Full time employed remote, not freelance, so 40 real hours every week with meetings. Planning to be out for around two years. I want to be able to train properly, see the same faces more than once, and not spend every weekend on logistics. Everyone posting the exciting version seems to be doing a month at a time. Everyone I have met in person who has been doing it for years seems to be doing three.
One month is a holiday cadence being run at work volume, and it shows up in the boring things. You never get a dentist, you never finish a course of anything, you never have the same coffee place recognise you. The whole point of going slower is that ordinary life gets to exist alongside the travel.
Also visas. Three months is the shape most tourist entries are designed around, and a month at a time means you are constantly at the mercy of whatever the next country wants.
Hybrid worked best for me: a six month base with two or three one week trips out of it. I got more actual new places that way than the year I moved monthly, because the trips were real trips instead of relocations.
Dissenting mildly. One month works if your job is genuinely async and you like the churn, and some people do get bored at week five and start underperforming. It is not automatically the beginner choice. But with 40 hours of meetings a week I agree it is the wrong call.
Fair, though it is worth noting the people who thrive on monthly moves are usually the ones with no fixed meeting load. That is a different job, not a different temperament.
@wanderport · 8mo ago · 3 replies
Three months, and I would say that even more strongly for someone employed than for a freelancer.
The cost of a move is not the flight. It is roughly the last three days before you go, when you stop starting anything, plus the four or five days after, when you are finding a supermarket, a desk, a gym and a barber and none of your routines exist. Call it a working week and a half, every single time. At one month per city you are paying that eleven times a year, which is most of a working quarter spent on relocation admin, on top of a full time job.
The money argument points the same way. Almost everywhere, monthly rates drop hard past 28 days, often 30 to 40 percent under the nightly rate, and you can negotiate a further discount for three months paid in two instalments. One month stays are priced as holidays.
What I do now is three months in a base with a proper desk and a gym membership, and a long weekend somewhere else once a month. All of the variety, none of the churn.
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@secondhandamps · 8mo ago
A working week and a half per move is the number I was missing. Eleven of those a year is obviously insane when you write it down.
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@threefund_dana · 8mo ago
The gym membership detail is a decent proxy for the whole question. If your stay is too short to justify a three month membership, it is probably too short to build anything else either.
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