There I was, lying down on my bed on a Saturday morning, thinking that I should get some work done. It has been the normal thing for me to do since, forever, to wake up early even on weekends, just because I don’t fancy sleep too much.

But my body keep pushing me away from gathering the momentum to start doing anything. I aimlessly walked around the house trying to find the comfort in the morning silence while everybody is still asleep. Too much time being wasted at that moment as I can’t seem to gather the energy to sit down and start doing thing on my Macbook. Stressed out with the situation, I decided to get out of the house.

My stomach was empty anyway, so I figured I could get an early lunch at the nearest coffee shop. I brought the Macbook along, in case I wanted to do something while waiting for my food. And there I was, typing codes and moving pixels at the coffee shop for hours. Everything seems so smooth. I managed to get most of the work done. The only thing that managed to stop me at the end is my Macbook’s battery life.

I realized it is just a matter of the surroundings. Sometimes it is not that we are lazy or too tired to do anything. But we are tired of the same environment, the same views, the same sound, the same vibe or even the same people sitting around us. One month ago, I gave us my desk at the office. I started going nomad. I change place almost everyday.

There is a standing desk with a big Cinema Display right next to the window. I’ll work there if bigger screen is needed, especially mocking up process that involves more than 1 person. Pair designing.

Contrary to my initial believe, having external monitor actually increases overall distraction – most of the time. I’ll get rid of external monitor and sit at any empty table when I want to get deep in the front end development process. With external display, we get more screen estate to load up more stuff – more unrelated-to-work stuff. And we keep moving our cursor around trying to control too many things at once. Thus the percentage of time that we spent to do work is already reduced.

I spend way too much time in front of my computer as I keep finding things to do. Therefore, having a much efficient way to make use of the time is important so that there’s always a big progress in whatever that I’m doing. For the time being, it seems like going nomad is one the methods that is working for me.