14 Learnings from 14 Weeks Working Remotely Across Southeast Asia
My partner Kristina Traeger and I just returned from 3.5 months of working remotely across Southeast Asia. We both have the luxury of being able to work anywhere there’s an internet connection, so we often decide to save money and explore a new part of world.
Last year we did Colombia and Germany over 2 months, but this was our biggest adventure yet. We majored in Koh Phangan, Bali, and Chiang Mai, and minored in Bangkok, Krabi, Singapore, Penang, Siem Reap, and Pai.
We save money every time we do this, because Airbnbs and international flight costs are dwarfed by San Francisco rent and prices!
I didn’t write a dedicated piece about our last nomad adventure, but something about this one called me to reflect. Perhaps because we moved around more often and met many other nomadic workers doing similar things.
Lots happened in the world while we were ‘gone’! SpaceX put a Tesla in the stars, the American gun control movement finally got legs, #deletefacebook brought Zuckerberg to Congress… and Uber sold all of its ASEAN assets to local competitor Grab, so the app stopped working while we were there, much to our chagrin. We even experienced 4 New Years this year— in order: Gregorian, Chinese, Hindu (Nyepi), and Buddhist (Songkran).
Here are 14 things I learned during this trip, around digital nomadism, remote work, Asia, and myself.
Some may appear self-evident, but ‘nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced’, and I experienced each of these in a big way on this trip. Maybe it will inspire you to travel more, appreciate your home more, or just provide escapism. Enjoy!
For location specific travel tips, view my newsletter archive.
About Digital Nomadism
It’s not Remote Work
Many of our stops were premier destinations for digital nomads, businesspeople like us who can work anywhere on their laptops. But this trip taught me that remote workers are not the same as digital nomads. Digital nomads are usually freelancers and dropshippers with flexible schedules, while remote workers still have a ‘nine to five’.
Yes, each can work anywhere in the world, but the fundamental difference is one of responsibilities.
Digital nomads have very few responsibilities and are their own boss, to some extent, while remote workers still have a manager to report to. A day at the beach is fundamentally different in each scenario — in the former, you work a few hours then relax — in the latter, you still have deadlines looming.
Sometimes it was hard to mix the two groups, as the nomads didn’t respect weekends since every day had leisure for them, while the remote workers were hard pressed with early morning and late night North American calls every day, or a weekly quota of hours to work pulling them away. But at the same time, nomad budgets appear a bit lower those of the workers, given the respective nature of the job.
It’s not ‘Travel’
Carefree as they are, nomads are not true travelers or backpackers either. They do have responsibilities weighting them down to the world, just very flexible ones. But the presence of any responsibilities at all is categorically different to the backpacker experience I’ve known.
I solo backpacked throughout Europe in 2013 and had a great time discovering myself and other cultures with absolutely zero agenda. The freedom that comes form being able to go wherever you want at any time, and explore any lead, is an invigorating one at the heart of the traveler’s experience. But at the same time, it is not sustaining over time, at least in my experience.
I felt like a wizened immortal when encountering backpackers at hostels and bars. Their time in each place was so short, so action packed! While we explored in slow motion, only on nights and weekends.
And no matter how joyous the discoveries, there was always those responsibilities from the other hemisphere on the back of my mind. Which is a blessing and a curse — it gives me purpose and direction beyond aimless wandering, but inserts worries beyond where I’ll lay my head.
Not all who wander are lost, but not all with direction are fixed, either.
It Dampens Your Weeknights to Escalate Your Weekends
Looking at my Instagram feed, you might think it was a never ending stream of picture perfect vacation time. But digital nomadism is not vacation — depending on your job, you still have all the same needs to respond to, only now from 14 hours ahead! I definitely worked more hours on this trip than I do normally, just to catch up since I slept for the exact duration of EST working hours.
As such, Monday to Friday resemble normal workdays — wake, morning routine, find a cafe, work, dinner, home. And your weekdays are actually harder — since you have to find a bed and desk every day, and sometimes lack a kitchen. It is only on weekends when you can truly let lose and explore your surroundings, with day trips and nightlife.
Our weekdays had about 6 free hours throughout the day to play with, and that’s it. I joked that I was either hunched over my desk or hunched over my moped every day this trip. A different cheap dinner out every night is nice, but like anything repeated too often, even that becomes a chore and we’d end up settling on a favorite.
