When I reached out to Bithika she mentioned she was planning a personal experiment to mix travel, family visits with work across time zones. I had to learn more about that. Read her summer story below and learn about the good, bad and ugly of her personal experiment.
About: Bithika is part of the Digital Optimization team at Mayo Clinic, a healthcare organization based in the United States. Follow Bithika on LinkedIn
What did your summer look like?
I have been traveling and working during summer for the last two years. Last year, I traveled for three weeks within the US but this year I have really swung for the fences! I traveled to India for 6 weeks to meet my family after 3 long pandemic years. The leadership and my colleagues at Mayo Clinic have been extremely supportive of me working from a different time zone altogether. Indian Standard Time (IST) is 10.5 hours ahead of Central Time!
How did you come with this?
The pandemic made me realize how much I took traveling to my family for granted. We have also learnt that work can be done remotely. So, it was a good personal experiment to see if I can travel during summer and still work effectively. In my analyst roles in the past, I have worked internationally for a couple of days but mainly to send some reports or updates. However, as experimenters, we need to regularly interface with product managers, developers, designers etc which is the main challenge with working in a different time zone.
How did you set the experiment up?
I worked for roughly 3 weeks and vacationed the remaining time. I worked asynchronously for a few hours during the day and then would stay up at night to attend meetings. So, let me give you the good, the bad and the ugly of my experiment.
What was the ‘good’ part?
The best part was to get away for this long! The longest we have traveled at a stretch has been 2-3 weeks which has often felt too short and rushed. In these 6 weeks, I have managed to travel to 6 different cities, get a myriad of experiences, spend time with my family and attend a wedding. So, this trip felt more wholesome and helped us reconnect with our family.
I like that I won’t return to a sea of emails, messages and pending tasks. I also didn’t need to spend a ton of time figuring out back-up for my responsibilities since I worked and traveled intermittently.
Working asynchronously gave me good flexibility to plan my day.
What was the ‘bad’ part?
Working across timezones has been hard. Some meetings I attended were way past midnight and I was trying to catch up on my sleep over the next day or two.
I also had less flexibility in the evenings when everyone else got off work!
Being confined just to a laptop, I missed my work set-up back home. I also needed to be flexible with where I got space to work during my travels. Some were cool, others not quite. 🙂
What was the ‘ugly’ part?
There really wasn’t any. Being able to balance my time between work and family was wonderful.
I am in the last leg of my trip now, it has been amazing. I am grateful to my colleagues and the leadership at Mayo Clinic for supporting me and encouraging me to travel to my family, take time off to spend with them and draw the line.
Thank you Bithika, for sharing your summer stories.
