The beauty of inconvenience
The lesson I never saw coming was the beauty of inconvenience.
Running a company while sailing around the world isn't straightforward. For example, this was my office for a while: a café deck overlooking a narrow cut in the Rangaroa atoll, 250 miles north east of Tahiti.
Water flows out of the atoll as the winds chunnel inward, creating standing waves that a family of about 20 resident dolphins play and jump about in each day.
This office comes with coffee, a very nice freshly baked bread, and an occasional beer when I work through the afternoon.
It sounds idyllic I know but again, it's not straightforward.
The morning commute for most people involves hopping in the car and listening to tunes or talk shows on a calm easy drive.
Mine starts with hauling the dinghy down from the metal frame off the stern, dismantling the bivouac of lines used to store it at night, making sure to remember to put the plug back in so it doesn’t fill up with water.
This mistake has happened more than once: “oh crap, forgot the plug!”
Finally, there's the necessary sweet-talking of my outboard (named Coop) to start at least one more time.
In this bay, the commute to that cement dock has been dead into the breeze, making the trip quite salty, bouncy, and wet.
I have to protect my computer briefcase because salt water eats everything.
Upon approaching the dock, the engine is shifted into neutral so it drifts forward just enough so I can scooch to the front of the dinghy and lasso the cleat that is about four feet above water level.
Once tied up and Coop is shut off, there's a scramble off the front end of the inflated bladder without scraping shins, knees, and not dropping my computer into the drink.
This is my parking space.
The walk to the office café is a few blocks up a small road lined with small homes and huts, with locals to saying a kind ‘iorana’ (pronounced yorana, their lyrical Polynesian ‘hello’), and a little local store with fresh veg brought in only one time every two weeks.
I hang a right turn down a palm lined path to Josephine's, my temporary office.
Internet is 2 dollars per day, the coffee is French press, and the bagels are freshly made and delicious.
Making this odd routine work actually requires a strategic plan, and the key is to have categories.
One category is on-line time. At the café, all things that have to be done and transmitted electronically must get done then and there.
The other category is off-line time. Anything to be done offline must get downloaded there before trekking and clambering and splashing my way back to Amari again.
On one hand, not having infinite internet makes me crazy. Certifiable. My internal rant is a rambling runon sentence of spectacular frustration:
“seriously I have things I have to get done and that paper that document that report that everything and I can’t connect unless I’m here pounding java at Josephine’s? How is this okay???”
On the other hand, my saner self says to me that this kind of inconvenience is truly a good thing.
Whether that “inconvenience” is having to interrupt your love relationship with your phone in order to hang with the kids, to interrupt your infinity of work to-dos by going home with the fam, or by taking a second to sit on the back of your porch (or boat) and check out the stars with your person.
These inconveniences do punctuate the class-5 rapids of your daily life. And they chafe too, right up until the moment when you relax, remember what’s important, and realize what you left undone at home by being so productive at work.
So I have become a convert to "structured inconvenience" -- as a daily reminder of what matters.
Like strolling back to a temperamental outboard, bouncing back to Amari as dryly as possible, hauling up the dinghy, out with its plug, and then hanging out with this lovely night sky, its easterly breeze, and talking to my girls about their day.
