{"id":22265,"date":"2023-05-21T00:01:45","date_gmt":"2023-05-21T07:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=22265"},"modified":"2023-05-17T13:35:26","modified_gmt":"2023-05-17T20:35:26","slug":"life-as-a-digital-nomad-part-1-testing-the-waters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2023\/05\/21\/life-as-a-digital-nomad-part-1-testing-the-waters\/","title":{"rendered":"Life as a Digital Nomad: Part 1 (Testing the Waters)"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Mike Huber<\/h6>\n

In 2010 the company I worked for gave me my pink slip due to budgetary cuts.\u00a0 I was feeling distraught and lost because I had been working there for 8 years. Fortunately, I had a great director who helped by transferring me from a management position into a project manager slot that would be fully remote.<\/p>\n

Remote positions at the time were called working from home.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t take long for me to ask myself a question:\u00a0 What if I didn\u2019t have a home? This mostly was bar talk amongst friends and I didn\u2019t expect the crazy scenarios we discussed to ever become a reality.\u00a0 Well\u2026it seems planting those seeds in my mind was all it took for them to nurture, and then to grow into 13 years of almost nonstop travel.<\/p>\n

\"\" The first two years were mostly spent learning to excel in my new position as a project manager along with clumsily discovering how to adjust my work\/life balance in creative ways.\u00a0 This involved motorcycling throughout New England in between work responsibilities.<\/p>\n

Something I learned early is that there are McDonald\u2019s with wi-fi everywhere, and at the time it was one of the better places to stop to respond to emails or for a conference call (this was a life prior to riding a BMW, so I didn\u2019t require Starbucks).\u00a0 I timed my rides to reach these locations 10 minutes prior to conference calls.\u00a0 This allowed me time to set up and prepare for them as needed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The first day as a remote employee I decided to knock out a ride from Boston to Route 17 in northern Vermont.\u00a0 Route 17 is also known as the \u201cLittle Tail of the Dragon.\u201d\u00a0 It was May and I was literally working off my Ducati Monster M1100 as I tore up Vermont. Since it took so long to reach Route 17 it made sense to ride it twice to ensure the long ride was worth it and regain the curve back in my tires.\u00a0 It may have been one of the best days I have ever had working and figured this newfound freedom would provide many opportunities to fill in the gaps that I had been missing by going into a regular office day to day.<\/p>\n

Riding all the way to Vermont from Boston on your first day in a new position probably was a bit of overkill.\u00a0 I was missing calls and hadn\u2019t noticed my phone was constantly ringing in my pocket (an easy oversight being so heavily focused on riding).\u00a0 I was in flight formation and setting the pace for a flock of mallards that happened to be flying down the White River, which ran parallel to Route 100.\u00a0 Unbeknownst to me the phone continued ringing as the Ducati\u2019s Termignoni exhaust roared through the Green Mountains while I leaned into corners that followed the river.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Shortly after parting ways with the mallards and crossing back into New Hampshire, I saw some lights behind me.\u00a0 It was a New Hampshire State Trooper.\u00a0 Dammit! I am sure I was speeding, but the question always is how fast. It was fast. As I began talking to the State Trooper to try to minimize the damage, I could now hear my cell phone ringing.\u00a0 I picked it up as the Trooper ran my information.\u00a0 It was my new manager based in Virginia calling to introduce herself and ask if I had noticed that I had missed a call I needed to be on.\u00a0 I stated I was just out getting a coffee (which was 100% true; it\u2019s just that the coffee was 200 miles away).\u00a0 This was probably one of my more challenging multitask scenarios (i.e., signing a speeding ticket while on an introductory call with my manager).\u00a0 To this day I feel I would have been able to get out of that ticket had I not been so distracted by work. Lesson 1 as a remote employee learned.<\/p>\n

After that day I knew I should take my work a bit more seriously and slow my pace.\u00a0 I continued to ride, but always ensured I attended every call (which I did over the next 13 years). My work ethic has always been strong, and I didn\u2019t want to compromise this position and what I could possibly do with it by losing my focus.\u00a0 Continuing to merge my work responsibilities with riding was something that I honed to an art form.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Once I was comfortable performing my work one or two days a week off the motorcycle, I thought I would step the adventure up a notch: California.\u00a0 I had relatives in Oakland and there was a Harley rental in San Francisco, a short transit ride away.\u00a0 It made sense to fly there for two weeks and work remotely in a new environment and time zone to see how I would perform.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The test run couldn\u2019t have gone smoother.\u00a0 I was on Pacific Time when my team was on Eastern Time.\u00a0 This ensured that by 1:00 p.m. all my tasks and calls were completed.\u00a0 Having earlier workdays provided much more time to explore San Francisco and the Bay Area.\u00a0 A couple of vacation days in the mix allowed time to rent a Harley in San Francisco and take a 3-day trip to Tahoe and Yosemite.\u00a0 Even though I was on vacation those days I felt obliged to join work calls whenever possible just to stay on top of my projects, while obtaining bonus points from management for doing so on my time off.\u00a0 I felt this made up for my missed meeting when I had first started this position in New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

The California trip had solidified my abilities to work from anywhere.\u00a0 On the return flight to Boston my thoughts focused on a farfetched mindset:\u00a0 What if I don\u2019t have a home?\u00a0 It would take a few months of planning and a solid leap of faith.\u00a0 As with all leaps of faith you never know where or how it will end, but I felt sure I could make this dream a reality. What I didn\u2019t realize is how far I would take this and the new experiences my decision would deliver.\u00a0 I turned my life into Ferris Bueller\u2019s Day Off on steroids over the next 13 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Mike Huber In 2010 the company I worked for gave me my pink slip due to budgetary cuts.\u00a0 I was feeling distraught and lost because I had been working there for 8 years. Fortunately, I had a great director who helped by transferring me from a management position into a project manager slot that … Continue reading “Life as a Digital Nomad: Part 1 (Testing the Waters)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":22280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[392,352,96,452,103,89,203],"tags":[420,377,104,3542,3544,3543,3131,2461,3545],"class_list":["post-22265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-back-in-the-day","category-bmw","category-feel-good-stuff","category-harley","category-harley-davidson","category-motorcycle-adventure-ride","category-national-park","tag-bmw","tag-ducati","tag-harley-davidson","tag-living-off-a-motorcycle","tag-mcdonalds","tag-project-management","tag-remote-working","tag-starbucks","tag-wi-fi-access"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/Digital_Nomd-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22265"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22279,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22265\/revisions\/22279"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}