Lightbulb moment
On Thursday, October 13th 2016, while on a train, slowly recovering from a pub-based night out, I had an idea!
The idea is to take a train somewhere (unspecified) for four hours, have lunch, then take another train home. The train would be my 90mph office with scenery for those four hours in each direction, and I’d get to enjoy lunch somewhere new. I’d do a full days work with the view out the window constantly changing.
Like this, but for a longer period, and at a reasonable speed.
I chatted about it over Telegram with my good friends Will and Stuart, then mostly forgot about it for two years. Every so often the idea would perculate in my head again, but I didn’t action anything.
In 2018, the idea came back to me, and I posted a little thread on Twitter. I’ll collate the posts here in this blog post, and expand on it below.
I’m very lucky to have a job where I an pretty much work from anywhere there’s an Internet connection. For long chunks of the day I can probably even go without it, typing documentation, blog posts etc. But working from home means the same four walls all the time. A thread! ✍️
— Alan Pope (@popey) August 7, 2018
The idea
I’m very lucky to have a job where I an pretty much work from anywhere there’s an Internet connection. For long chunks of the day I can probably even go without it, typing documentation, blog posts etc. But working from home means the same four walls all the time.
Sure, I could go and work in local coffee shops, or use a co-working space nearby, but I’d eventually end up still looking at mostly the same four walls. I sometimes go to our London office, and often work while I’m on the train. So I had an idea.
Why not use the train as an office, rather than a means of getting to the office?! Trains are great. Most have fairly comfy chairs, air con, desks. On some lines there’s power sockets, often decent enough WiFi. They also take you to new places!
My idea was, once in a while :-
- Look for destinations from my home town that take ~3-4 hr by train
- Spend the morning working on that train journey
- Stop for lunch and a walk at the destination
- Get back on the train and work all the way home again!
Anyone tried this?
I think maybe one day a month is enough to test this out. Brighton looks like a good first destination on my journey. £28.50 off-peak day return. Might even get time to dip my toes in the sea while I’m there :)
I could go into London and out from another station, but I don’t like the idea of schlepping across town to other stations. Sounds too much like a real commute! :). Interested in hearing destinations suggestions for my new office journeys. Ideas for reducing ticket costs too!
I suspect I’d have to nope out of any online meetings on the day I’m travelling. Nobody on the train wants to hear me having hangouts/skype calls, and the other participants will quickly get narked if it drops
