How to Work (and Survive) in Vienna

Getting my creative work done while on the road will always be delightful and challenging at the same time: Every new place has its own advantages and disadvantages, and it always takes some time to find out about them.

Having spent five weeks in Vienna now, I can honestly say that this is a great place to work, live and travel. Here’s why – and some thoughts on how to tackle your creative work in this marvelous city!

An Ode to the Coffeehouse

Wanna get things done in an elegant atmosphere with as much inspiring input and as little distraction as possible? Be sure to give the traditional Viennese “kaffeehaus” a try! While you’ll have to learn to decipher lots of weird coffee specialty names (Here’s the best dictionary I could find online!), you can spend a great couple of hours there among like-minded people, brainstorming a project or outlining your next writings.

In some of these coffeehouses, the age-old literary culture still is alive, and you can almost feel the spirit of writers like Arthur Schnitzler and Karl Kraus when you’re sitting at one of the small tables next to a window, contemplating your words while observing the bypassers or the elegant (and often entertainingly arrogant) waiters in their dress coats.

There’s no music to distract you, only the other guests around you talking in their strange Viennese dialect. And while the prices aren’t really cheap in the more central areas, it’s absolutely okay to just order one coffee and spend hours hanging around, reading newspapers or writing in your agenda. This may feel weird especially for Americans who are used to get thrown out of a place after finishing their meals or drinks – but it’s actually part of the coffeehouse tradition!

Cheap Connectivity

As it turns out, calling a German phone number from my Austrian cellphone is cheaper than calling a German phone number from my German cellphone from within Germany! ((To be more precise, it costs about nine times less to make the call from Austria! I should probably inform a cartel authority or something about that!))

Apparently, there are few countries with such a competitive telecommunication landscape as Austria. Plans offering 1000 voice minutes, 1000 SMS and 1000 megabyte of data will cost as little as 9 euros a month.

For short-term visitors, SIM cards and 3G sticks are inexpensive, easy to get and don’t even require any kind of registration.

There are also free wi-fi spots available in Vienna, like in the courtyard of the Museumsquartier.

One Golden Rule: No 11 oz. Schnitzels Before Work

Viennese cuisine is both tasty and heavy. If you want to explore it, better don’t plan to get much stuff done afterwards! Eating the largest schnitzel in the world or one of the inexpensive and yummy pizza slices that are for sale everywhere will hopefully leave you satisfied, but probably also a little too full to really focus back on your work once you’re done.

Talking about work and delicacies: What is great to let the work day phase out with some light writing or brainstorming are spritzers: White wine with sparkling water can be found everywhere; from the most deteriorated snack bars to the finest restaurants. (And, of course, in the coffeehouses!)

Don’t Get Yourself Killed (by a Car)

Vienna is probably one of the safest cities on this planet. It’s so chilled and relaxed you almost wonder if it can be for real. ((Until someone grabs your purse at the Naschmarkt, maybe… Yes, pickpockets are everywhere, even here!))

The only major danger seems to be the city traffic. Honestly, Viennese drivers are hands down the worst I have ever seen. Neither in Bogotá or Bangkok, Rome or San Salvador did I see as many traffic accidents as here! Apparently, everybody wants to get everywhere fast, so be sure to not stand in the way.

To move around, public transport is a great option. Subways, buses and cable cars serve the whole city and operate regularly during the day. At night, certain routes will close and you might have to wait a bit longer for “nightline” connections. A monthly ticket costs about 50 euros.

Sundays for Real

In most parts of the Western world, shopping hours aren’t really restricted anymore. Even in Germany, supermarkets will now often be open until 10pm or midnight. Things are different in catholic Austria, though, where it can be hard to even find an open restaurant on a Sunday evening in some parts of the country. While you will find lots of options in the more touristy areas of Vienna, planning ahead and getting anything you need before Saturday afternoon could be helpful, so you don’t have to starve.

