A digital nomad
When the pandemic started, I was working in San Francisco. As I rushed back to Amsterdam to handle our next steps with the team, I figured we'd be gearing up for 3, maximum 6, months of remote working.
18 months later, I'm a PM working in a team that's 6 hours ahead of me. I have never met most of my colleagues. And yet, we've managed to keep productivity high and keep many ambitious projects on track while working from home.
When I finally got vaccinated in June 2021, I decided to go the extra mile: ditch my beautiful home up North and become a full fledged digital nomad. I would do what my working class parents could only dream of before the age of Zoom and cheap 4G connectivity: I would enjoy the beauty of travel and discovery while keeping a high-performance job that pays for my bill and gives me stability and purpose. My boss was supportive, my vaccine passport ready: I booked a one-way ticket, and left.
On both sides of the productivity continuum - from the crazy 10x programmer to the low-rank social media influencer - you'll hear a lot about the virtues of remote working. The Covid pandemic is a large-scale experiment that has demonstrated that companies can survive and thrive while fully remote. And for many people this is a dream come true: no longer bound to the office and its menial politics, water cooler talk, drab cubicles and mind-numbing routine, they are finally free to travel and enjoy life as it's supposed to be: work to live, instead of live to work.
Personally, I lasted less than 8 weeks before I finally caved and booked a flight back to our office. For me, it just didn't work.
As it turns out, I am not alone. There's a lot of commentary on the internet about how great remote work is, but in the real world, most of my friends and colleagues enjoy the flexibility, but dislike pretty much everything else about it. When adding the digital nomad component into it, the total package really does fall short of expectations and - at least for me - becomes a completely different experience than what aspirational work-while-travelling articles paint.
As to the why, I think it comes down to four pillars - the people, the productivity, the creativity, and the reality of it.
The people
I have been lucky enough to study at some very good universities, work at brilliant startups, and later on brilliant products at two pre-IPO companies (Adyen and Wise). In all these places I met many inspiring people that were smart, motivated, and well positioned to show up every day with experience and passion.
I'm trying not to generalize here, but as a digital nomad I met a whole lot of people, none of which were that inspiring at all. I can think of many people I have worked with -either in the office or from home - that I'd love to start a venture with; but I wouldn't do that with any of the people I met while digital nomading. Not a single one.
I have moved to new cities before and met really interesting people (and even lifelong friends) through online communities such as Meetup and Reddit. But following the digital nomad infrastructure, I converged to destinations that are very popular amongst a certain type of travelling professionals: young, largely freelancing, largely working on social media-related things. And all I found were communities I had nothing in common with.
Working for me (and many people I know) is about forging long term connections - it's more than networking; rather, it's a funnel to meet like-minded, hopefully brilliant people, that can show you the world in a new light. Nomad life, on the other hand, is fast and fleeting - something that definitely reflects in the personality and careers of the people I met.
Maybe, if digital nomadism becomes more than a pandemic-driven need, infrastructure will evolve to allow companies to replicate the office experience in many different hubs. Or maybe, as more traditional career workers start leaving the office in droves, there will be less tiktok influencers and more brilliant people building sustainable, impactful businesses at your local WeWork.
Until then, I suspect the average digital nomad in Lisbon or Phuket is optimizing for a different life than the one me and many of my friends and acquantainces are personally looking for.
The productivity
I generally would think of myself as a productive person. I love my job, but I also have plenty of hobbies outside of it; and it's very rare that wake up feeling like doing nothing all day.
Even when I'm at the office, I actively enjoy what I do - so you'll rarely find me at the watercooler chatting, or idly checking my Instagram while waiting for a document to upload. Instead, I try to keep my work life balance sharply tuned, and accomplish as much as I can in the hours of work I have - so I can go home and do all the other interesting things I like afterwards. Most of my colleagues are like me in this regard.
When I transitioned from office to remote work, my productivity stayed largely unchanged: some tasks, like brainstorming or aligning the team for a certain task, got harder; some others, like writing spec or doing deep work became easier to do without a noisy office environment.
Adding the digital nomad element into the mix, however, had a significant impact on my productivity. You see, if you travel while working you will have to plan for a lot of different contingencies: fast internet, a quiet place to stay, you luggage, your lunch, your flight tickets, your passport, your covid test - and what are we doing after work? And who are we meeting? And what are we cooking? And do we have salt? And what are the five things to do on a Wednesday in Porto? And...
Our brain is bad at multitasking. Digital nomading takes all of the negative factors of office working, and cranks them up to 11, by removing all of the comforts that come with a complimentary office or your own Work From Home rig.
Once again, I'm trying not to generalize - and this is my personal opinion and in no way a single truth - but I'm struggling to see how anyone doing my job can argue that we could be more productive if we'd do it from a different location every week. There is absolutely nothing about travelling through exotic location that incentivizes you to do your job better: instead, it adds a lot of cognitive load to your limited brainpower; new, unpredictable and constant interruptions; and of course even more way to get distracted.
