I'm sitting here in Bangkok drinking bad coffee and missing the ubiquitousness of fast internet that exists just about everywhere else. Downloading hundred's of new e-mail (most of which will be spam) and rss feeds here harkens back to the early 90's when you used to download your email for later viewing while you had a shower, made breakfast and coffee, and were generally ready for the day. No instant information here.

I appreciate this approach in some ways. It forces a certain discipline that I might not always have. For people like me, having instant access to information means getting trapped in a endless cycle of reading and discovering and reading. With so much information readily available it is hard to stop trying to absorb it all. Put a small barrier in this process, in this case speed, and you are forced to be far more goal directed. I plan out exactly what I need to see ahead of time.

Working out of Bangkok tends to change your habits too. Elsewhere I tend to treat a remote web server much like a local drive. But here you are forced to do all your work locally and then when you find a good upstream upload all your work to the remote server. There are advantages to this approach I suppose.

In a beautiful country with such happy friendly people it's hard to want to spend anytime in front of my Mac anyway but it's interesting to reflect on the changes to your habits when access to fast networks become the exception and not the rule.

Categorized: Work and Working , Productivity

Tagged: 2, Workflow