This experience of a “real” Sunday has another notion, of course: It reminds us that while workdays may be for work, it’s also important to have days off, dedicated to leisure and idleness. Being in Vienna to get work done can be great, but being here to simply lay back and relax a little will always be an integral part of sustainable creativity, as the wise artist Michael Nobbs calls it.

Inspiration is Everywhere

Rarely have I been in a city as inspiring as Vienna. Just watching the people can be amazing: The public here is an interesting mix of old-established Viennese couples, snotty youngsters, immigrants from the Balkan States, Japanese tourists, struggling artists, new-rich opera-goers and impoverished bohemians.

Apart from that, is there anything they don’t have around here?

  • Baroque castles and parks? Check.
  • Ongoing intellectual discourse in coffeehouses, universites and beyond? Check.
  • UNESCO World Heritage sites? Check.
  • Major international organizations, like the UN and OPEC? Check.
  • Immigrant culture? Check.
  • Stunningly beautiful architecture ranging from classicist to modern? Check.
  • Well-deserved fame for music, fine arts, and theatre? Check, check and check.
  • All in all, one of the highest-ranking cities for quality of life worldwide? Check! ((Okay, I will be totally honest with you: I miss Ocean access and a more tropical climate. Especially in late October. And even more especially as I’m sitting here with an unpleasant cold! But then, this is how life is, and our heating is doing wonders!))

The Bottom Line: If you’re struggling with finding input for your creative work, taking a walk around Vienna will most likely provide you with the spark of inspiration you were waiting for!

Good Reads, Fast Breaking Edition

If you want to learn to appreciate food, try to eat nothing for a week.

I did this experiment recently when I decided to go on a fast for a week, reducing my food from three meals a day to one or two apples, and then to nothing but unsweetened tea and unsalted vegetable broth.

After all this time of traveling, after all these months on the road, after eating quite a bit of junk food and some pretty amazing uber-schnitzels (check this post by Earl Baron to get all the details!), I just felt the need to give my alimetary organs some rest. So I convinced my friend Rudi (whom I’m visiting here in Vienna) to join me for a cure.

Some interesting observations:

  • Not eating (for a couple of days!) is not as hard as it sounds. Even though I’m not a person to get hungry easily, I love to eat. But after not eating for a day or two, the hunger simply disappears. Sure, there is appetite when you pass some delicious restaurants on the street, but other than that, things were pretty much okay for me.
  • Energy levels stay higher than expected. I was still able to write and to walk around the city for most of the fasting days. While I got some withdrawal symptoms (like a slight headache, probably due to the lack of coffee), my body was feeling fine overall.
  • The environment matters. I was lucky to be here in quite a relaxed atmosphere – but fasting in the city probably isn’t the best thing to do. Next time, I would rather go to some quiet place somewhere in the countryside.
  • Mental silence. The sleep is amazing. So is just sitting on a couch. At some point, the body surely is exhausted, but the clarity of mind is astounding. I felt way less distracted, my mind way less cluttered during the fasting days than I normally feel. No more thoughts rushing through my head, just a state of calmness and tranquility. If you want to make some big decisions, fasting might be one way to find the peace of mind that you need.
  • Enough is enough. That said, the described calmness and tranquility is of course entirely dependent upon knowing that I could start eating again any moment I wanted. It’s hard to even imagine how much it must suck to not have enough food when you need it. On the fifth day of zero food, I awoke tired. It cost me quite a bit of effort just to leave my bed, and there was no way to even imagine having more of that broth. (Or more of that fasting tea, for that matter!) Instead, my body was longing for something fresh. So I decided to eat half an apple…
  • Food is a-ma-zing! …and half an apple was all it needed. Boom. As I chewed it – slowly, thoroughly – pure vital energy rushed back into my whole body. That apple tasted like paradise and damnit, my brain looooved the fructose! Funky colors everywhere… this is how an LSD trip must look like. That piece of apple provided me with enough energy to walk through half of the city, visit the Schiele exposition in the Leopold Museum for the second time, and even get some decent amount of work done.

