Hotel Quarantine is the New WeWork

5 Lessons Learned from Working a USA Job Remotely from Australia

We’ve all heard tales of how the pandemic has created new tribes of digital nomads pulling up a laptop from a beach, nursing a Pina Colada and working remotely from anywhere in the world. In this article, I want to share my own experience of working for a California employer from Sydney, Australia over the past seven months and offer tips for anyone contemplating doing the same.

First, here’s some context. My family left the San Francisco Bay Area in November 2020 to return to Sydney, Australia where my wife and I grew up. We had been away for 21 years in the USA and Asia. My employer, a Silicon Valley tech company, graciously agreed to let me continue to do my job remotely for as long as it worked and made sense.

Lesson one - Hotel Quarantine is the New WeWork

In case you haven’t heard, Australia now has a 14-day mandatory hotel quarantine program for all international arrivals. The thought of knowing we were going to be locked up in a hotel room with our young kids for two weeks gave us anxiety for months before. It’s luck of the draw which hotel you end up in too. You could be in a tiny hotel room with no windows. We ended up getting lucky. We scored a two bedroom apartment in Sydney at the Meriton Suites on Sussex. You can get food and groceries delivered but you are not allowed to leave the apartment for any reason. A guard in the hallway stationed there 24 hours a day makes sure of this.

But as it turns out, it was the perfect work environment. I was still jet lagged so didn’t have a problem working across the time zones. The wi-fi was great. As you couldn’t leave the room, there was very little to distract from work. When the folks in the U.S. started readying themselves for sleep (about 4:00 p.m. Sydney time) we’d have a couple of hours of family time playing games, taking turns DJing the music or just spending some time together.

Lesson two - Daylight Savings is Both a Friend and Foe

We arrived in November and I will forever remember those first few months as the golden period. When it was 6:00 a.m. in Sydney, it was 10:00 a.m in Silicon Valley. There were challenges, but for the most part I could organize my day around the time zones. It was possible to get up earlier, power through meetings, have some time to work on projects in the afternoon and end the day with a swim.

That changed a bit in March when California daylight savings started. 6:00 a.m. Sydney time became 11:00 a.m. in San Francisco. But not too bad. Then in April Australian daylight savings time ended. So 6:00 a.m. Sydney became 12:00 p.m. in California. Not the end of the world, right? 

But compounding the pain, increasingly my work was revolving around the U.S. East Coast. Even if I started work at 4:30 a.m. or 5:00 a.m., I would only have a limited window to interact with the East Coast. I started to compensate by beginning work at 10:00 p.m. Sydney time at the start of the New York City day. But there was no doubt about it, this whole juggling act was getting harder. Maybe if you’re living on your own and can just put down the blackout curtains during the day to sleep, you’d be fine. But as a father with two small kids, it was getting less sustainable.

Lesson three - Get Your Tech Toolbox Right

Do some research on this one. My philosophy was to make my international move as least of a burden to my co-workers and employer as possible. I kept my U.S. phone number as I wanted them to be able to reach me just as easily as before. I also didn’t want them having to fuss with international dialing and a new number. My T-Mobile phone was perfect as it allows free U.S. phone calls on a wi-fi network. As long as your wi-fi is solid, you’re good to go.

When we got out of hotel quarantine we spent a couple of months at my wife’s parents house. I quickly learned that their wi-fi couldn’t cope with the added burden of a serial Zoom remote worker plus a couple of kids on school holiday streaming Netflix and YouTube Kids. I was dropping out of video conferences mid-stream. Other times my connection was unsteady. I needed another solution.

I found that solution in a trusty Telstra wi-fi brick small enough to fit in my pocket. At around $50 a month I had all the bandwidth I needed to do videoconferences, make and receive wi-fi enabled long distance calls and appear and sound like I was within sight of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Lesson four - Embrace a New Way to Think about Work/Life balance

For a few months there, my work got really busy and the hours got even crazier. Even if I was in California it would have been crazy. I was the communications lead for taking our tech company public on the NASDAQ exchange. I started to do the occasional overnighter and get a couple of hours of power napping the following day. Then the overnighters became more frequent. Other times I’d get up in the middle of the night for a meeting then try to train myself to get back to sleep. I also learned quickly that if you called the same number twice you could break the sleep function. Apologies to my wife and kids for all the random incoming nocturnal calls.

During that time I learned to look at work life balance in a different way. Dividing a day up into neat packages of work and rest and family time was no longer possible. Instead I learned to make the most of a few hours of free time and treasure it. Saturday Sydney time is a work day (it’s Friday in California) but by Sunday afternoon I might have a few hours reprieve to take my son boogie boarding or go for a meal with the family. I learned to enjoy the window of time and make the most of it. Even though I was tired, I didn’t want to waste that time laying on the couch.

Lesson five - Think of it as an Adventure, not the New Normal

There’s no doubt some work patterns we’ve picked up during the pandemic will stick. We’ve shown that you can achieve a lot through working remotely and leveraging relatively inexpensive technology that would have been prohibitive a few years back. If, like mine, your circumstances have changed or if you want to just try the ultra long distance remote commute, think of it as an adventure, not as permanent. It’s not sustainable long term for everyone.

I’m so grateful to my employer for giving me this opportunity over the past few months. It’s helped create a softer landing during a time of so much change for our family. However, I’ve also decided it’s time for me to fully immerse myself in the country I now live in, Australia. So I recently made the difficult decision to move on and search for a big opportunity on this side of the planet. 

Sydney, it’s great to be home! And a huge thank you to family, work colleagues and friends for your support over the past few months.

Cameron Craig returned to Sydney, Australia in 2021 after many years in Silicon Valley and Asia. He is a communications professional with 20+ years experience working with companies like Apple, Visa, PayPal, Polycom and Yahoo! Equally adept at building communications functions from scratch at start-ups on the journey to becoming public companies. Former tour publicist for Johnny Cash. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Business Insider and Forbes. Follow on Twitter @Cam_CommsGuy

Open to new opportunities! cam100@me.com