Spearheaded by Uber and AirBnB, the sharing economy is innovating the way people consume products and services. Slowly but surely, it’s also changing the market of office spaces around the world.

According to Investopedia, the Sharing Economy is an economic model that allows consumers to rent assets owned by a private individual and is most likely used when the cost of a particular asset is high but isn’t fully utilized all the time.

In retrospect, people have shared items with other people long before. We shared clothing with our family members, shared cars with friends and even unused equipment. And today’s technology – with the help of the internet – have created a bridge between the people who want to share their unutilized assets and the individuals who are looking for people willing to share it with them.

AirBnB allowed homeowners to rent out vacant bedroom and homes to strangers and Uber allowed drivers to share rides with other people. And as people start to see the opportunity to make profit out of sharing, the market grew.

Around the world, people share spaces for car park, for storage and even for planting – all of which made possible by today’s technology and the growing knack to save money. It wasn’t long until the commercial real estate industry thought that its time join the sharing phenomena.

However, there’s more it than it seems. Brokers aren’t just jumping into sharing economies for no reason. Social and economic trends came into play. Now, companies are reshaping the ideas of modern office.

Experts believed that the traditional offices began to fade when spaces per work started to shrink. Space allocation dropped from 125 feet per worker to 50 feet over the last decade. Moreover, it was a global phenomenon happening from Asia to Europe.

In addition to this, the financial pressure are driving companies to look for cheaper offices with flexible workspaces. Experts have argued that the global recession that took place during the 2008 diminished cheap rent. Businesses couldn’t afford the idle capacity brought by large-scale office buildings.

Another factor behind the demand of shared spaces is the increasing number of remote workers. The premise of telecommunicating first came to the industry during the year of 1973 and with the advancement of today’s technologies, flexible ways of working have become popular.

As the number of self-employed professionals and digital nomads rose and the commodity of business operations evolved, a demand for cheap and flexible offices came to be.

The idea of flexible workspaces was brought to life by serviced offices – now widely known as shared offices or executive suites. Companies started to lease large offices and dividing them into smaller offices. Furnishing it with desks, meeting rooms and all the facilities and equipment needed in a conventional office, they started renting these spaces out to different companies.

Later on, hosted services entered the market with a similar layout as serviced offices while providing back office functions such as information technology services, human resource staffing and accounting. These providers cater to offshoring business process outsourcers.

The movement of coworking then drove the hybridization of workspaces. Coworking spaces became the widely-popular flexible workspace. Offering open space layouts with trendy interior designs and variety of working environments to cater the different needs of tech startups and freelancers. Nowadays, they also offer private offices, conference room rentals as well as event spaces.

The synergy between the sharing economy and the evolving industry of workspace solutions paved the way for a new breed of offices that can benefit both the employee and the employer. Shared spaces caters to both the needs of the company and the needs of its employees.

Besides, sharing is caring. Ready to share your offices with the rest of the world? Talk to us today!

The twenties of someone’s life is often called as one of the most exhausting moments. Everything is complicated and the world doesn’t really give you a handout on how to successfully survive this frenzy. And though you have grownups to give you – at the very least – a rundown of what to expect, you’re still confused.

In summary, people often associate their twenties as this disorderly time of their life that they barely managed to survive. These are the years wherein almost everyone is frustrated and unsure of where they are heading, of what they actually want in life. It’s quite the chaos, really.

Chances are by the time you’re in your twenties, you want to learn how to stand on your own. You tell your family that as grateful as anyone can be that they aren’t cutting you off, you want to “make it” on your own. Or maybe they still haven’t let you live by yourself, so here you are, independent but not really.

It’s all complicated because everything has changed. You’ve entered a new territory without prior knowledge on how to do things correctly. You do what every person in your age do right after graduating, look for a job. Grownups make it look so easy yet here you are, trying you best to look as professional as you can be – thinking that maybe if you dress well enough, iron your shirt properly, you’d fool everyone that you have your life together.