Since then, I slowly started eating again. Everything tastes more intense than ever. I am more aware of the textures, the temperature, the spices of everything I eat.

Fasting has been an interesting experiment and was also probably a good preparation for experimenting with raw food at some later point.

Now, on to some of the great stuff I read during the last weeks (or months – it has been a long time without a new edition of Good Reads…)!

[¶]

I make it a personal rule never to do anything that I don’t really care about. It is surprising how much this cuts out. It sounds trite and obvious, but try it. Write down the three to five things in the world that you care most about – they could be people or causes or abstract qualities such as truth and beauty. I doubt that your car will figure on the list.

Richard Koch is at times a bit weird in this Boing Boing interview, but what he says about applying the 80-20 principle to time is certainly inspiring.

[¶]

Make it great, no matter how long it takes. There’s no such thing as too many drafts. There’s no such thing as too much time spent. As you well know, a great book can last forever. A great book can change a person’s life. A mediocre book is just commerce. (David Shank)

Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 23 Authors. This post was the rave a couple of months ago. If you haven’t seen it, here’s your second chance. And if you have, it’s worth another look!

[¶]

“I don’t usually have guests this deep.” – Crazy German film director Werner Herzog at The Colbert Report. Pure gold.

[¶]

Number 17 was, according to the bank officials, the most alarming one as it is achievable with no particular effort. Basically the student steals time. She shows how one can jam a banks activity up to a halt and at the same time bring along consistent losses of money.

Blasbichler’s Twentyone: An Austrian professor gives his architecture students the assignment to plan a bank robbery and then invites the bank representatives to an exposition presenting the results. As you might have guessed, number 17 was especially appealing to me!

[¶]

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

[…]

And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer.

Jonathan Franzen on going for what hurts. Such a good read.

[¶]

How do you achieve laser focus?
The single most important thing I do to “achieve laser focus and concentration” is to work in such a way that I don’t need “laser focus and concentration” to get my work done.
This has to be done the night before.
I always quit all online work at least 2 hours before bedtime and print whatever I’m working on.
Then I go into any other room with program listings, blank paper, and pens (especially red!) and plan out all of tomorrow’s work.
All analysis, design, and refactoring must be done at this time. I do not allow myself to sleep until the next day’s work is laid out. I also do not allow myself to get back onto the computer. The idea is to have a clear “vision” of what I am going to accomplish the next day. The clearer the better.
This does 2 things. First, I think about it all night (maybe even dream about it). Second, I can’t wait to get started the next day.
I always wake up and start programming immediately. Once I get going, it’s easy to keep going. Any difficulties are probably because I didn’t plan well enough the night before.

This is a free book for programmers by Ed Weissman. While I’m not a programmer, I still found much of his stuff to be extremely interesting and valuable. It’s more about philosophy and approaches to work and meta-type of stuff. Other people’s approaches to productivity can always be inspiring. Call me a nerd, but you still might want to check it out.

[¶]

As we consume food, we also consume information. Yet few of us make deliberate decisions on what kind of information to consume or how much. We do make unconscious, non-deliberate decisions though— we’re naturally drawn towards the opinions we agree with, whether it be through following our friends on twitter or the mass media we consume. We naturally avoid diversity in the news we consume— you won’t find many conservatives watching MSNBC or being fans of Keith Olbermann, and you’re not going to make any liberal friends happy turning on Glenn Beck in their living rooms.

You’re a happy vegetarian? Vegan, even? So why do you still consume all that junk food for your brain? Maybe it could be a good idea to go infovegan?

[¶]

So I did some more math. If I freed up one hour a day it would give me 365 hours. Broken into 8-hour days, that would give me 45 days of time. To do the thing I said I most wanted to do, but “just didn’t have the time.”

