I ended up doing two days of remote work during my holiday in Gran Canaria.

Some might say I’m a workaholic; I’d say for various reasons I am short of annual leave for 2025, so the chance to spend a full week out here without using up more than three days’ annual leave was too good to pass up.

Naturally, I had to bring my work laptop - which could be a problem if you work for an employer such as the UK Government which forbids you from taking such devices out of the country - and the time zone being the same here as at home helped.

I also bought an unlimited data eSIM from Holafly - for US$25 to cover six days, a bargain. You can’t count on hotel WiFi for serious business, as you might well find it blocks the VPN you are trying to use, or gets interrupted by a kid streaming two rooms down. To be fair, it seemed fine but I had no need to use it, and concentrated on giving the Holafly eSIM a proper beasting, shifting about 12GB of data, mostly in but some out, over two working days. It did break up my video call once, but other than that, worked as expected.

I also brought my travel monitor as I find myself a lot more productive with a dual screen setup. As such, I did my work from the hotel room with plenty of peace and quiet, apart from the ping and pong of table tennis taking place a few floors below. This also ensures access to plug sockets etc.

At a large hotel, I wasn’t too surprised that a few others were doing the same thing, but I was quite surprised to spot a couple of people with “obviously work laptops” aka slabs of Lenovo sitting out in the sunshine by the pool.

Maybe, maybe if you happen to be reading or indeed writing a large document or otherwise doing a solo task not involving meetings, this is a valid choice. I can’t help but feel, as a manager, that if I caught any of my team “working remotely” in such a manner, I’d consider it taking the piss. It’s certainly not something I’d let myself get away with.

Fortunately I was able to close the lid on work at a decent hour on the Tuesday and enjoy properly putting my feet up for the rest of the week. As an alternative to skipping the trip altogether, it was fine, but I’d rather avoid it in future if I can.