My First Week as a Digital Nomad

My expectations of remote work vs the reality of remote work

For as long as I can remember I have been jealous of those people in cafes working on their laptops and doing work. And not just school work or writing papers because I used to do that all the time as a student but actual work, like with a salary and responsibilities to clients. I dreamed of the flexibility to just work from any cafe I wanted, to work from hotel lobbies, or airports, or strange locations around the world. In a word, the dream job was about freedom and self-actualization.

For the longest time, I thought this dream job could only be had by writers and other creatives. And so I have been waiting for my career as a writer and author to take off. But that is a notoriously hard nut to crack.

I finally got the dream job after two years in the food industry after dropping out of my philosophy PhD. It’s a fully remote position for a creative agency. All I need is a laptop and an internet connection and I can do my job. It’s amazing. The company, RebelMouse, is itself fully remote, with no central office location. There are about 45 employees and we are scattered across the globe in many timezones.

Funny aside about how I got this job: the CEO recruited me from Twitter because she liked my writing.

But back to the expectations of my dream job. I imagined remote work was going to mean all this freedom to run errands and get coffee and take lunch whenever I wanted. In other words, I imagined freedom in my daily schedule and I would just work whenever I felt like it.

That’s not what happened, however. There were so many scheduled meetings and calls and group-chats and things to do that I simply didn’t have time to just step out and run an errand for an hour. It was a fast-pasted, long, attention-consuming day. It was not this relaxing day-at-the-beach sort of mental vacation I had imagined remote work to be.

I was essentially in front of a computer Monday through Friday, 9–5, with only small breaks for lunch, snacks, and espresso. Without the distractions of an office, it is easy to sit down at your computer and just focus. I was able to get a lot of work done.

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