Working holiday

In summer 2012, Sarah and I decided that we would fly south for the winter and visit my family in New Zealand.

I've been to NZ 6 times in the last 9 years to visit the family, my previous visit lasted just 3 days for my sister's wedding in November 2010.

This was to be Sarah & Rebecca's second visit and Hannah's first.

Our original plan last summer was for Sarah and the kids to join me in the US after I had finished doing some work with a client over there. However, we were staggered at the cost of flights (just over £3k for Sarah and the kids) and then the addition of internal travel, accommodation (even with friends in various parts of the east coast), food etc. it was all quickly mounting up, even for just a 2 week stint.

As anyone who knows me will know, the main thing I don't like about Scotland is the winter. It's terrible. Dark mornings, dark afternoons, rain, wind and just general "mingingness".

In theory, I can work anywhere there's an Internet connection (in an ideal world we could do without but the reality of a web developer is you will need online at some point to grab a jquery plugin or code snippet - at least I do anyway).

Inspired by my friend Mike Boyink and his family, we decided to see if the theory could in fact be a reality and embark on a mini adventure. We booked 3 months in NZ (costing £3500 for the 4 of us) from November 2012 to 2nd February 2013. This would also be our last opportunity to visit NZ over a Christmas given Rebecca will start school this coming August.

Considerations

We had a few when discussing the feasibility of the trip, would my clients be OK with me being so far away? (I actually don't have many in the UK, most are in the US) Would the kids be OK missing 3 months of pre-school? Would I be able to land new project work? Ultimately, these were variables we had no control over and thankfully clients were really cool (some even jealous) about the trip.

Accommodation

The trip was largely made possible by staying with my parents for the majority of our trip (we had a few nights at my sisters and a long weekend with friends in the north of NZ). There's no way we could have afforded to continue to pay our mortgage and bills at home in addition to paying for a hotel or rental property during the trip.

We did look at the possibility of renting out our house in Scotland while we were away but 3 months isn't a lot for a renter. So we left the house in the care of a friend who kept things like the heating and mail collection ticking over while we were away.

I did look briefly at house swapping but let's be honest, who wants to come to Glasgow for Christmas???

Working Pattern

The first week, I tried to maintain a 9-5 day to New Zealand time but quickly found this wouldn't work long-term. NZ is currently 13 hours ahead of the UK so when Kiwis are going to bed, the UK is generally starting the working day. This meant I had to be a little flexible in approach.

I adopted a pattern of working from 9am - 12pm with my US clients, while taking a few hours off in the afternoon to spend with Sarah and the kids (this generally meant heading to the beach a 10 minute drive from the house). I'd do some more work before dinner, break until 9pm and then catch up with UK clients on Skype and do some more for a few hours.

This isn't entirely different from the pattern I have at home. Working later at night generally means less distractions - although Twitter at night in NZ is obviously buzzing with UK friends so it was important to shut that down.

Work Environment

The fact we were at my parents did make the morning work sessions quite tough.

My parents have a large lounge and it was in that space that I setup my mobile office. My MacBook Air is my main machine but I did buy an Apple Cinema Display while I was there (I can't work on my laptop for prolonged periods as I get terrible head and neck pain).

Although the lounge was a good size, it was also the place where the family would congregate and so generally, there would always be "traffic" - regardless of what time of day it was. It did make it tough to concentrate at times (although my Bose noise cancelling headphones did make a wee bit of difference).

If we were to do it again, I think I'd make an effort to reach out to the local web community and find a better work environment. I did find a co-working space in Tauranga but they wanted me to sign a lease for the year which clearly wasn't an option, in hindsight I should have pushed harder to negotiate.

Money

This was a tricky one but was certainly made easier by my family living in NZ. Clients were continuing to pay by BACS to UK business account (although some were still paying by cheque which was a pain).

For the first few weeks, I was transferring funds from my UK account into an NZ account that I had opened 9 years previous. The fees (and transfer times) were beginning to sting us a bit and so we found ourselves using our VISA debit card which cost us around £1 per transaction. We did have another arrangement where I would transfer funds to my parents UK account and they would give us the equivalent in NZ Dollars.

We could have used a credit card but that wouldn't have agreed with our financial principals - but this is probably the most important thing to consider if you're aiming for a working holiday.

Balance

As I've already said, I tried to maintain a normal working pattern for the majority of our time away but I wasn't overly precious about taking if there was something we wanted to do with the kids or if Sarah needed a break (being pregnant and having kids who want to always be on the beach is tiring).

The important thing, like anything in life, is discipline. Knowing when I could drop some work and knowing when I had to power through. I counted circa 3 or 4 all-nighters but then, some of that was go-live days so they were certainly an exception.

Client Work

Undoubtedly, communication was the key factor here. I use ActiveCollab for projects we take through ghijk and we have some clients who use Basecamp. Using some form of project management tool is essential, particularly where there is a time overlap.

Generally this worked well and there were only a few instances where I had to wait for a query to be cleared up. I guess though this would vary project to project but I found as long as tasks are lined up for completion, it makes for easy development.

Social Life

This certainly suffered a bit. Granted we were there to spend time with family, sometimes you just need to connect with friends and hangout. I love my family dearly but there are tipping points of too much at times (and I know they felt the same).

Whilst we didn't socialise with friends, Sarah and I had much more time to connect than we would back home (but then we don't have alot of family around us).

Given how young our kids are (and the fact there's only 14 months between R&H) making friends wasn't really an issue and they generally kept each other amused. We did though notice a positive difference when we visited friends with kids of similar ages.

In Closing

We had a great time, probably the only time we'll get to do something like this (unless we opt to homeschool) but it has certainly reaffirmed our desire to leave Scotland for sunnier climes. Hopefully you'll find some nuggets of info here if you're looking to do something similar, and, as always, if there's something I haven't covered, just ask.