Learning to work on the road
I’m not good at working away from my home setup. I like my Kinesis keyboard, my big flat-screen monitor, and even the convenience of an external mouse. I don’t really like working without them.
But I’m learning to deal with being away. For the last few days I’ve been sitting in talks at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. There’s wifi and the speed is quite good. So I sit here checking out code, writing and running unit tests, and generally getting a few things done. I’m also surprised at how easy it is to work but also keep one ear on the presentation. The most obvious manifestation is when a speaker asks for a show of hands – I am surprised to find my hand going up (or not), without my really being very conscious of what’s going on. Before I hear the question, I’d have thought I wasn’t really listening. But it seems that I am.
That’s all good. One reason I don’t much like going to conferences is that they’re mainly down time. The talks are not good enough or fast enough or don’t have enough content, so if you sit in one it’s often frustrating. But in a way, lightweight talks are good, because they let you work in parallel. And if the talk does happen to be good you can always pay more attention.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.