2 Weeks Feels Like Home, 2 Months Feels Like Banishment
We noticed that the first few days in any new place were the hardest — the most full of novelty and wonder, but also the danger of shitty wifi and hard work. Once 2 weeks had passed, that’s when we started feeling at home, confident in the locations, traffic, and people (at least for the good spots — for the others, a weekend was plenty).
On the other hand — 2 months in was when we started feeling very homesick in the trip.That’s probably the best amount of time to spend abroad in any given trip, maximizing immersion but without making it feel like you’re banished from home.
Some days I felt like Napoleon on Elbe, putzing around on an island while the world happened elsewhere. But the sense of being away from it all is what defines escapism, right?
About Remote Work
Mornings Can Be Beautiful — If You Retire Early
Since I maintained PST and EST calls while being 14 hours ahead, I discovered a whole new part of the day — the hours between 6–9 am.
These first hours of daylight have a lot to offer that I was never aware of before — I think I’ve watched more sunrises on this trip than the rest of my life combined!
3 strong hours of work in the morning sets one up for success in the rest of the day — win the day by noon, as they say. But it does sap the strength from your afternoons — so you just have to figure out when you want to do what.
I found that I could get some of my best work done in these postdawn hours — but then I’d spend the next 2–3 hours showering breakfasting and finding a cafe for the day — so in the end, I wasn’t necessarily more productive.
The Knowledge Workday is 6 Hours Long
Which is the next point — no matter how many hours I logged, most days usually ended with 6 solid hours of knowledge work. And this is backed up by statistics — it’s hard to do good knowledge work for more than that.
It comes down to sleep — without enough sleep, your brain is foggy and slow, and your brain is your hands when it comes to this work. Therefore this lends creedence to never waking up with an alarm as one of the strongest productivity hacks — inastead of waking up at 4am as long productivity gurus reccommend.
Here’s what my schedule looked like most weeks in PST — every sleep session was bookended with 3 hours of calls on each side.
Treat Every Day like a Sprint With a Global Workforce
When you pass the baton to the other hemisphere every workday, you have to be sure all parties are aligned. I quickly became adept at phrasing my delegations to others in the clearest possible manner, so that I wouldn’t wake up to an ‘I didn’t understand you’ message. That costs 48 hours — since it would take them another 24 hours to respond to my clarification!
To solve this, I diligently got to Inbox Zero (or at least, urgent messages zero) as the first thing when I woke up. And before I went to bed, I would make a list of every blocker on my plate, and who was responsible for removing those blockers, at what time. And link directly to the material I was referencing whenever possible, to help colleagues gain necessary context even when I was asleep.
It’s the difference between ‘Hey can you respond from our company email to the priority client for me?’ and ‘Client XYZ needs ABC from us and says it’s not online. I checked and looks like Joe never forwarded the initial query. Can you forward the query and manage Joe to fix?’
By the end of the trip I was getting so good at putting out fires in my sleep (aka empowering others to put out fires), that I’d wake up to messages of ‘solved!’ rather than ‘what?’ Making ones communications clear in terms of intentions, goals, delegations, and context is a powerful good work habit, no matter what timezone you’re in.
Coworkers Pay for Community
There’s a robust new industry (Economist / New York Times) forming worldwide to support nomads like us, asking prices somewhere between East and West to remove most of the headache from the third world.
We mostly avoided these senselessly expensive coworking spots in favor of free cafes where our money got us food and a desk instead of just a desk, but always skittered around the edges of their social scene.
And that’s what you’re paying for in such places — you can get food and air conditioning and strong wifi elsewhere, but your money really keeps people like you nearby, to combat the digital nomad’s greatest burden — loneliness.
You pay for a Facebook group, and regular events, and group trips out to nearby attractions. You pay for the kinds of things it used to take 6 months of social life in a new place to obtain, that now costs just a $6 overpriced lunch plate.
And you get what you pay for — since the internet hasn’t truly commoditized friendship yet, your new friends are more of convenience than soul mates. If you’re lucky, they’ll follow you to your next nomadic destination, but the most likely outcome is a few jovial dinners and daytrips when the schedules line up, and no more. It’s hostel friendships, artificially lengthened.
About Southeast Asia
Urban Planning is a First World Privilege
It’s a cliche, but the list of things I was grateful to return Stateside to became quite long.
From flushable toilet paper to drinkable tap water to timely public transit to intersection right of ways to just plain sidewalks, the list goes on.
This wasn’t my first trip by far- but it’s duration was such that the differences added up to more than the sum of their parts.
