Virtual Office

Working within a "virtual office" has it's pros and cons. The biggest challenge that I find is the time difference. Amsterdam is 9 hours ahead of Vancouver and 6 hours ahead of Toronto. You can see in the pics that I have these two nerdy clocks. Green is Vancouver time; White is Toronto. What is the future like 9 hours ahead, you ask? All I can say is, if you have Google shares, now is the time to sell them.

I typically work a 2pm to 9pm shift plus "on call" duties, which actually works out pretty well because I have the morning / early afternoon to go about being an Amsterdammer. There are also advantages to the time difference. For starters, I am fully working when Toronto folks arrive at work, so I am able to help them out and hand off a smooth baton to Vancouver folks a few hours later. The height of nerdiness, however, was figuring out my phone situation. In order to get phone calls to a Dutch mobile phone, I figured out the following call forwarding chain:

Calls to my work # => Forwarded to my Vonage # => If no answer, forwarded to a Skype number (New York area code) => Instantly forwarded to my Dutch cell #.

Technically, setting up the virtual office was very easy. All I needed was a high-speed Internet connection, my laptop, webcam and my Vonage phone (and an old school pad of paper).

Kudos to my colleagues, especially in Vancouver, whose assistance and cooperation is making this little work-from-anywhere experiment a success! Heineken's are on me (and, of course, I live a stone's throw away from the main Heineken brewery).