Ger’s Excellent Adventures

After taking a couple weeks off from work in December, I planned to spend the first week or two in January getting caught up on work in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). I found a hotel in the backpacker district for only $12 USD/night including TV, a/c, wireless internet and breakfast. That’s less than half my rent at home.

Unfortunately the first week I got almost nothing done: I spent most of my time getting caught up with photo publishing, blogging and email, and researching scuba diving in Thailand and Malaysia. I had hoped to travel around Vietnam a bit more while I was here (Mui Ne, Nha Trang, Dalat) but decided to stay in Saigon longer to get some work done before going diving. I can always come back next month to see the stuff I missed. (I had planned to come back to visit north Vietnam anyway.)

I had a hard time working on Ko Samet last month as well, so after another unproductive week here I started to worry about being able to pull this trip off at all, and spent some time trying to figure out why I was so unproductive.

(I don’t think the rest of this post is very interesting to most people: just some thoughts about trying to work while travelling)

Various theories on my lack of productivity:

• having a net connection in my hotel room makes it too easy to waste time online — if I had to go to a net cafe to work I’d be more focused while I was there, even when it only costs thirty cents an hour. It’s just way too easy to spend hours reading about diving etc when I’m lazing around my hotel room. One of my requirements for my hotel room in Saigon was in-room net access, but I might try going without next time.
• having a flaky internet connection is much worse than none at all. The connection in my hotel and most other places I tried in Vietnam was terrible, possibly due to the recent earthquake in Taiwan that disrupted communications for much of Asia. Whenever the connection sucks like that I should immediately try to find another or work offline, not spend hours wrestling with it. There were at least a dozen net cafes within a 5 minute walk; I should have spent a couple cents evaluating each of them and set up camp at the one that sucked the least.
• working a regular schedule (e.g. Sun-Tues each week) might be better than trying to do weeks at a time, because I could still travel and sightsee the other 4 days and not feel guilty about missing the places I’m visiting. That’s probably better work-wise too. (those days coincide with my weekly teleconferences.)
• I have been trying to keep this trip as open and flexible as possible by booking stuff no more than a couple days in advance. But that makes it too easy to slack and waste time: once I booked my scuba diving trip I became much more motivated to get stuff done (both work and sightseeing) because I had a deadline. Maybe I should start making plans at least a week or two in advance.

Anyway, I knew this work/travel thing would be a challenge before I came here; part of the adventure is figuring that stuff out. I had a similar adjustment period when I first started working from home in Ottawa and again when I moved to Whistler, but adapted quickly in each case. My second week in Saigon I managed to get in a few productive days, I’ll figure it out yet…

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 12:32 pm UTC and is filed under Asia '06-07, Vietnam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.