Whether you’re in a lush converted warehouse or a sterile cubicle, you spend a lot of time there: Eight hours a day. Five times a week. 48 weeks of the year. 35 working years. That’s 67,200 hours! Which is equivalent to 7.7 years of your life.

Dexterous journalist and cricket aficionado Gideon Haigh recently released a thick, encyclopedic book called The Office: A Hardworking History. He takes us through the advent of the sky-scraper, the introduction of women in the workplace, the democracy of the open-plan office, and the caliber of the corner office.

He details the psychological implications of the office layout, too. Planning an office’s structure and decor is a minefield of hierarchy, ego, comfort and internal branding. What goes where? Who sits there? Does the office promote transparency, does it encourage congenial office relationships, does it enable easy communication between colleagues? Do we paint the door red, or blue? It all matters.

“Even the most routine attempt to lay out an office is tackling one of the foremost design challenges of the last century and a half: balancing privacy with communication, enclosure with access, autonomy with cohesion, the fear of not knowing what’s happening with the desire to be secluded from it,” says Haigh.

Gideon Haigh’s office space bible set me daydreaming about my ideal office, and it got me thinking about our priorities as modern office workers.

My fantasy office has a sun-drenched balcony, a tattered leather armchair for thinking, posies of fresh flowers on every surface, lemonade on-tap, and a small set of pedals under the desk so I can cycle while I write. It has easy parking, exactly the right temperature settings, a spotless kitchen with ample tea supplies and inspirational quotes framed on white walls. Think, an Apple store crossed with a country cottage - light, clean, inviting, friendly and conducive to creativity. It’s also a five-minute drive or walk from my house, and there’s Toby’s Estate coffee house with free wifi just downstairs.

Even though most of us get by in a windowless, charmless cell cluttered with dormant fax machines, isn’t it nice to dream?

Here are my five of my favourite innovative offices in the world.

Google, Zurich

What I love about this office is its playfulness. Slippery slides, fireman poles, beanbags and an aquarium set the casual/vibrant tone. Google has a rule that no employee should be more than 100m away from food, so the sprawling cafeteria serves breakfast, lunch and dinner - for free!

Dtac headquarters, Bangkok

This office has seriously accomplished the work-play balance within its natural oak walls. There’s an entire level devoted to sport and play, with a running track, soccer pitch, ping-pong table and concert space. The outfitting is futuristic and minimalistic, with a library that wraps around a whole floor.

TBWA, Tokyo

This is probably the most serene office I’ve seen. The advertising agency that lives here have brought as much nature inside as they could - there are patches of immaculate grass for meetings, pretty trees and clean wooden floors.

Inventionland, Pittsburgh

This is the Disneyland of office spaces, with racetracks, a pirate ship, a castle, a tree-house, a cave, a red carpet, and a giant robot. It’s either the most inspiring, or the most distracting, office of all.

Pallotta Teamworks

This American charity has done exceptional things on a shoestring budget. They’ve converted shipping containers into neat, brightly coloured offices for a really compact but surprisingly uplifting space.