How Skating Keeps Me Sane While Running Multiple Businesses Remotely

By Trevor Fenner | Updated 2026

There is a specific kind of mental fatigue that comes from running multiple online businesses.

It’s not the same as physical tiredness. You can sleep eight hours and wake up still carrying it. It’s the accumulated weight of open loops: campaigns that need monitoring, supplier relationships that need attention, content that needs to be written, students who need responses, clients whose results you’re responsible for, decisions that are waiting to be made with incomplete information. The cognitive load of holding all of that simultaneously is real and it doesn’t go away just because you step away from the screen.

I run Ecommerce Paradise, Electric Bikes Paradise, and Paradise Skate Mag from a laptop in Bali, working through the night on US hours while my wife and nearly twenty cats sleep. I’ve been doing this for years. And the thing that has kept it sustainable, more than any productivity system or tool or optimization, is skateboarding.

Not metaphorically. Actually skateboarding, a few nights a week, at Amplitude and around Bali, with a community of people who couldn’t care less about Google Ads or supplier margins.

Here’s why it matters more than I expected it to.

The Problem with Screen-Based Rest

When most people think about taking a break from work they think about switching from one screen to another. Close the laptop, open the phone. Stop reading business emails, start scrolling social media. Watch something on a streaming platform. These activities feel like rest because they’re less effortful than working, but they’re not genuinely restorative because they’re still consuming the same channel they’re supposedly resting.

The brain’s capacity for sustained focused attention is not unlimited and it doesn’t recover through passive screen consumption. It recovers through genuine disengagement: physical movement, different sensory inputs, activities that require a different kind of attention than the one being depleted.

Skateboarding provides exactly that kind of disengagement. When I’m skating at Amplitude, the kind of attention required is completely different from the attention required to run businesses. It’s physical, reactive, and present-focused in a way that analytical work never is. You can’t think about your Google Ads structure while trying to land a trick. The trick demands all of your attention or it doesn’t work. That complete reorientation of focus is not a distraction from the work. It’s what makes the work sustainable.

According to research from Stanford University on the cognitive benefits of physical activity, regular physical exercise produces measurable improvements in executive function, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, the exact capabilities most relevant to running complex businesses. The skate sessions are not time taken away from building better businesses. They’re part of what makes better business thinking possible.

What Happens to Business Problems When You’re on a Board

I’ve noticed a consistent pattern over years of skating alongside running businesses: problems that felt intractable before a skate session often resolve themselves during it or immediately after.

This is not mystical. When you stop actively thinking about a problem and engage your body in something physically demanding, the brain continues processing in the background without the interference of conscious analytical effort. This is the same phenomenon behind the common experience of solving problems in the shower or on a walk. The background processing that happens during physical activity often produces clearer thinking than the foreground processing that happens when you’re staring at a screen trying to force a solution.

Some of the clearest strategic decisions I’ve made about Ecommerce Paradise and my other businesses have come to me during or immediately after a skate session. Not because skating makes me smarter, but because stepping away from the problem gives my brain the space to work on it without the noise of conscious effort getting in the way. The clarity that follows a good session at Amplitude is one of the most reliable cognitive benefits of the whole routine.

The Community Provides Something Work Can’t

Running businesses remotely means working alone more than most people realize. Yes there are client calls and community interactions and supplier communications. But the actual work of building and managing online businesses is largely solitary. You and a screen, working through problems that nobody else in your immediate environment fully understands.

The skate community at Amplitude and around Bali provides something that the business world can’t replicate: a group of people who know me through something that has nothing to do with what I do for a living. At the skatepark I’m not the Ecommerce Paradise guy. I’m a skater of a certain level with a certain style working on certain tricks. The social dynamics are completely different from anything in the business context and that difference is genuinely valuable.

There’s a specific kind of social connection that comes from doing something physical with other people. Watching someone land something they’ve been working on for weeks and knowing exactly what that feels like. Getting encouragement on a line you’ve been afraid to try. The wordless communication of shared stoke when a session is going well. This is a different quality of connection than anything that happens in a Zoom call or a community forum and it feeds something that purely professional social interaction doesn’t reach.