Together with Good Reads veterans Michael Johnston and Kirk Tuck, David duChemin is one of my favorite photobloggers. Here’s a post on finding time for stuff otherwise left undone.

[¶]

Once you’ve started, you keep it rolling. You can’t afford to have anything stop it.

How to write a book in three days. Wow. This would be like ten novels during NaNoWriMo!

Idleness is Everywhere!

Not Lazy. Not Procrastinating. Idle.

When doing my research for Productive Anywhere, I had the chance to interview Raam Dev, who is currently traveling around the United States, embracing a slower pace of life, writing, and deliberately living on a small budget. After finishing the interview, we talked a bit more about our observations and experiences within the work-fetishizing Western societies.

As it turns out, not being stressed and not being angry about our labor situation apparently makes us just as rare as people walking aimlessly through the forest.

The reactions from most people to this lifestyle are puzzled, sometimes even a bit unfriendly. Especially if I introduce myself as an idler, I’m simply seen as lazy or as a chronic procrastinator.

This made me think about how there is a difference between procrastination, laziness and idleness.

It’s maybe just a play with semantics, but for me, laziness is simply dead and sterile: You’re lazy after work because you don’t have any power left. You just feel exhausted, and you don’t want to do anything else, so you retract to your couch and TV.

If laziness is nothing but apathy, procrastination is the desire to escape from boring or gruesome work: You don’t want to do a certain thing, so you start doing something else. In this sense, procrastination is an “away from something”.

Idleness, on the other hand, is a “towards something”: It’s a movement to stop all movement. An invitation to fully be in the present moment. A moment to simply embrace life as it is. As such, being idle can become a part of the broader celebration of life I wrote about some time ago: It means saying yes to the world at large, and it means accepting that most things in life are – all in all, in the big picture – okay and wholesome.

That’s why I’m happy to be an idler. Fancy to join me?

Hell is a Second

If time is relative, the same may be true for Heaven and Hell. Many people think we are here for a reason: We are here to create something, to let something out that’s already inside us, to “become who we are”. So here’s a thought: Depending on how good we manage to do that, and in how far we manage to live life in agreement with our real selves, we could be able to build either Heaven or Hell with our very own hands. Sounds weird and woo-woo? Of course it does, as so often when entering the realms of life and death and time philosophy!

“So… where exactly did all the hours go?!”

It seems that time never runs as fast as when we’re happy, in love, having Prosecco with wonderful people, or merely feeling really well-entertained.

But the hours can also pass slower than a snail on a honey trail. Just think about the last time you lay awake with a toothache, spending what seemed like an eternity tossing and turning, only to notice that a mere 30 minutes of “real time” had passed since the last time you looked at your alarm clock. Then, think about those horribly slow minutes the next day, when your dentist drilled without anesthesia. (You still hear the noise of that drill, don’t you?)

Interestingly, the same thing happens precisely when we’re not suffering from insomnia, namely in our dreams. As visualized by Christopher Nolan in his 2010 movie, Inception, dream-time is slower (or faster, depending on your viewpoint) than “real time”. Consequently, we can spend what feels like days of action in just a single night of sleep. This feels even more amazing when we experience epic stories in a mere 5-minute afternoon nap.

…

Now, you’ve possibly read or heard about near-death experiences (NDEs) at some point. NDEs are like dream-time on steroids: During these experiences – the tunnel, the light, maybe some spiritual entity calling you – people will often wander through their whole life again.

Even though the “real time” length of such an experience is a mere couple of minutes at most, people will revisit their most stunning successes and their most disturbing failures during this time: “What I have thought and felt in these five to ten seconds, it’s not possible to express in ten times as many minutes,” as one person remembers.

During NDEs, people will confront their angels and demons, remember people and places, and re-live childhood memories they almost had forgotten. ((In fact, they might just have buried them under a bunch of other stuff. Brain scientists and mystics alike suggest we might never really “forget” anything at all – we just lose the keys to access it.))

