Taste of the Digital Nomad Lifestyle

Two and a half months later than planned, we finally shipped! 2 major app updates released at the same time: 4.0 for the TimeStory Mac app, and 2.0 for the iPad/iPhone app.

It felt good to ship finally. What we couldn’t finish before we embarked on a two-month long visit in Asia, we worked through in bits and pieces in hotel rooms and coffee shops while there. After we got back home, it took us a few more days to wrap up all the loose ends and hit go. Needless to say, this had been a very interesting and unique experience.

Here’re a few of my learnings and observations from our casual encounter of the “digital nomad” lifestyle, and some fond memories.

Working in hotel rooms

Throughout my many years of various corporate jobs, I had done plenty of travel and working on-the-go. So I didn’t give it much thought beforehand (business travel vs. leisure) when booking hotels and B&Bs. Most of the locations we booked were optimal for sightseeing and leisure—they certainly provided for lounging comfort. However, the chairs, couches, chaise, beds, floors—no matter how comfortable by itself, we couldn’t use them for more than an hour of work before some parts of our bodies started to ache. Even when the room had a desk, the desk and chair looked to be more as a decoration rather than being practical for working.

Coffee Shops

When you are on the go, seeking out suitable coffee shops for work itself becomes an experiment and overhead for productivity. We avoided the often accessible options of Starbucks, Peet’s, McCafe etc. even though we already knew they’d fit our basic needs for work—we wanted to taste the local coffees and culture at the same time.

We spent time seeking out new coffee shops with good reviews for both the drinks and the vibes. Even then, the actual experience and outcome for working varied. Some had really good enjoyable drinks, but were too crowded or noisy to work, even though we had gotten pretty good about being able to work at just about any small surface that would hold our laptop and a cup of coffee.

Smoke is another factor we didn’t anticipate. One quiet morning, we had an outdoor sitting area of a coffee shop all to ourselves, when someone sat down at the next table and started smoking. Another time, we were inside a coffee shop, actually working on nice big tables, when we started smelling smoke—we hadn’t paid attention that we were close (but not too close) to the outdoor tables, and smoke had come in through the door.

On the other hand, dropping the lens for work suitability, we quite enjoyed most of our coffee shop visits. The coffee culture was quite strong across the three major destinations we visited: Japan, Shanghai (China) and Taiwan. In Hualien, Taiwan, we were fortunate to get some very freshly roasted coffee beans from the local Hualien coffee farm!

One last note of observation—compared to what I’m used to, coffee shops tend to open later in the morning. I associate a fresh cup of coffee to the start of my day. Here at home, I could find plenty of options that open before 8am (many open at 6am, some as early as 5:30); whereas it was very rare to find a coffee shop that opened early; in fact, not uncommonly, you might find an interesting coffee shop which only opened in afternoons and evenings.

Internet Connectivity

Wifi at most places we stayed in Japan and Taiwan were reasonably good. In coffee shops though we preferred to use our own mobile data hot spots (as a general habit, for security and consistency). We started with purchasing an eSim in Japan, but then quickly realized that both of our mobile setups required much higher volumes of data usage and we were hitting the eSim data cap very quickly. Using a local eSim was no longer cheaper than simply doing the international roaming on our own unlimited US mobile plans once we factored in our usage volume.

We didn’t attempt to connect to any Wifi while in China, partly because also it wouldn’t do us much good as most destinations we needed connections with were blocked off anyway. Every now and then, our Macs would “act up” and couldn’t reach anywhere via our phones’ hot spots, and required some rebooting on both the Mac and the phone. We never figured out more specifics.