Sometimes traveling skaters come through Bali looking to get footage and those sessions become something else entirely. Shooting for Paradise Skate Mag, skating spots around the island or in the streets, the kind of spontaneous creative collaboration that only happens when people who share a passion end up in the same place at the same time. Those nights are among the best I have in Bali.

The Physical Practice Is Its Own Reward

I want to say something that doesn’t often get said in the productivity and entrepreneurship world: not everything needs to be justified by its contribution to business performance.

Skateboarding is worth doing because I love it. I loved it before I built any businesses and I would love it if the businesses disappeared tomorrow. The fact that it also makes me a more productive, clearer-thinking, more emotionally regulated entrepreneur is a genuine bonus, but it’s not the primary reason I do it.

This distinction matters because a lot of people in the entrepreneurship space have a tendency to evaluate every activity by its return on time investment. If skating makes me more productive, it goes in the approved column. If it didn’t, it would need to be justified or eliminated. That framework is efficient and also deadening. It turns every moment of your life into a resource allocation problem and leaves no room for anything that’s just good because it’s good.

I skate at Amplitude a few nights a week because it’s one of the genuine pleasures of my life in Bali. The fact that it also keeps me sane while running multiple businesses is a happy alignment of what I love with what I need. But the love came first.

How the Schedule Actually Works

My work starts by 11pm at the latest and runs through to 7 or 8am, aligning with US business hours while Bali is asleep and quiet. The skate sessions happen in what is effectively my late afternoon and early evening: after I wake up around 5 or 6pm, have breakfast and watch the sunset with my wife, and before I settle into the work that carries through the night.

That positioning of the skate session is not accidental. It acts as a transition ritual between the sleeping-and-living part of my day and the working part. By the time I sit down at the desk after a skate session at Amplitude, I’ve been physically active, I’ve had genuine social interaction with people I enjoy being around, and I’ve completely reset whatever was left over from the previous night’s work. I start fresh in a way that going directly from the couch to the laptop never produces.

The sessions I film for Paradise Skate Mag have an additional layer of purpose that makes them feel even more satisfying. The skating itself is the point and the documentation of it is a creative output that I care about independently of the business value it might produce. Combining physical practice with creative documentation is one of the more satisfying things I do in Bali.

What I’d Tell Other Remote Business Owners

If you’re running businesses remotely and your entire existence outside of work is passive consumption, you’re building toward burnout in a way that’s difficult to see until it’s already happened.

The cognitive depletion that comes from sustained business building without genuine physical practice doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates quietly, showing up first as slightly worse decision-making, then as reduced creativity, then as the kind of flat emotional state where nothing feels particularly meaningful or engaging. By the time most people recognize it as burnout they’ve been running on fumes for longer than they realized.

Physical practice that fully absorbs your attention is the most reliable countermeasure I’ve found. Not exercise as a chore to get through before the real work starts. Actual practice of something you care about, that demands your full presence, that connects you to a community of people who know you outside of your professional identity.

Skateboarding is that thing for me. Surfing is that thing for some people. Martial arts, yoga, running, climbing: the specific activity matters less than the quality of presence it demands and the genuine love you bring to it.

The tools that make running multiple businesses from Bali sustainable on the logistics side: Google Workspace for keeping everything organized across teams and time zones, FreshBooks for financial visibility across businesses without the overhead of complex accounting, Wise for managing money across currencies as an expat. These reduce operational friction in ways that create more genuine space for the things that actually restore capacity.

But none of those tools is what keeps me sane. The skatepark is what keeps me sane. The sessions at Amplitude a few nights a week, the clips filmed for Paradise Skate Mag, the community of people who know me through something that has nothing to do with ecommerce: that’s the foundation.

Build the business. Protect the thing that keeps you human while you do it.

If you’re working on building the kind of location-independent business that makes this lifestyle possible, the free beginner’s guide at Ecommerce Paradise is the starting point. The masterclass covers the complete system. And the Ecommerce Paradise Community is where you’ll find people who understand what you’re building and why.

Trevor Fenner is the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, an education and services platform for high-ticket dropshipping entrepreneurs. He has been building location-independent ecommerce businesses since 2013 and currently lives in Bali, Indonesia.