The power goes out here two or three times a week, more often in the rainy season. Sometimes for ten seconds, sometimes for an entire afternoon. No one pays attention anymore.
Robert Scales has been based in Bali for about a year, after a few months in Thailand. He left Vancouver at the end of 2010. Most of his days are divided between dive training and computer work, helping dive operators with their websites and social media. In Canada, people picture a laptop on a beach. The reality is a laptop on a plastic table, a fan pointed at it, a USB modem sticking out the side, and one eye on the sky, because rain is coming and often brings a power cut with it.
The term "digital nomad" is starting to spread. In practice, it mostly means working from somewhere else and resolving the practical issues as they arise. Here are the observations so far.
Why are a UPS and a second SIM card business tools?
The first lesson concerns electricity. Power cuts happen, sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for hours. A few seconds is enough to damage a desktop computer, corrupt a file or drop a Skype call with a client on the other side of the world.
A small UPS, an uninterruptible power supply, solves most of these problems. It is a box with a battery; the modem and router plug into it and keep running during a power cut. The equipment is modest, but worth every rupiah.
The second lesson concerns internet access. Café Wi-Fi exists, but its quality is unpredictable. Most remote workers rely on 3G modems and mobile data, and a network can be excellent in one village and unusable in the next. The solution is to carry two SIM cards from different carriers and switch when one fails. That second SIM card saves more deadlines than any app.
These needs are not unique to Bali. Many people in Canada run businesses from a cottage or a small town, on a rural connection that drops when the wind picks up, and a storm can cut the power for a day. The equipment is the same: a UPS for the modem, a backup connection (even if it is simply a phone on a different carrier) and copies of your files somewhere other than your laptop, in Dropbox or a similar service.
Your website should not depend on your home's power supply either. That is the role of proper hosting and site maintenance: the site continues to accept bookings during an outage.
How much time do visas and paperwork require?
The rules change often, and explaining them is the role of the relevant authorities, so this article does not go into detail. It is worth noting, however, that anyone living and working here devotes a significant amount of time to paperwork: offices, forms, waiting rooms and, occasionally, a short trip out of the country and back.
The lesson for anyone running a business from anywhere is to schedule that time. Administration is part of the work. If it is not planned, it encroaches on the week set aside for clients.
The same applies to a small business owner in Canada: taxes, permits, renewals, the domain name that expires during vacation week. All of these tasks take hours, which need a place in the week.
Why reserve mornings for deep work?
If only one practice from this year were kept, it would be this one.
The island offers many distractions: a friend heading out to dive, a ceremony down the road, a new café opening. The afternoon heat also makes concentrated thinking difficult.
The solution adopted is to work in the morning: early, before the heat, before emails from Europe and North America accumulate, before any requests arrive. Two or three hours of focused work, with nothing else open, for writing, building and demanding analysis. Afternoons are devoted to email, calls, errands and the dive centre.
The rice fields do not make anyone productive; the routine does. Some people arrive here expecting the scenery to improve their focus, and a month later they have fallen behind on everything.
This rule applies anywhere. The early hours are the only part of the day no one else has yet claimed.
Which small habits help with organization?
- A single list for the day, written the night before: three tasks, not twelve.
- The phone in another room during the morning block.
- Clients clearly informed of the hours when you respond, in their time zone. Most people accept a delay when they are told about it.
Why do local people teach more than any guidebook?
The expat bubble is real here. It is possible to spend a year in Bali speaking only to other foreigners, and many people do.
Yet it is local people who provide the most useful information: where to find a SIM card that actually works in your area, which days businesses will be closed for ceremonies, how to deal with a landlord, a mechanic or the banjar, the village community council, what Nyepi means, the day of silence when the whole island shuts down (lights off, nobody on the roads), and how to plan work around it.
None of this information appears in a guidebook, or if it does, it is out of date.
The same is likely true when settling in any small community. The most useful information comes from neighbours, not websites: who repairs motorbikes honestly, where people actually eat. For a business based in a small community, that network is also its marketing. Word of mouth there is more effective than any paid advertising.
What role will coworking play?
Coworking spaces are multiplying in large cities: shared offices where freelancers rent a desk by the day or the month. For an introduction to the concept, the Wikipedia page on coworking explains it well. The model is still rare here, but it is likely to develop, with reliable internet and a generator as the main selling points. The number of people working this way grows every month.
The trend indicates that a growing number of people will work away from an office in the coming years, whether in Bali or simply at the cottage. Those who succeed will be the ones who address the practical aspects first: power, internet, backups and a routine. The beach is the easy part.