This week I started reading a list of Five Reasons to Start Your Own Business.

Now, most of the people I know who have started their own business start out buzzing but soon seem tired most of the time and kind of twitchy, while being prone to sudden outbursts.

But I might start my own business one day, so I started reading the list. Then I stopped when I got to reason number two – “Location Independence”.

• Work satisfaction is a recipe for success
• How Team Australia is hurting our young people

The idea was that, while being your own boss, you can work from anywhere if you don’t need to have face-to-face dealings with customers. With WiFi, this could be almost anywhere in the world – an office, a café, your backyard or a holiday destination.

My former employer, Fairfax Media, introduced “hot desking” just before I left after some 19 years. The idea was that nobody – not even the CEO or the editors – had a desk of their own.

No desk? What about my stuff?

Everybody was issued with a laptop, which could work through any screen on any desk. The broader mindset was to break old habits around newspapers and be “digital first”.

I needed that encouragement, being a hardened Luddite. But there were problems.

Everybody was supposed to pack up all the stuff on their desk when they went to lunch, putting it into a locker and then getting it out again in the afternoon. Then pack it up again at knock-off time.

That meant no photos of family and loved ones, but you could get a plastic stand to hold a few snaps which had to be packed away with everything else.

Clever colleagues used a small plastic basket to carry their belongings to and fro, but I wondered at the efficiency of it all.

I must confess to being an “old school” journo, who printed out reading matter like court judgments and then kept them on his desk, where they circulated through various piles and sometimes even into a filing system. And I borrowed books from The Age library and had a shelf of my own books at work.

At first, I tried to ignore the approach of hot desking but the office manager mentioned, in a staff briefing, that workspaces would be checked by a “desk monitor” at lunchtimes and at night, to make sure they were left clean.

Not a paperless office: the newsroom at the Xinhua news agency in China. Photo: Mark Skulley

Immediately, I sat up like a meerkat and said, “I can do that job!”. I asked if there was any extra pay involved and said I had relevant experience – at primary school I was a milk monitor for years.

My impromptu application was ignored. The mooted desk monitor system lapsed, possibly because Fairfax cut so many jobs the remaining staff could be fitted into a far smaller space (thereby saving money on rent).

The curious thing was that Fairfax was not that keen on employees working from home. I was happy to come into town for meetings, interviews and events but why not work from home the rest of the time?

After all, a smartphone has similarities to a tracking device and I voluntarily filed stories for the website from dawn to dusk regardless of location.

But that was then. Now, I’m just about fully digital. I write in a home office, in cafes, my backyard and even sometimes on holidays.

But I miss the office. By the time I go back to one, managerial fashions might have reverted to people having their own desk.

Footnote: Here’s an interesting article from The Economist on how the paperless office was first mooted in the mid-1970s.

Mark Skulley is a freelance journalist who is based in Melbourne. He was a reporter for The Australian Financial Review for almost 19 years, which included a decade covering national industrial relations and the world of work. He has since written for The New Daily and other outlets.