Why I Always Show Up at the Office

My company has never required anyone to show up at a fixed time. I still walk in before nine every morning without fail.

Part of the reason is the obvious one: keeping work and life in separate physical spaces helps me focus when I work and actually rest when I do not.

But the more important reason is what I call serendipitous information encounters.

The term originally comes from e-commerce recommendation systems — the idea that while looking for something specific, a user stumbles across something unexpected that turns out to be just as valuable. The same thing happens at work. A quick exchange by the coffee machine, a hallway conversation, a few words over lunch — these moments connect you with ideas and people you would never have thought to look for. The encounter itself is the point.

Remote work is the opposite. Almost every piece of information arrives filtered, organized, and scheduled. Meetings have agendas, messages have subjects, even a casual question requires drafting a message and waiting for a reply. The spontaneity disappears, and with it, the chance of discovering something you did not know you needed.

Terence Tao once said that a year at Princeton, free from the usual social obligations, left him creatively dry. I recognized that feeling from my first two years of PhD work done mostly from home: output was fine, but new ideas and breadth of thinking slowed noticeably. Things improved a little toward the end of 2021, but with so many people accustomed to remote and video meetings by then, the density of genuine in-person encounters never fully recovered.

Many people assume that because I know a lot of people, I must be intensely extroverted and fearless about social situations. I am an extrovert, but I still feel awkward at networking events. My approach is simpler than most people expect: just be there. Show up, be visible, and if your presence carries enough gravity, people will come to you.

Showing up is itself a strategy.