If the dream is to travel the world and make a living out of travel blogging and writing, then I guess the medium-term dream is to travel the world working remotely in reasonably reliable employment. Obviously that’s not the dream for everyone. I’m not at all sure that’s even the dream for me but all the same, somehow I’m a remote worker. So I’m going to tell you the truth about remote working, as I’ve seen it.
Nothing is simple where my work is concerned. I work two jobs. One company is part-owned and part-funded by the other and I spend my weekdays sitting at a kitchen table in a converted country pub. Job #1 is a long-established family business that deals in outsourcing & export. I’ve been here since 2008, give or take an 8-month “sabbatical” in 2016 when the grass looked greener elsewhere. When I returned, I was headhunted in early 2017 for Job #2, which was looking for someone who could spend all day staring at spreadsheets. Hi. Job #2 is a very small data/market research startup, which operates on the same continent as Job #1, hence why it’s owned & funded. The catch? Job #2 is based in a coworking space in London, 120 miles from my converted pub. So I work remotely, from that same kitchen table I’ve been sitting at since we bought this building in 2011. The other catch? Neither job wants to wait nearly a week for my days with them to come around again so I alternate my days. I have cocktail stick flags on my screen to remind me and the people in my office which job I’m doing today. Even better, Job #1 wants me to work 08:30-04:30 like all the accounts and logistics staff, while Job #2 wants me to work 9-4 like the rest of them do. My alarm is literally set for a different time every day.
I’ve been doing this for a little over two years now and here’s the truth about remote working:
- It doesn’t really work for me. To work remotely you need that kind of outgoing and extroverted and people-liking personality that can make an effort to connect with colleagues you hardly ever see. That’s not really me and being so doesn’t come naturally to me.
- You don’t get to know anyone, not really. You don’t have the banter or the comradeship. Other than my boss’s wild swimming, I have very little idea what my colleagues do outside work, what they’re like, what they like. The colleague who left at the beginning of the year, I didn’t know he had a boyfriend, let alone one he was serious enough about that they got engaged over Christmas. I don’t know my boss’s wife’s name, I don’t know anyone’s opinion on caravaning, P*ers Morgan or crazy diets, they don’t know I (occasionally!) cave or climb, they don’t know I wear glittery shoes to work.
- You don’t get to join in the social side of things. Christmas party, Secret Santa, that lunchtime everyone went out together for sushi. To be honest, this is mostly a good thing. I don’t like enforced “just a bit of fun!” but my contrary little heart persists in feeling a bit left out when I’m not included. On the other hand, that all still carries on in the office I actually work in so I still get to do it all.
- Getting summoned to the main office three or four times a year soon stops being a novelty and starts being an inconvenience. It’s quite exciting the first time you “have to go to London for work” but at this stage, trying to find a gap in my diary – often a two day gap – between Guiding, comedy and adventures is more often a bit of a pain.
- I don’t really get a sense of workflow. I’m given instructions and I ask for instructions. I’m not really in a position to intuit them for myself. So not only do I have no idea what I’m doing next week, I often find I had no idea what I was going to be doing this very afternoon. Two weeks of uploading profiles. Ok. The very same day: no, now I’m spending the week cleaning data. Which is in itself no problem but I didn’t and couldn’t know that.
- I’m a millennial. I don’t like the phone. Of the four and a half people in this company, I need to be in regular contact with two of them. One phones regularly but my office can be pretty loud, especially when I’m on the phone. They don’t notice or do it on purpose but it’s as if me picking up the phone is a signal for everyone to start screeching literally over my head or across the length of the room. Many of these calls are held with my end muted and also with a hand over my spare ear. The other colleague has a fairly strong Hungarian accent and only about 95% fluency in English, which makes phone calls hard. (I speak four other languages, none of them over about 70% fluency and my Russian consists of about six words so far, so not complaining at all about his level of English!). We communicate exclusively by Slack.
- In order to keep up with each other’s work, we are very dependent on Google, mostly Drive, Sheets and Data Studio. At Job #1 we live and die by Microsoft and our own server. But I like Excel a lot more than Sheets and I like Microsoft correcting when I start a word with two capitals – Google leaves them both there. I guess it’s a chance to what I’ve been used to for 11+ years and I’m slow to warm to change.
- I have no idea what anyone else is doing and they have no idea what I’m doing. They don’t see that this profile took over an hour because there was data missing or formulas misbehaving or Google not working properly or an internet failure, they just see that I only managed seven profiles in an afternoon. I work flat out on Job #2 days to have visible results and more often than not go home bleary-eyed and with a headache.
- I get to work for a cool little London startup without leaving my old job in the countryside and that’s pretty fun.
Is there a conclusion to this? Well, on the face of it, remote working is a good compromise between perpetual travel and having the reliable income that keeps the travel machine moving. But there are ups and downs to it and it may not suit your personality or working style so have a proper think before you commit to moving to the other side of the world while keeping your old job.