Professional Development
Locations card, MethodKit for Professional Development
Card 32 of 66 · MethodKit for Professional Development
  • ThemeEnergy & Wellbeing
  • CardCard 32 of 66
  • Questions5 to explore
Energy & Wellbeing

Locations

Role of places in your life

Where you do your work, and where you live your life, shapes both in ways that are easy to underestimate.

Location is not just a practical matter of commute times and rent. It is about the networks you have access to, the culture you are immersed in, the pace of life that surrounds you, and the kind of work that is available nearby. Moving to a different city, working from home, or shifting between countries can change a career in ways that are hard to predict in advance.

For some people, location is a constraint they work within. For others, it is a genuine choice that can be made and remade over time. Understanding how location affects your work and life helps you make those choices more consciously, whether you are thinking about where to base yourself, how much you need to travel, or what flexibility in location would mean for you.

Remote work has made the question more open for more people, but also more complicated. The freedom to work from anywhere is only as good as your ability to decide where is actually best for you.

How to work on it

Practical ways to reflect on and develop this dimension of your working life. How it tends to look at different stages of a career, and where to put your attention.

Early career

Think about what locations offer you, not just what they cost. Proximity to a particular industry, community, or set of collaborators can accelerate your development in ways that are hard to replicate remotely.

Mid career

Consider whether the location you settled into is still the right one. Life circumstances change, industries shift geographically, and what made sense at one stage may not be optimal now.

Later career

Ask which aspects of location still matter to you. Proximity to clients, colleagues, or institutions? Access to nature or a particular kind of city life? The answers may have shifted significantly from earlier stages of your career.

A practical start

List the three things about your current location that most support your work and life, and the three that most constrain it. That inventory helps clarify what you would be trading if you changed something.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

  1. How much does your current location support the kind of work and life you want?

  2. Are there places you have lived or spent time where you felt more professionally alive? What was different about them?

  3. How does working from a particular location (office, home, co-working space) affect your focus and your sense of connection?

  4. If location were not a constraint, where would you ideally base yourself for work, and why?

  5. What would you gain and what would you lose if you changed where you work or live?

Things to notice

  • Underestimating how much location shapes your network and opportunities. Some fields are heavily clustered geographically, and being physically present in those clusters can matter more than people realize until they step outside them.
  • Overestimating how easy it is to replicate in-person community remotely. Remote work offers real flexibility, but the spontaneous connections and ambient information that come from shared physical space are genuinely hard to reproduce.
  • Making location decisions based on where you want to be rather than what you need. Both matter, but it helps to be clear which is driving the choice.