When I first met ideato I was living in Edinburgh. It was 2012, I was freelancing at that time and that was my first experience as a digital nomad. I stayed there for some 9 months and I really loved it. Now ideato has evolved into Flowing, a digital company I’m proudly partner and member of, and this year we kinda done it gain, but this time I’ve shared the experience with a bunch of fellows, and it has been even better.
It all started a few months ago in Budapest. We were attending Craft Conference and of course we spent the day after the conference in the city to do some sightseeing. We enjoyed our time there, but we felt like it was a real shame to have just one day to spend in the city.
What if we had moved a week or two before the conference, rented an apartment (and maybe a co-working space) and stayed there a little longer? Why couldn’t we do something like that?
Yes, why not? None of us had a decent answer to that simple question :)
So, long story short, next year we decided to give it a try.
Step 1 — decision making
We didn’t want this to be a “corporate” thing, we wanted to keep it small, simple, spontaneous and we wanted it to be available for whoever wanted to be part of it. To get this done in a timely manner we used the same approach and decision making tools that we use in our company’s open governance:
- we made the activity public and available for everyone creating a slack channel for discussions, a trello board to generate options about locations, periods etc etc and to vote options.
- we engaged the most motivated people to take a few binding decisions (when and where mainly)
- once some details were fixed, we shared the outcome with the whole company allowing whoever wanted to join and participate. We even opened it to friends outside our organisation.
- We collected money and booked the apartment ;)
Phase 2 — Make it possible
We decided to go to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria for a month (from the 25th of march to the 25th of April). A total of 12 people from 3 different companies (other than Flowing, also Riccardo from Soisy and Emanuele from Voxnest) decided to join the adventure. Some of them stayed for the entire month, some of them just a few days, some of them brought their relevant ones with them, and some of them even their 2 year old son :D
We booked a big apartment for 6 so people could come and go according to their schedule, and some of us decided to book a dedicated flat for themselves to have a bit more privacy.
Allowing this kind of freedom was key to enabling participation: different people may have different needs and we wanted this experience to be enjoyable to anybody.
We also wanted to be able to keep our productivity high: this was a personal initiative, but we didn’t want to betray our company’s trust in us. Our freedom to go remote was never in doubt but we felt responsible for having a productive work environment, to honour that trust. For that reason we spent a good deal of time looking for the right apartment with a decent internet connection (we ended up with a 100/100 fibre optic connection).
Phase 3 — Enjoy
Gran Canaria is kind of a mecca for digital nomads, at least in Europe. It is relatively cheap, Las Palmas (the capital) has very good internet connection, the weather is nice almost all the year, the ocean is great and you have a lot to explore (deserts, forests and steep mountains: they call it “mini continent”).
So long and thanks for all the fish
I stayed for 3 weeks. I’m on a train going back home right now, some of my fellas are still enjoying the ocean (greedy bastards :D) and I can’t wait to do it again. This experience was not only about travelling. Of course visiting new places is great and I love travelling a lot, but the mixture of personal and work life is what amazed me the most. I am convinced that we should not somehow try to balance work and life and should instead switch to a mindset where your work life is no longer separated from your real life. Being in a company based on trust allows us to enjoy a great deal of freedom, and we got the most out it with this experience.
Would you like to join us next year ;) ?
