My wife and I are not the biggest fans of winter, especially version of it that we usually have in Prague. Every year we plan our vacation to cover as much winter time as possible. Last year we spent 7 weeks in Nicaragua and at the end of our stay we felt we hit the limit of how long we can/want be abroad and NOT doing anything else than travelling. Therefore we’ve decided to try another approach.
Digital nomad, you say?
This winter “adventure” started in the middle of December, when we flew to Málaga and moved to small village on Costa del Sol. Plan was to work remotely, change place every approx. 14 days, enjoy the sun, fresh seafood and wine.
There were however some drawbacks:
- not all flats on AirBnb come with laptop friendly workplace
- even if they do: working full time using just the notebook (no external monitors, no external ergonomic keyboard) sucks
- 4 years old decision to buy 12.5" notebook (ThinkPad x220) did not help much. I quote my former naive self: “I will never work on ntb full time and this little one is so easy to carry around”
On the plus side: I had validated my theory, that almost everything I do for my clients can be done remotely. Now I just need to convince them, that they did not miss my physical presence at all, that using Slack, appear.in (or Skype if you’re old school) is perfectly sufficient “replacement” of meeting in person.
Working in different and sometimes not ideal environments did not decrease my productivity much. And it was outweighed by faster work-to-relax switching. In a new place it took me just a minute to completely forget about work. When I’m home and for example going for a run, I sometimes still think very hard about the problem I’m working on. This was different here, very clear division between working and not working ‘state’.
But after almost 80 days I can’t imagine doing this much longer. I do miss home, although we’re probably still going to have snow and cold weather there. I’m looking forward to being back at my desk, with two monitors, two mice, perfectly ergonomic chair, keyboard of size more suited for my fingers, audio system, etc.
And in just two weeks after our return home - off to Eindhoven for Engage, a conference I wouldn’t miss for the world!!