Day Desks: Coworking Goes Hotel

Coworking is a great model for footloose (and penurious) freelancers and small startups, who need places to work but don’t want or can’t afford the overhead of getting an office.

One issue is level of commitment: most coworking spaces are organized around a monthly agreement: so much for a full-time desk, so much for full time access to shared desks, so much for one day/week access, and so on. So, even though you just want to date all over town, the coworking spaces are still looking for a monogamous tenant.

I stumbled across two sites yesterday that take out the marriage aspect of coworking, and make it seem more like dating, or renting a hotel room: Desktime and OpenDesks.

These sites allow you to search for a desk to rent by the day, based on geography. 

In the case of Desktime, you can search for other features, like a shared printer or conference room.

Desktime is only available for use in Austin, Chicago, and New York, while Opendesk seems to be more agnostic.

I can imagine using these apps frequently, especially now that I opted out of the coworking space I had signed up for. I found that I was not actually using the space one day per week, as I had planned, and I travel all over New York for meetings. Now I will be able to track down space that is located near where I am going to be, like near to Grand Central Station, where my trains come and go.

I bet that the creation of sites like these will open up the untapped option of companies renting out desks who otherwise wouldn’t, becuase of the hassles involved. These new sites could act like AirBNB, getting companies to rent space on a casual basis, that they otherwise wouldn’t have.

A side note: Yesterday, I came across Third Door, a coworking site in London, that provides day care for freelancer’s kids. I haven’t heard of that in the US at all.

Why is that? Don’t coworking types have kids?

Desktime has a box I can check looking for ‘pet friendly’ spaces, but ‘kid friendly’ isn’t an option, I guess.