I did the digital nomad thing shorter term - for a few months. Kinda fun but I still found work even more invasive on my time than at home. Everyone’s having fun and relaxing at the beach while I’m sitting at the reception area trying to connect to the crappy wifi to upload my work or join a call. Or I’m sitting at a hotel room all day/night working because the time difference is weird or just working in a coffee shop every day is not any more fun than at home. It was killing the spontaneous adventures part of travel which is the truly fun part.
Later in my life business travel killed my love of travel to the point I dread getting on a plane and now I just go to nature near wherever I’m living at instead.
This is a cautionary tale... I'm considering doing the same myself, and hopefully can get the most out of it. What would some of you have done differently? Considering mostly East Asia, and will be having a remote full time developer job.
Be careful working remotely in asia if you need to work on US time. I spent two months as a zombie in Tokyo only wandering around by myself at night because of that which was fun but not as glamorous as it seems.
Depends on where you are, but I work remotely on my own during the day and then have a meeting at the end of my day (around 7pm for me) and beginning of their day (9am for them) to touch base. We skip that meeting a lot and just communicate via issue tracker.
You can make it work, but it's important for me to not work "american hours" because I'm asleep by then. Try to focus on the 1 hour of overlap somewhere.
And in my experience potential clients are very weird about the whole travel abroad thing. They think I'm less committed or escaped the zoo or something so I have to show them that I have the same level of commitment remotely as if I'd showed up at their office.
Definitely I should have rented a place with internet after a while of looking for what place feels right and stayed for some months. At least to me being “on the road” and working was really tough. But maybe if you just go to Hanoi for 6 months or something it might be interesting. I also wasn’t on a great contract and was kind of a noob myself so the work wasn’t that fun.
Later in my life business travel killed my love of travel to the point I dread getting on a plane and now I just go to nature near wherever I’m living at instead.