Out of office: the rise of the digital nomad

In Bali I met the glamorous thirty-something Dr Dani Gordon, a Canadian GP. Gordon currently lives moments from a Balinese beach but moves around South East Asia and treats patients back in Canada using cutting-edge telemedicine technology, prescribing cannabis to wean patients off high-risk opioids such as fentanyl. ‘Patients are sent to me by GP referral, screened by my medical assistant online, given an hour-long cannabis counselling session and then I prescribe their medical cannabis along with lifestyle changes,’ she explains. ‘We use mindfulness meditation and yoga to treat their pain more holistically and they do a free online meditation course. Patients get physical access to a yoga and pain-management program at our clinic, too, but most prefer the online resources because they make it so accessible.’

‘Whether we work in medicine, finance, design or e-commerce, young people want the freedom, as promised by technology and the mobility of social media, to arrange their professional lives around their personal ones, rather than the other way round,’ says trends forecaster Zoë Lazarus. My generation (I’m 35) refuses to be professionally shamed for prioritising our health and happiness — I’m perfectly happy to tell editors I’m off to LA to be around for the birth of a new nephew and help out my sister Naomi. I’ll also be honest about my past struggles with SAD, and how my winter work breaks away mean I can improve the productivity that used to plummet come November.

Increased productivity isn’t the only professional benefit of remote working. Living in a new city, I spot trends, meet people and have experiences that I wind up writing about, so my travels make me more creative and productive, not less so. From Los Angeles I covered emerging fitness trends, reporting on indoor climbing studios such as RiseNation and cult spin sessions like Psycle before they landed in London. From Amsterdam I reviewed a restaurant geared towards solo diners months before its pop-up in London. In Bali I wrote about the rise of professional bootcamps at which high-achieving millennials spend their holidays abroad ‘manifesting a whole new career path’.

Being a worker makes me a better traveller. I get to discover Berlin by staying in a studio flat in Kreuzberg, working my way around the freelancer cafés, then discovering dive bars in the evening. I’d rather get to know a new city this way than by traipsing around the tourist sites over one long weekend, staying at a characterless city-centre hotel.

In his famous book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich, the American entrepreneur and lifestyle guru Timothy Ferriss argued for ‘lifestyle integration’ as an approach to travel. In Ferriss’s mind, we can work as we travel and distribute what he calls ‘mini-retirements’ throughout life.

But if lifestyle factors have driven our demand for greater flexibility, it is only sustained because it makes financial sense, too. Office space in London, New York, Paris and San Francisco is prohibitively expensive. And for young workers, rental costs in major cities are skyrocketing. Choose the right nomadic work location and it might just save you money. Nomadlist.com ranks the best cities in which to live and work remotely. Currently Bangkok sits at the top, putting the monthly cost of living — accommodation, desk space and meals — at $1,219 (£890); less than half that of London, at $2,824.

Of course, a location-independent working life isn’t for everyone. While I love it for the benefits of flexibility and an escape from the grim weather, constantly checking my phone and email and carrying my laptop as I travel blurs work-life boundaries and I never fully switch off. At a time when digital detoxes are all the rage, my lifestyle wouldn’t be for everyone. Still, it suits me — I recently did a five-day digital detox in Somerset, which was anything but relaxing. It took me a week of 5am starts the week beforehand to get my work in order, and I spent the week afterwards playing catch-up. I cope by keeping my phone on flight mode for chunks of the day, I never check emails after 7pm and I ration my social-media time to 20 minutes a day.

Another challenge is that of maintaining friendships and relationships. I’m sure it can be frustrating for friends when I’m frequently unavailable to meet, and regularly miss birthdays, weddings and Christenings. I do my best with WhatsApp and Facebook to stay connected, but of course the social-media versions of ourselves are far from reality. These days I remind friends to hit me with important dates months in advance if they can, and as numbers of location-independent workers grow, this will increasingly become the norm. I will always prioritise a wedding or birthday over a trip, but I can’t prioritise what I don’t know about. I’ve also always chosen boyfriends who don’t mind me disappearing for a few weeks at a time and I think most modern relationships require this sort of flexibility and independence. It doesn’t even feel that unusual to me.

Then there’s the critique that for all this talk of lifestyle integration, we do very little actual social integration, merely sitting on the surface sipping a flat white. This is changing, with apps that connect travellers to volunteering opportunities, international members’ clubs and groups such as Hacker Paradise (hackerparadise.org), geared towards helping digital nomads bed in. A new-generation members’ club, Norn (norn.co), offers members residencies of up to six months at co-sharing Norn houses in key cities including San Francisco, Berlin, Barcelona or London, facilitating workshops, mentoring sessions and other collaborations while they’re in situ.

For me, the laptop lifestyle enables me to see the world without quitting my job or decimating my savings account. But best of all, I see cities the way they’re meant to be seen: from the inside out. Not the outside in.

Anna Hart’s travel memoir, ‘Departures: A Guide to Letting Go, One Adventure at a Time’, is published by Little, Brown Book Group on 15 February