And somewhere in the middle, there’s this uneasiness in your heart. Do I actually like my job or am I just fooling myself that I’m happy here? Am I doing this because I love what I’m doing or is this just for show? So that people won’t ridicule me that I’m being left behind. You wonder if you’re actually cut for this traditional office and think that maybe you should try coworking or be a digital nomad, isn’t that the trend nowadays?

It only gets worse when you’ve come to the point that you finally realize maybe this isn’t for you. You’re at a loss for words. You want to follow what your heart wants, work on something that you actually love, but they won’t let you. Because there’s another dilemma that you have to consider; expectations.

Society expect you to get a high paying job so that you’d pay back your parents for everything they’ve done for you or to finally get that college loan of off your back. The moment universities thrust you into the real world, you have to get yourself together – no time for travelling in hopes of finding yourself or figuring out what you want in life, that’s a complete detour from the road of success.

Don’t forget about your social life, they’d add. You need to have enough time to socialize with other people and have fun. A high-paying 9-to-5 job, a bursting social life and the intuition of doing the right thing is what they expect from you, a young person in their twenties barely having any idea on what’s happening.

But here’s the thing, there’s about a million of your generation who doesn’t have their life together. They may try to fool society with their Instagram posts and Facebook statuses, deep down, they’re just trying to live through another day.

花樣年華 or hwayang-yeonwha, that’s what your twenties is actually like. The most beautiful moment in life. It’s the only time you get to truly know yourself through and through. This is the only time that you get to decide for yourself; paying no attention to what anyone else thinks.

Admittedly, it’s the most tumultuous time of your life. At the same time, it’s the most adventurous one. It doesn’t have to be as hard as they make it out to be, don’t rush and live your life by your own pace. Soak yourself with every ounce of experience and life lesson you can get. Find your people – one’s that would help you grow. Join a community that will criticize not to pull you towards a downward spiral, but to aid you in soaring higher than you thought you can.

Make peace with yourself knowing that the most beautiful moment in life is a synergy of the good and the bad. You’ll pull through your twenties. A day will come and these hard times will be a distant memory of when you learned to accept everything that life offers you.

How often do you sit down in the office? Do you ever do any sort of work while standing upright?

Most of us today doesn’t know how to answer the following question. We leave our houses to go to work and end up sitting down most of our commute. We arrive there, take a seat in our desks and start working. The only time that we spend walking or at the very least, standing, is when we go for a break. If there’s one thing that we do more than anything else in the office, it’s sitting down. In fact, an average of 9.3 hours of our day is spent stuck in chairs; quite a large number compared to the 7.7 hours of sleep that we get. It’s an activity embedded in our daily life deep enough that we barely question how much we’re doing it.

A Harvard Business Review article released last January 2013 called sitting the smoking of this generation, further elaborating that we need to get up and start moving if we want to keep ourselves healthy.

There are several health drawbacks to spending endless hours sitting down and it affects everyone, even those who are maintaining exercise routines. A recent study based on nearly 8,000 adults have said that there is a significant connection between risk of early mortality and time spent sitting. Those who sat for less than 30 minutes had lower risks of early death compared to those who spent more down time. In addition to this, the moment we sit down several functions in our bodies are easily affected. Electrical activity in our leg muscles shut off, the time we take to burn calories drop down by 1 minute and the enzymes in our body that burn fat drops down by 90 percent. The aforementioned study also reported that those who sit 3 hours or more per day watching TV are 64 percent more likely to die from heart disease.

Experts says that for every 30 consecutive minutes of sitting, there should be an allotted five minutes for you stand up and walk around at a brisk pace to reduce its health risks. Moreover, moving around also helps in increasing productivity and allows you to focus to the task at hand.

Author of the HBR article from earlier, Nilofer Merchant, also discussed how she turned her usual coffee meeting to a walking-meeting. She said that after almost a hundred of walking-meeting, she surprisingly noticed other benefits. Walking also helps fight off dementia and Alzheimer’s according to a research by US neurologists. Paying attention to posture is also important. Take the extra step by making sure that you avoid slouching or hunching over the computer during your work hours. Studies have shown that poor posture when working increases feelings of depression and cuts off circulation.

