The Office With a Mediterranean Sunrise

This morning’s office came with front-row seats to a Mediterranean sunrise.

No traffic outside the window. No fluorescent lights. No awkward kitchenette conversation about whether anyone watched that thing on Netflix. Just the sea, the breeze, a laptop, and the quiet sense that maybe work does not always have to happen in the least inspiring place available.

The desk was not ergonomic. There was no proper chair. There was definitely no coffee machine. I had to carry everything up the hill myself, which is a bold design choice for an office that claims to care about employee wellbeing.

Still, I would happily renew the lease.

Remote work is not just working from home

I think we flattened the idea of remote work a bit.

For a lot of companies, remote work became a policy argument. Are people productive at home? Do they need to be in the office? Should hybrid be two days or three days? Can managers trust people if they cannot physically see them pretending to be busy?

All valid debates, in their own slightly exhausting way.

But for the person actually doing the work, the value of remote work is more personal than that. It is not just the ability to sit at the same desk in your spare room every day instead of commuting. Useful, yes. But not the whole point.

The real value is flexibility. The ability to shape the working day around energy, environment, family, focus and life. Sometimes that means working from home. Sometimes it means a coffee shop. Sometimes it means a pub garden. Sometimes it means a laptop on a hill while the sun comes up over the sea.

Environment changes the work

I do not buy the idea that environment is everything. You still have to do the work. A nice view will not magically fix a broken database migration, although it may make swearing at it feel slightly more cinematic.

But environment does matter.

There is a different kind of focus that comes from being somewhere that gives you a bit of space. It changes the mood of the work. Problems feel less claustrophobic. The day feels less like a block of tasks and more like something you are actively choosing to move through.

That is especially true when you are building products, solving messy problems, or doing creative technical work. Those things need momentum, but they also need oxygen. You cannot always brute-force your way into good thinking from the same chair, under the same ceiling, staring at the same wall.

The freedom is the point

The point of working this way is not to pretend every day is a travel advert. Most days are still emails, code, calls, invoices, decisions, bugs and slightly too many browser tabs.

But having the option matters.

It reminds you that work is not a place. It is an activity. And if you can build your life in a way where that activity can move with you, even occasionally, that is worth something.

For me, this kind of morning makes the hard bits easier to carry. It gives the day a better starting point. It makes the laptop feel less like a shackle and more like a tool, which is what it was supposed to be before modern work got all weird about it.

So yes, today’s office gets five stars.

No coffee machine, questionable ergonomics, and a mild hill-based commute. But the sunrise was doing most of the heavy lifting.

Draft adapted from Brad’s LinkedIn post from 2026-07-02. Source: LinkedIn post.