There are just way more tiny problems standing in the way of a quality day in the developing world that we don’t have at home. Each one is a tiny friction point, but the mental bandwidth of managing them on top of the noise and general overwhelm extracts quite a toll.
The first mattress topper’ed bed we collapsed on top of back in American suburbia was bliss — we laid down, stared at each other, and whispered simultaneously ‘it’s so quiet!’
These problems have all been solved for you already in the developed world. It’s in the name — someone developed a solution.
It’s like that Steve Jobs quote — “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.” Unless, of course, they didn’t get around to making it up.
This is true even of emergent systems like cities and countries, for which there are established best practices. And yet somehow people still forget to put in sidewalks when they pave new roads…. tsk tsk.
Thailand is thinking about banning food carts to clear up street space, but that’s solving the symptom, not the disease. Respect the sidewalks!
Local Data Plans Are Like Superpowers
I can’t believe we didn’t get local SIM cards in all my past remote work travels in Germany, Colombia, and Israel. It’s a total game changer! No more fretting about wifi quality as a business call looms — I have a bulletproof contingency plan.
I can take calls while walking! I can watch Youtube on buses! I can call Ubers anywhere! I can Wikitravel our destination on the fly!
It felt like a superpower, after so many trips spent begging stingy cafes for shitty wifi. And what’s more — the cell data plans here are BETTER than the ones back in the states. I got unlimited data for a full month for $20 — it felt like cheating!
Chalk one up for the developing world where the telco monopolies are less strong.
International development is a delicate dance
We met many businesses with some combination of western/local owners, operators, and workers. There’s something that makes your stomach twinge when you see local workers working for a Western business owner, but it’s hard to know why. All the dirt cheap family restaurants next to the bourgeoise hipster cafes for 2 and 3x the price, you know…
The real estate is cheap, so it’s a tantalizing opportunity for many, but comes with moral qualms.
You’re literally buying their land and paying them to work on it. It’s capitalist colonialism.
I’m not sure what a universally just solution to this situation would be — perhaps something like Grameen bank, that makes loans for win win win siutations? There must be some way to combine Western money with Eastern opportunity that’s both fair and profitable for all parties involved.
If you’ve heard of anything like this, I’d love to know more.
Assorted Trivia facts
- Balinese scarecrows wear moped helmets to look more human.
- There’s only two beer companies in Thailand and craft beer is illegal. So local brewers import their own stuff from abroad, and bribe police to look the other way.
- Geckoes actually make a noise that sounds like their name! Though it’s more ‘WAHN-uh’ than ‘GECK-o’.
- Plastic is pervasive there — you can barely order a drink without it coming wrapped in plastic and straws — and people were confused when we brought our own water bottles. I know its a first world privilege to be able to use more sustainable materials, but seeing beaches and vacant lots choked in plastic refuse is heartbreaking.
- Indonesian is a designer language created to unify all the islands’ local tongues — and it’s easy to learn, with no verb conjugations or gendered nouns.
- The Internet is less trustworthy — online facts would either be slightly wrong or just plain false far more often. Forces you to rely on you directly experienced world.
- Apparently one of the reasons why Thailand is so accepting of ladyboys is because they believe it is a result of bad karma from a past life.
About Myself
Never Disagree While Hungry
Snickers was right — you’re not you when you’re hungry. After one too many explosive arguments around 11 am when we couldn’t find a good cafe to start the day at, Kristina and I instituted this rule to stay civil.
Being hungry is like being tired or drunk — things can escalate much more quickly because you’re lacking something and living in a scarce world at that moment. Instead, table the issue, find some food, then figure out what to do next.
Making decisions is hard work that requires adequate nourishment!
“A nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
As the maxim goes— paradise is nice to visit, but I wouldn’t wanna live there.
My days were often full of bright sun, warm sands, and cold beer — but I don’t want that every single day! Especially when I have things to do — sometimes I felt like the entire island was conspiring to get me off my computer and into a hammock.
Plus such tropical amenities come with their own downsides — lack of air conditioning, tourist prices, and transient clientele. Everyone wants to relax in a remote location ‘far from it all’ — but they want to live in the thick of things, for the most part. Speaking for myself, I know I’m in the latter camp.
I’d rather skimp on the first order pleasures like cheap prices and good weather and indulge in second order pleasures of scintillating company and plentiful activity options. And savor the adventuresome remote destinations as a break from the rest of the world.
For more location specific travel tips, view Coreyspondence.
