Out of Office: The Big Problem & Bigger Promise of Working from Home

A future-looking, game-changing book about the radical transformational potential of working from home.

If you think you’re working from home during the pandemic, Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen are here to tell you otherwise. What we’re doing right now is something else, a jury-rigged compromise made under the duress of a national crisis that’s satisfactory for neither the worker nor the employer. But they also see that the past few months have revealed that there may be another way to go to work on a more permanent basis, one that doesn’t involve hellish daily commutes and the demands of jam-packed work schedules that no longer make sense for our time. As a society, we have talked for decades about flexible work arrangements, and, as the authors make clear, we may finally be at an inflection point where this becomes possible for almost everyone.

Out of Office combines groundbreaking reporting and the couple’s first-person experiences after they made the decision to leave their desk jobs in New York City for Montana. They describe how workers and employers across America, and around the world, are finding new ways of working that make people happier and more productive, and make companies more profitable. This is a book that aims to reshape our entire relationship to the office and outline a path toward a new kind of work-life balance that can improve our lives and strengthen our communities.

About the Author

CHARLIE WARZEL recently started writing a newsletter, Galaxy Brain, on Substack. Before that he was a writer-at-large for the New York Times Opinion page, and a senior technology writer at BuzzFeed News. He was the lead writer of the Times’ Privacy Project and co-author of ’One Nation Tracked,’ a seven-part investigative series on smartphone location tracking, for which he was named a finalist for the 2020 Livingston Award for National Reporting. Before the Times, Warzel was a senior technology writer at BuzzFeed News, covering technology’s biggest platforms, disinformation, and information warfare. He was the recipient of a 2019 Mirror Award for his reporting on Facebook’s privacy struggles. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN is former senior writer at BuzzFeed News, and now writes her newsletter, Culture Study, as a full time venture on Substack. She is the author of three books: Scandals of Classic Hollywood; Too Fat Too Slutty Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman; and Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, based on the viral article of the same name. She received her Ph.D. in media studies from the University of Texas. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

Author Residence: Missoula, Montana