Online work styles: Low latency required?
I spent the last week-end touring Crete, and the subsequent week in meetings in beautiful Agia Pelagia. While everybody was longing for the breaks and evenings (you just can't not go for a swim there), a lot of us were fighting with Internet access: While nominally high-speed access was available in a number of places, the latency often turned out to be a killer. Using skype for a telephone conference (which I do pretty regularly while traveling) turned into a disaster, both concerning sound quality and latency; I did more than one conference call from my mobile, which I normally avoid like the plague for these things. Doing work on CVS was annoying and made focusing hard, since any update or commit would take ages. Going through list archives was almost impossible.
In the end of the day, I was much less effective getting my usual work done than I normally am while traveling. Without me having noticed before, my work style had become dependent not just upon having some Internet access, but upon having low-latency Internet access. I was surprised myself how badly I function in asynchronous mode these days.
I wonder if that's just how my personal work style evolved, or whether it's a more general effect? How do others deal with work in high-latency environments with spotty Internet access?
