcome.
In the meantime, here are three strategies to balance the mental wear and tear of your job with the joy of building yourself up to Hulk-like proportions, all without ever leaving your desk.
No. 1: Give meetings a power lift
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