It’s 9:20 am and I’m sitting at Gatwick Airport after a surprisingly smooth check-in upon arrival. I wouldn’t say I’m an anxious flyer but everything until security stresses me out. Once I get past security I feel generally calm, but I like to sit at my gate and wait.
After taking a weekend trip to Oslo last week, I’ve realized that airports on this side of the world don’t love people waiting at their gates really early, so they don’t tend to release travel gates til closer to departure. So here I am, eating an overpriced yogurt bowl and croissant from PRET because the sandwich I packed was moldy when I got to the airport…
If you’d told me that I’ve been in London just short of a month already I wouldn’t believe you. Time has gone by so quickly but so long at the same time. Traveling and working remotely really makes you feel that almost 50% of your awake hours are spent working.
I’ve gotten used to the feeling of that, it makes it hard to focus sometimes though and limiting technological distractions is a great way to leverage your working time so that you don’t procrastinate too much and end up ruining your free time later on because you didn’t get enough work done.
But first… London. What an amazing city. I’ve loved working remotely here for April. Something special about my experience is that I stayed in a house with 3 other people. I found it on Airbnb. It had everything I needed - desk space, bathroom, kitchen, washing machine - which is why I chose it but I got so much more out of it than that. I made 3 new friends which is so sick. One of them was the landlord, one of them was a live-in tenant and the other was another Airbnber. What are the odds that we would have all gotten along and had dinners together, BBQs and nights out together? I feel so blessed for that experience.
My tip on finding a space to live while working abroad. If you’re not doing a coworking living space like Outsite or Selina, consider looking in a neighborhood to find the best place to rent. I loved living in the lil neighborhood of Homerton in Hackney. It was so beautiful, close to so many parks with many things to explore.
Working remotely has been a new obstacle for me. I’m on a different time zone. I have so many potential distractions… how do I make it work?
Work Hours. For my work, I have to have three hours of overlap with the West Coast of Canada, in London that’s 5-8pm. Some people would hate that but it’s perfect for me because I prefer to explore during the day.
To make the most of my trip, I had to be a perfect mix of planned to spontaneous. Sundays were a great day for me because I could sit down and look at the week ahead and see if there were things I needed to book ahead (for example, a free ticket to a museum to secure a timeslot) versus just leaving an open time block to go explore a new space.
I would use a few different working times to adjust to making the most of my days. Some days I would work 7:30am - 11:30am, take a break to explore then start work again around 5pm - 8:30pm. That usually gave me about 4-5 hours in the middle of the day to explore. Other days, I just worked straight from 12:30pm - 8/8:30pm. Then I would wake up early and do something before getting to work in the afternoon. It really depends on how I was feeling that week and what I was doing.
Now I’m onto my next adventure with Outsite. I’m so stoked to try co-living with other digital nomads to see where my adventures take me.