In addition to this, there are certain things that we can do to convert our offices into healthy workplaces. Standing desks can be found in a handful of offices around the world, from communal offices like coworking spaces and even private offices. If allowed, switch to a standing desk every now and then. Look for a setup that allows you to adjust your workstation and gives room for a chair to be used when needed.

The activity of sitting is pretty unavoidable taking into account the nature of our respective lifestyles. Still, health should be a priority no matter how tedious it seems to be. And in any case that you have other ideas to lessen the time spent on couches and chairs, we’d love to hear it. Also, we’ll be more than willing to help you should there be a need for a healthier workplace.

Julia Child was an American woman married to a French diplomat who wanted to be so much more than just a wife yet was unsure of what she wanted to do. While Julie Powell is a 29 year old woman stuck in a cubicle with a run-down-the-mill job who felt lost.

The difference between them seemed non-existent at first, but Julia Child published her cookbook entitled The Art of French Cooking in the USA during the year 1961 all the while Julie Powell started her blog entitled the Julie/Julia Project in 2002.

With years separating these two ladies, no one would’ve thought that passion and cooking will create a connection between them.

Julie and Julia is a 2009 movie that combined the success stories of two different American woman and the life lessons that they have conveyed to women everywhere.

Julia Child’s passion for French food led her to enroll into the famous all male French cooking school Le Cordon Bleu at the age of 30. And despite the doubts her fellow students have thrown at her, she managed to be a chef. 7 years later, she published a cook book entitled The Art of French Cooking in collaboration with Simone Beck and Louisette Berthole. Years later, her cookbook inspires frustrated writer Julie Powell to start a blog of her own entitled Julie/Julia Project wherein she tries to cook all 524 recipes within one year. She continues her day job at a development corporation as she blogs.  Writer and director, Nora Ephron, combined Julia Child’s autobiography entitled My Life In France and Julie Powell’s blog into a movie about chasing after your dream.

Though set in different times, both stories of Julie and Julia relates to a handful members of the workforce and conveys meaningful life lessons that are worth sharing to the world.

Despite of Julia’s age, she continued to search for her life’s passion and didn’t care if most of her friends are already ahead of her. The movie starts in France where she continues her career exploration after having worked as an advertising copywriter and serving the government. She gives hat-making a try since she liked wearing hats yet it simply wasn’t for her. And instead of criticizing herself, she tries playing cards – turns out, it’s still not her thing. She finally moves to cooking and alas, she finally makes a connection with something she enjoys doing.

Julia Child’s road to cooking inspires us to go through our own pace and stop berating ourselves if we haven’t found our true life’s passion. Her career exploration wasn’t a waste of time, she didn’t mind learning and experiment on what she liked and didn’t like. She knew that it was her own pace of discovery and growth – a concept that we can hopefully try in the future.

Julie Powell went through a similar dilemma as well. As she worked herself away in her small cubicle, she saw her friends’ careers take off while she remained in her small apartment and mediocre job. She felt unhappy and lost. She was drowning in self-doubt when Julia Child’s cookbook pulled her out.

She starts a blog entitled Julie/Julia Project wherein she tries to cook all 524 recipes found in The Art of French Cooking within a year. And though she struggled to complete all recipes all the while maintaining her day job, she pulled through. In addition to this, writing also helped Julie rediscover herself.  Through it, she confronted aspects of herself that she hated, like her recurring mental breakdowns and how she takes his husband for granted. Immediately, she tries to resolve this issues within herself. Julie Powell’s unwavering determination is proof that commitment pays off. She took personal responsibility of her success and treated her failures as temporary setbacks.

The ability to make a living out of what brings you joy is an opportunity not a lot of people can have but these two women are proof that maybe it’s not too late to chase after what you want. Today’s workforce continues to challenge the traditions we have had in order to have a healthier career life. Flexible workspaces and working hours allow professionals to have enough time to pick up a new hobby or learn a new skill that they’ve been eyeing for a while now.

In her book, Julie says

“Julia taught me what it takes to find your way in the world. It’s not what I thought it was. I thought it was all about-I don’t know, confidence or will or luck. Those are all some good things to have, no question. But there’s something else, something that these things grow out of. It’s joy.”