I suppose it depends on how you do it. I worked from a beach town in Costa Rica for a month last year. I worked very well, being unusually productive (I think due to lack of stress and a change of scenery). I worked ~6-8 hours a day/5 days a week, and got more done than I had over many more hours back home. That left me plenty of time to meet and hang out with locals, so scuba diving, swim in the ocean twice a day, cook with local fish and ingredients, make new friends, etc... It was fantastic!

I worked from a small beach town in Costa Rica for 6 months a while back, and I have to agree with the parent. The novelty kind of wore off and we had to work a _lot_, it became more of a nuisance with bad/spotty internet than a WFH paradise. We took off 3 days one time the week we left to be just like regular tourists for once; that was great.

I concur. I did the same in the Mediterraneans, working from a beach for a month; whenever I felt like I took a little swim in the sea, being refreshed, and it did wonders to my productivity. Not sure why wouldn't you do this if you could...

Full disclosure: I work for the author's company.

I agree with you! Back in March I finished a 15 month trip around the world while working full time. I travelled to 40 different cities in 15 countries and while some places where difficult to adapt to and the conditions where I worked from were challenging, I can say that my productivity didn't diminish.

Since I came back (I live in Barcelona) I've attended retreats in the Alps (Austria for skiing + Italy for hiking just last week) plus 2 weeks in a very nice countryside house 2 hours from Barcelona where we worked together with 10 people from the office and in the afternoons we did hikes, wine tastings or went to the beach.

Thanks for joining the discussion. I wonder how do you keep business running (bigender claims an outstanding support) while in retreat ? Does only a part of the company goes on retreat ?

>To me traveling with a laptop and working is neither traveling nor working well.

Well, regular working is not traveling at all on the other hand.

To GP's point, at my office, I have a desktop with 2 monitors, at my home office, I have a desktop with... 2 monitors. Traveling, I'm stuck with either a VERY heavy 17" laptop or a less heavy 15" laptop, or an incredibly light 12" laptop. Any way I go about it, I don't have my dual 27 inch laptops.

So? Unless you are a graphic designer, why would that matter?

It might be convenient, but hackers for decades had just had 14" (or less) monochromatic monitors and they've built masterpieces on them.

If "dual 27 inch monitors" are so important to your work, then (a) I don't see how you'd be able to be a programmer in the 80s and 90s when those things either didn't exist or costed a fortune, (b) fine, don't travel.

The "very heavy" part (for the 17" laptop) doesn't matter, as you're not supposed to backpack everywhere with it. Just keep it at your hotel/rent house/bangalow in the different cities you visit and work from there. You can still visit the city and explore all the other hours.

Besides, if it's that important, then anywhere you go and stay for a month or more (and nomads can spend several months on each country or more), you could buy a $200 24" monitor -- and then just give it away to some friend you've made, charity or sell it.

I wouldn't be able to program in the 80s and I don't want to go back to the 90s. I'm sorry but having my IDE on one half of one screen, debug console on the second half then browser on the other monitor is a big convenience that I have gotten used to.

Its like saying, oh you like your power steering, and automatic transmissions? Well then you couldn't drive a Model-T.

That viewpoint that progress makes you weak is a very bad way to view the world. Progress makes us all better at what we do by making us more efficient.

>Its like saying, oh you like your power steering, and automatic transmissions? Well then you couldn't drive a Model-T.

No, I think it's more like saying "most of those efficiencies are probably cargo cult" especially since programmers with just a 12" laptop and Vim can (and do) run circles around people with double and triple monitor setups and fancy IDEs.

So nothing especially efficiency improving that wouldn't be trumped by simply more skills.

(Not saying that you don't have skills. You might be better than Linus. Saying that multiple monitors are not the reason for that).

Yes, it's nice to have a big screen, but not really essential. As for the second screen, it gets all marginal returns from there.

You can use an iPad as your second screen. Not as good. But that's not the point. The point is good enough for know the world while you're still alive.

Understood that especially in front-end work, dual screens are pretty much necessary for testing & debugging and just being able to work efficiently.

FWIW, a 24" monitor in original box will fit in a checked bag-- takes up half of the medium-large hardshell luggage I have-- and yes I've traveled with an extra screen.

I wonder if good a VR headset would some day change this.

I can only hope so. Ever since I played with a Virtual Boy Headset in the mid-late 90s, I have wanted a VR world that would replace my physical desk.

Just bring them in checked luggage. As another comment points out, you're not backpacking.

Consider it like traveling with a bicycle, which people do quite successfully.

As a front-end dev, the extra screen is a nice productivity boost. You shouldn't lug around extra monitor, too many kgs/lbs.

Get the portable Asus MB168B+, goes in your backpack. Lugged this bad boy around 13 countries over the past 2 years. No Flux support though!!!

Yea you could probably argue there are better economies of scale doing all of your working in large chunks and then all of your traveling in large chunks.

To me 1-2 week vacations per year though is not a large enough chunk of time off. I sometimes wonder if I'd rather forgo weekends, accumulate all of that time and then take 2-3 months off all at once.

It depends on a lot of things. In a prior life, I took some month-long vacations with effectively no communication back home. (it was pre consumer Internet.) It's definitely qualitatively different from my more typical week or two intermittently online trip these days.

That said, I get antsy if I'm "in the office" (physically or otherwise) for too long and, when traveling, there does come a point where I'm ready to get back to my house rather than living out of a travel backpack.

These days I find it much more practical to take a couple of 1-2 week vacations and spend some time around business trips than to take a huge chunk of time off. But circumstances will vary.

That's kinda what I did. I wasn't head down on trying to build something, but I did write a novel while we were traveling, along with some freelance. We'd travel, moving from place to place frequently, then settle in somewhere with decent internet. We travelled through Peru and Chile, but lived in Buenos Aires for a month.

Travelled through much of SE Asia, but lived in Thailand for a couple months. India (travel) Spain (living) and so on.

This is what I have found. When I travel, I want to travel deep, so to speak, and suck out all of the marrow. I have tried to do work while touring by bicycle and, while work could easily finance my trip indefinitely, I was seeing much, much less by bringing it along. Better to save up for shorter trips, free to wander as I will.

I love backpacking but it seems fundamentally incompatible to tour by bike and work simultaneously - as the pleasure of traveling slowly means there isn't time to fit both any significant distance and work time within the same day.

Planning to work remotely laster this year and will definitely pick a spot and stay parked there for weeks.