NEXT TIME ON PARADISE REMOTELY....

How to ensure your career progresses from paradise

X Marks the Spot - choosing a location

We all know how grim the holiday blues can be. They start the minute the air conditioning blasts out on the plane, sucking the moisture from your skin and ensuring your tan peels and fades like paint on an old shed. Once home, your wonderful holiday becomes a distant memory as soon as the last vestiges of sand from that mouldy old flip-flop disappears up the Hoover.

That said, most of us love home too.  So, it seemed a total no-brainer to me to combine the two as a route to eternal bliss.  However, falling in love with a little Greek fishing village or vibrant foreign city doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great place to go and live. Finding the right spot for you on a permanent basis requires a more scientific approach.  Here are some things to consider before upping sticks.

1)      In this case location, location, location applies more to the local airport than your home! Make sure your chosen spot has a low cost airline flying in regularly

2)      Travel times must be considered before moving and those times start the minute you leave your new front door. Find somewhere not too far from an airport

3)      Do the flights operate all year round? Even a decent connection to a hub airport is better than being stranded in the winter months

4)      Is the place you’ve fallen in love with ‘open’ all year? It can prove a shock when you find all the tourists have gone home and even the locals de-camp to other areas to wait out the low season months

5)      Technology must always be considered – not just Internet connections, but having the right devices to enable you to do things at speed and from anywhere, after all, working from the beach, lake or forest is part of the joy of working in paradise. Check out mobile networks too as there are still black spots for iPhones and Blackberrys

6)      Get yourself on forums for ex-pats and start asking questions. They provide a wealth of knowledge and advice and are a great sounding board for most things you need to know before taking the plunge

In the next instalment of X Marks the Spot I’ll give you some great money saving advice..... watch this space!

Getting Started.... Remotely

Before taking the plunge of working remotely you need to test if and how you can work from the idyllic spot you’ve chosen. Ironically, in the initial stages, much of this will have to be done remotely, i.e. from the place you’re leaving, as it’s not practical to keep hopping on a plane to test everything personally.  

Preparation, planning and research is key, so, I’ve created a Dos and Don’ts check list, (that I will add to over time) that will really help you in the early stages of your migration. Make sure you take note of these tips or an un-checked check list can quickly turn into a ‘cheque list’ of costs and wasted money.

My first set of tips below are designed to get YOU in the right mindset. You are leaving a culture and way of life so engrained that what you do in everyday life, from paying bills to renting/buying property, paying for shopping to opening a bank account, has become second nature. It won’t be like that where you’re going. Expect things to be different, after all that’s half the fun of it. See it as an adventure, albeit one that needs thorough planning, as no two countries are the same. Oh, and by the way, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve been there on holiday, living there is simply not the same as a two week jolly for fun and a suntan!

Do consider technology as this is the ‘Great Enabler’ and you won’t get far without it – check out reliability of Internet services, bandwidth, download capacities etc, for work, but also for entertainment such as streaming TV and movies. It isn’t always wise to go for the cheapest option as the old adage that you get what you pay for applies – if you pay practically nothing, you can expect practically nothing! Reliability is key for critical business continuation.... and not missing the soaps or the sports after work either.

Don’t expect things to be like they are at home – They won’t be, and THAT is one of the reasons you’re leaving.  Depending on local culture and expectations, service delivery and customer requirements are often measured differently and what you require from a work space/home/Internet provider etc, may be very far removed from what you might end up with if you don’t research all the options. Create a check list for you to test next time you’re there, make sure you go through every process and need in great detail and ensure each question is answered. Have plan B (and C and even D) fully prepared and ready to roll for testing too. Be patient, this is important research and quality research takes time.

Do be prepared for your expectations to not always be reached – leaving a heaving, throbbing modern (smelly, stressful, crowded) metropolis like London and going to some out of the way speck of land in the Med, Caribbean or African plane means that things are going to be different. Slow yourself down, work patiently around local customs and grin and bear it, no matter how annoying it seems at first. Try my ‘this is quaint, this is quaint, this is quaint’ mantra and repeat in your head until it becomes a soothing chant! Never forget that this slower pace of life is the reason you’re going there in the first place and that the meteoric speeds and efficiency of the metropolis comes with a liberal dose of stress and anxiety. Chill out, switch down a couple of gears and coast in the slow lane of life.

Don’t leave anything to chance – this requires an entirely new approach of playing devil’s advocate with everything from builders to letting agents and bank staff to accountants. Moving abroad is not just a massive step to take away from your career path, family and friends, it also costs a great deal of money. Annoying someone to teeth-grinding proportions with endless questions just cannot be your concern, so grow a super-thick skin around causing others annoyance.  I found my practise of asking about all the things that can go wrong and not saying ‘can you do that’ but  ‘how many times have you done before’ quickly followed by a ‘show me an example,’ made for a more peaceful night’s sleep.  It’s all a learning process and you’re on the fast track, wise up. Fast!

An introduction to me... And why I write this blog

The one thing I wanted to avoid when I decided to set up this blog was using the voice of the self-satisfied ‘smugite’, the condescension of the conceited that seems prevalent in those oh so wise self-help books and blogs. So, if at any point my supercilious siren should go off I promise to change track immediately. Feel free to let me know should a mere hint of it waft your way across the ether...

OK, so why am I here? Not just on this blog but physically, why do I find myself slumped on my sofa in Spain, (it’s a rare cold a blowy day here in the White Isle so I’m inside) about to launch into a written diatribe about my life over the past 6-7 years? Well, mostly just because I can, because I have the time and space to. I wrote some advertising copy this morning and was up until the wee small hours editing my book, a thriller entitled Numerous, last night so I now find that I have the time to start this blog, and that’s really what this is all about - Freedom. Yours and mine.

By harnessing the freedom technology now affords us and following in the footsteps of the remote pioneers, who’ve made this way of working successful both for them and for their companies, businesses or clients, you too can live in paradise and work remotely. Whether your idea of paradise be an isolated and windswept croft on the Outer Hebrides, the glitz and neon of the Vegas strip or a beach hut in Borneo, the principle is the same and this blog will help you make that jump into ‘remotesville’.

Here on Paradise Remotely I’ll cover such topics as, Getting Started... Remotely, how to see if remote working will work for you and in X Marks the Spot and Going the Distance, I’ll include a series of dos and don’ts about choosing a new idyllic location and how to test if it really will work. The blog also will feature tried and tested top tips from myself, but also other remote workers that I know, all of whom are based overseas, and in Technology – The Great Enabler, I’ll tell you about the very basic technology you need to set yourself up remotely, through to cloud based solutions and remote servers. Finally, I will endeavour to help you Sell Yourself at a Distance and in Diversify Before You Fly, I will show you how to alter, hone and perfect your current career path to make it remote-proof.

So, that said (not too smugly, I hope) I shall be back very soon with my first tips and hints for you.