Heaven and Hell

So this is the near-death experience.

What comes after it, we cannot know. So far, no-one has returned from anything later to tell the story. ((Good old J.C. probably did, but he wasn’t really talking time philosophy and stuff. And maybe even all of us keep coming back for karmatic reasons, but we generally don’t seem to remember the details of our past lives – and much less so of our past deaths.)) So where do all the stories of Purgatory, Heaven and Hell come from?

If we die, chances are that’s it.

Probably, it all ends there: No after-life, no paradise, no shaking hands with Saint Peter.

Actually, this is nowadays the most popular hypothesis.

But maybe, at the same time, all the religious, spiritual and mystical traditions telling stories about the after-life, crossing the river of Death, Heaven, Hell and Judgment Day are still right!

Maybe, this last moment of heightened awareness, of illuminated super-consciousness we hear about from the people coming back from near-death experiences is precisely that: Heaven, Hell, or anything in between. And: An eternity. An eternity that’s not graspable for any of us mortals who are still on “this side”, living in “real time.”

An eternity that is, nonetheless, as real as it gets for the person taking the ride.

If that’s true, Hell is a second.

And, no pun intended, it’s a hell of a second: It’s the second where we get the bill for everything we did or did not do in our lives – regrets and happiness and worries and feasts and mistakes and all.

The bill for all the lose ends.

The bill for all the questions never asked. For all the answers we didn’t want to recognize. For following our bliss, or for ignoring it. The bill for confronting our fears, or for trying to bury them.

In this second, anything could happen. And, probably, everything we could imagine will happen: All the thoughts, all the questions, all the matters unsolved.

  • Why did you stay in that job?
  • Why did you beat your wife?
  • Why didn’t you have the guts to publish that novel?
  • Why didn’t you convince your husband to visit Paris?
  • Why didn’t you explore the rabbit hole the universe had prepared for you?

What looks for an outsider like a single last breath could as well be a thousand times a thousand years of agony for the person who’s living it.

If nothing else, Hell is a second.

But – and of course you were thinking about this all the time – so is Heaven.

Heaven is a second.

Paradise is a second.

Eternity is a second.

And again, anything could happen:

  • Yay for building that house!
  • Yay for giving love to that person!
  • Yay for daring to take that trip!
  • Yay for not freaking out about small beer!
  • Yay for not getting lost in distractions!

If there has ever been a good reason to confront our demons, embrace our angels, tackle our problems, put our lives into order, and make our dreams real, maybe it’s this: Make that last second count! It could last longer than we think.

A Slow Revolt

And then came the day when some of us understood that all we had known about time was wrong. It’s not precise, it’s not objective, it’s not limited. It’s not about being first, outrunning others, or even getting somewhere faster.

This was the day we would just drop out and start to live life at our own pace. Because our own pace was the only thing that mattered: Some of us would go faster, speak faster, think faster; others would go slower, speak slower, think slower.

We noticed that time and speed are much more personal than we had ever thought: It doesn’t matter which measurable speed you attain, but how you feel about it personally. If you run a marathon in 2.5 hours, then it’s 2.5. If it is eight hours, then it’s eight. Even if you take the shuttle bus just to attend the after-party, people will cheer. ((I did that in Berlin, recently.))

The machine didn’t like to see these thoughts. Because big systems don’t seem to work well when everybody moves at their own pace. Just think of highway traffic.

But while some of the people around us gave in and lost their pace of life, we didn’t.

We didn’t let them distract us.

We just opted for our own speed, and, in that sense, we became anarchists. Not of the kind that throws bombs and burns cars. But of the kind that takes responsibility for their own lives and their own speed and their own time, and of the kind that create their own rules that serve them while not harming others.

This is the nature of friendly anarchism, and it’s the essence of living life at tempo giusto. In other news, it looks as if light just became slow. Astounding, and yet another proof.