Let's face it: humans are naturally procrastinating primates, and if we have to choose between a delicious espresso and croissant followed by a bath in the afternoon sun versus chasing that horrible supplier once again or sending a 200-lines excel sheet full with detailed information, we all know what we'd rather be doing.
There's a higher amount of trust built into remote working, by definition: we trust people to do their job without constant supervision, and I absolutely support that.
But for the productivity argument we really need to split 'remote working' and 'digital nomading'; I personally think it's possible to work from home or another trusted flexible environment and achieve a high level of productivity, but I think it's extremely challenging and, in the long run, impossible to do so while travelling around as if you were on holiday.
When I started staying in the same place for longer, I managed to bring my productivity back to a level I was happy with; even then, I never managed to shake the feeling I was doing two job at once: that of a traveller, or an explorer; and the one I'm paid for, as a senior product manager at Wise. Ultimately, I decided to cut the experience short and go back home; my productivity instantly went back to regular levels.
The creativity
Many of the best ideas I've ever had at work come from two avenues: spontaneous sparring with my colleagues, and deep empathy with my customers.
Exchanging ideas with colleagues is already difficult when working remotely: it's virtually impossible to schedule a '45 minutes Zoom brainstorming session', and those of us who tried it know it's a largely futile effort. That's the one thing, in my opinion, that work from home cannot provide when compared to the in-person experience.
But surprisingly enough, I found empathy to be by far the most unattainable of the two while travelling as a digital nomad.
This made little sense: I am the product manager for a card product geared towards travelers, and I was dogfooding my own product - by using the Wise card as my only way of paying across Europe - all the while visiting beautiful and inspiring locations. Why were the ideas not flowing?
I suspect the answer to this has to do with the creative bandwidth of your brain, and how it's spent. I suspect I was spending all of my brain energy by taking in new ideas and experiences, and I didn't have enough time and capacity left to distill them into actionable insights and actually solid product ideas and developments.
We often imagine artists, travelers, writers and photographers producing their best work while on the road. But most of Hemingway's books were written in his bedroom in Key West; Kerouac's "On The Road" was compiled in New York, and Steve McCurry develops the picture he took in his travels back at his studio in Manhattan. Travelling can be inspirational - but the insights come on the way home.
I don't think there can be deep, meaningful work done while plotting a trip from one destination to the other. On the opposite: I felt the mental drain of deciding my next sight to visit or thing to do took away time and energy from my self-reflection and deep, meaningful work both on a professional level and with regards to my hobbies.
The more I traveled without recharging, the more unable I felt to tackle uncertainty and meaningful problems at work; and even on a personal level, the quality and quantity of my passion projects declined more and more.
I'm sure there are some jobs that benefit from a continuous stream of experiences to be consumed in parallel to rote, routine work; or to be regurgitated towards a group of followers without much processing at all. As product work goes, I think it would be very challenging for a product manager to be on the road 365 days a year and still tackle his or her work at the level I've seen people do at the office or while working from home.
The reality
Ultimately, the dream of working while travelling has a very strong appeal to people like me that can't afford to not work, but also have the curiosity, empathy, and interest to enjoy getting to know different places and cultures. For years I dreamt of it, and thanks to a supportive company and boss, a good track record at work, and a strong pandemic-driven shock in workplace habits I was finally able to try it out.
I know now that the idea of combining work and travel and living as a digital nomad is not as straightforward or as enjoyable as it seems on paper. I feel a lot of people writing about 'the future of work' today are too often writing in hypotheticals, praising the edgy choice, but doing so from the comfort of their office. I also feel they might be jumping to conclusions too early about what the average worker really wants from their job.
Sure enough, this experience really showed me the reason why I do the job that I do, with the passion and intensity and effort that I put into it. It's not for the salary - that I could comfortably draw while travelling with much lower effort or contribution; no, it's because I enjoy being with brilliant and driven colleagues (the people), building sustainable and impactful things, stretching my capabilities every day (the productivity), and come up with solutions that are thoughtful and innovative (the creativity).
Switching from office work to working from home, I found that I was still able to do those things - sometimes less, sometimes more effectively. I enjoyed the flexibility and I feel a hybrid working model is something that would work for a lot of jobs out there.
But when I decided to become a digital nomad, and try and solve complex product problems from a rickety plastic table on a sunny beach - that's when I realized there are important advantages to the traditional structure of work. Digital nomadism, at least for me, really fell short on all the core parameters that render work enjoyable and meaningful.
I think it is quite counterproductive for the debate to conflate 'working from home' with 'digital nomadism'. The former simply moves the office from a physical location downtown into your living room, bedroom or (if you're lucky) studio. The latter completely removes the things that make working great, and delivers an experience that's neither here not there.
For this reason, I'd be wary of anyone that pitches you digital nomadism as the future of work, or working from home as a threat to productivity. As usual, it's best to take such sweeping claims with a pinch of salt, and instead think about what the future of your work looks like - and why it matters.