1 . Why working from anywhere isn’t realistic

For most white-collar workers, it used to be very simple. Home was the place you left to go to work. The office was almost certainly where you were_________. Co-working spaces were for entrepreneurial people in T-shirts who wanted to hang out with other entrepreneurial people in T-shirts. You could stay at a hotel on a work trip, but it was not a place to get actual work done, which is why a hotel’s “business centre”_________all of business as using a printer.

The pandemic has thrown these neat_________up into the air. Most obviously, home is now also a place of work. According to a recent Gallup survey, three-quarters of American workers whose jobs can be performed_________expect to spend time doing just that in the future. And offices are increasingly where you go to put the company into company – through collaborative work and social activities.

_________, the boldest version of remote working extends well beyond these two locations. “Working from anywhere” imagines a completely_________existence, in which people can do their jobs in Alaska or Zanzibar. The idea sounds wonderful. Nevertheless, plenty of_________remain. Some are practical. The payroll and tax of working from different locations in a year are an administrative headache._________, working from anywhere is only feasible if your equipment functions reliably. If you spill suntan lotion on your laptop, the people on the hotel’s reception desk are more likely to offer you_________than a replacement computer.

Another set of obstacles is more__________. The carefree promise of working from anywhere is far easier to__________if you don’t have actual cares. Children of a certain age need to go to school; partners may not be able to work remotely and have careers of their own to manage.

The option to work from anywhere will be most attractive to people who have well-paid jobs and fewer__________: childless tech workers, say. For many other people, the “anywhere” in working from anywhere is a simple choice between their home and their office. That might be a recipe for__________within teams. Imagine dialing into a Zoom call covered in baby drool (口水), and hearing your colleague Greg saying how amazing Chamonix (法国城市夏蒙尼) is at this time of year.

Adding it to the menu of working options for sought-after employees__________. The working-from-anywhere policy will probably help employers attract better people. But for the foreseeable future, working from anywhere will be a bonus for a lucky few rather than a(n)__________for things to come.

I WANT YOU

5 . Three years into my postdoc (博士后), I started to wonder whether I needed a new career plan. After applying for more than two dozen teaching jobs, I hadn’t landed a single interview.

I had once considered going to art school but had put that idea to the side when I decided to pursue chemistry as an undergraduate. In the years that followed, I kept up my interest in art by taking painting classes at night. My family was bursting with mathematicians, computer programmers, and engineers, so it felt natural to have my daily life center around science.

But in the spring after my failed job search, that started to change after a friend excitedly showed me proofs of a review article. She was astonished by what the journal’s scientific illustrator had done with her fundamental sketches (速写). “That would be such a fun job.” I thought.

I decided to test out a new career direction by volunteering to create similar illustrations for my institute’s newsletters. I spent my nights and weekends reading scientific papers and thinking about how to illustrate the results. It was a fun task. I felt I was perhaps on the right path. But could I make a full-time career work?

Searching online, I tracked down people who had that kind of job. I found many had training through scientific illustration master’s degree programs. After living on graduate student and postdoctoral salaries for years, I didn’t have enough money saved up for the programs, so I decided to get a certificate in digital design.

I now work as a visual designer at a biomedical research institute where I spend my days working with research to communicate their work visually. I love the fact that I get to combine my scientific and artistic sides.

6 . Animal rescuer and cinematographer Douglas Thorn’s passion for animals began when he was a little kid. “I started rescuing orphaned baby animals,” Thorn says. “And I wanted to be a wildlife cinematographer.”

When Thron grew up, he did just that, working for shows like Discovery Channels Shark Week, filming the great white sharks off the coast of Santa Cruz, California. But Thron says it was the Paradise Fire in California in 2018 that “pushed” him to do animal rescue activism work, putting his aerial cinematography skills to good use.

At the time, Thron was filming a man who was rescuing cats after the fire using an infrared hand-held camera. The camera uses heat to detect the animals at night Thron and the man talked about how incredible it would be to put one on a drone to detect animals more easily. “The animal's body temperature will glow on the screen and you can pick them out among the bricks and stones,” explains Thron.

The first animal Thron ever rescued was a dog in the Bahamas after a category-5 hurricane hit, which wiped out hundreds of houses. Thron tested out putting an infrared scope on a drone and found the dog.

“The drone really shaves off critical time so that the really badly hurt animals are able to be rescued,” Thron says. Once the scope picks up the “heat signature of an animal”, Thron turns a spotlight on the animal and zooms in on it, so he and the rescue crews can go and save the animal.

Thron has basically been “going non-stop since then”. His TV show, Doug to the Rescue, shows some of his heart-warming animal rescues, including after Hurricane Laura in Louisiana in 2020 and after fires in Northern California and Oregon. Thron also helped rescue koalas after fires damaged parts of Australia in 2020.

10 . According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China’s digital economy has increased by 15.9 percent annually since 2012, reaching 45.5 trillion yuan ($6.32 trillion) last year. Facing the growing digital economy and new vacancies developed in the sector such as deliverymen and livestreaming anchors(主播), young people, especially those born after 2000, are expressing a stronger willingness for flexible work relations with companies, and also wish to become “digital workers” with flexible work locations and schedules.

“The Internet helps me a lot. I check emails from my clients and submit my proposals through WeChat, and then we discuss plans via teleconference. I love working from home actually,” said Mi Lu, a 28-year-old new media operator in Beijing. “We work everywhere, perhaps in a cafe, or on a bullet train or even on the table of a restaurant.”

To cater to young people’s work preferences, more companies have begun to include “flexible working mode” in their recruitment advertisements. Zhaopin, a website, said vacancies with flexible work available make up 15 to 20 percent of total vacancies on its platform, especially for industries in the growing gig economy such as transportation and logistics(物流). According to Zhaopin, the proportion of flexible vacancies in these industries has increased to 25 percent this year, up from 10 percent in 2018.

However, the flexibility may bring risks to workers’ rights protection, according to Zhaopin. It said that though roughly 60 percent of companies posting vacancies on its platform offer insurance, the proportion is decreasing.

Li Qiang, vice-president of Zhaopin, said that the greatest risk to those seeking flexible work is whether the company pays the salary fully and on time. “It’s necessary for job seekers to set up a long-term development plan, rather than be shortsighted.” He added that companies may bear risks that flexible employees can’t deliver high-quality work in a limited time period, which requires the companies to establish a sound work delivery standard to help evaluate employee performance.