remote work

Lead, Travel, and Remote Work

Posted on by Irina Papuc

If you ask me, working remotely rocks. I’m currently writing from a small beach bar located on a remote island in southern Thailand. Looking up from my laptop, I see nothing but the endless ocean and its crystal clear blue waters. I’ll be enjoying this morning undisturbed and focused on my work because the rest of the team hasn’t even gotten up yet. Time zones work out really well for distributed teams.

My colleague Thomas recently talked to 11 thought leaders in project management about the impact of remote work on a company; some scrum experts argued that distributed teams could work together effectively while others came out strongly against it.

I understand the concerns; you can’t just open up the office doors and release everyone into the wild. It’s not guaranteed that you’ll end up with a thriving business. Marissa Mayer at Yahoo famously axed remote work in 2013 after feeling that some employees abused it.

So how does a tech company get this working remote thing right? Read on. The following is based on our story at Planio and how we made it work.

The author, Jan Schulz-Hofen, working remotely on an island beach.

Enter Planio, my remote company

There are a number of things which motivated me to start my current company. Breaking away from client work while retaining all the benefits of being a location independent freelancer was one of them.

In 2009, I was sitting in the shadow of a cypress grove situated in a beautiful Mediterranean-style garden overlooking the rolling hills of Tuscany, working hard on a new side project of mine: Planio.

It’s a project management tool for people like me: developers. Planio helps make client projects more organized and transparent all while reducing the number of tools and platforms needed to do the job. Planio is based on open-source Redmine (an open source Ruby on Rails-based software project), which I’ve used remotely with my own clients since its very beginnings. So, in a way, remote work is already in Planio’s DNA.

Fast forward to today, and my small side project has grown into a real company. We’re a team of 10 now, serving more than 1,500 businesses worldwide. We have an office in Berlin, but many of us work remotely.

In this article, I’ll dig into the principles, tools and lessons that have helped us along the way. After reading it, I hope you’ll be able to architect your software company so it’s remote-friendly right from the start.

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” – Linus Torvalds

Every Thursday we have an all-hands conference call where we discuss what we did the previous week and what’s coming up next.

At the beginning, we spent a lot of time discussing ideas before deciding on what to do, but we found that it’s a lot harder when some team members are on a poor quality telephone line and you can’t see them.

Now, we often just “build the thing” and then discuss it – we create a working prototype with a few core ideas and then discuss that. For instance, we recently hit some performance issues with our hosted Git repositories. Instead of discussing and analyzing all the possible ways in which we could potentially save a few milliseconds here and there with every request, my colleague, Holger, just built out his suggested improvements in a proof-of-concept on a staging server to which we directed some of our traffic. It turned out well and these ideas are going into production.

This method focuses everyone’s minds on action rather than talk. The time invested in writing code is paid back by less time spent talking in circles.

Use Text Communication

Real-time communication punishes clarity. Instinctively calling a colleague when you need something is very easy, but it’s not always your best course of action. I can’t remember the number of times I’ve started writing an email or a Planio ticket for a problem only to solve it myself just while writing it down.

Zach Holman, one of the first engineering hires at GitHub, agrees: “Text is explicit. By forcing communication through a textual medium, you’re forcing people to better formulate their ideas.”

Text communication also makes you more respectful of each other’s time, especially when you’re living multiple time zones away. Immediate communication can be disruptive; the person might be in the middle of figuring out why the last deployment went wrong. With an email, s/he should be able to consider your write-up at a more convenient time.

Be as Transparent as Possible

Time spent worrying about office politics isn’t conducive to shipping working software, and transparency promotes trust. It’s no coincidence that many remote-by-design companies, such as Buffer, have radical transparency. In the case of Buffer, it shares revenue information and the salaries of all its employees.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, also emphasizes transparency. In his book, The Year Without Pants, Scott Berkun shares his experience working remotely for Automattic, and that all decisions and discussions are internally available to employees in its P2 discussion platform as part of its emphasis on transparency.

The chat feature in Planio works in a similar way. Discussions are open for everyone to see and chat logs are linked automatically from the issues discussed so nobody is left out; even new hires can read up on what previous decisions were made and why. When I started building the chat feature, I considered adding a feature for chatting privately with others, but when we discussed it as a team, we ended up leaving it out because we wanted to keep team communication as transparent as possible.

I think transparency is critical for remote teams. For example, imagine you’ve just joined a team of remote developers. Perhaps you’ve never met your new colleagues. You don’t know the unspoken rules of behavior. You might be worried about whether you’re doing a good job. Are your teammates actually being sarcastic or do they really mean their compliments? Is everyone privately discussing how good of an engineer you are?

Digitalize Your Systems

We choose our services based on what they offer by way of online platforms, from telephone providers to banks (many of them will even offer a small financial incentive for going paperless, plus it’s great for the environment, too). I’m lucky to have a lawyer and an accountant for Planio who are comfortable sending emails or messages with Google Hangouts instead of summoning me to their offices. (I strongly recommend you ask about this at the first meeting.) Bonus points for getting them to sign up with your project management tool and become a part of your team!

We’ve even digitized our postal mail; at Planio, we use a service called Dropscan that receives our letters, scans them and forwards the important ones to the appropriate person. You don’t want to your friend to pick up and read them out over Skype. If you cannot find a mail-scanning provider for your city or country, some coworking spaces offer virtual memberships to maintain a physical mailing address while you’re away.

For those companies sending out mail, there are services available so that you never have to visit a post office again. We use a German printing company with an API that automatically sends a letter along with stickers to each new paying Planio customer. It’s something people love, and we don’t have to print and mail a thing. International alternatives include Lob and Try Paper.

Digitalize Your Systems

Should You Have a Digital Presence Mandated?

In a co-working space on the tropical island of Koh Lanta, Thailand, I noticed that someone in a support role for a major e-commerce platform was constantly on a live video feed with the rest of the team. Sqwiggle offers a similar “presence” functionality for remote teams.

I suppose mandating that all employees are on video while working might be based out of a fear that employees abuse remote work arrangements. In my experience, that’s not the case. At the tropical co-working space, there’s a certain urgency in the air, despite the laid-back clothes and coconut drinks. People are quietly focused on their laptops; it’s as if they want to make sure remote work delivers results, so they can stay out of a fixed office for good.

We found that we don’t need a digital presence because we have a great level of trust among everyone on the team. I also think that it’s paramount to respect everyone’s privacy. If your company is moving from an all-on-site setting to remote work, a digital presence might help the more anxious managers to overcome any trust issues.

Choose Bootstrapping over Venture Capital

Most venture capitalists are looking for outsized returns, so they’ll prefer an intense short burst of 12-months’ work from a team over a more sustainable pace. Front App, a startup funded by the Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, rented a house in the Bay area for their three-month stint in the Y Combinator accelerator program. The goal is to optimize for evaluating a business idea quickly.

Given the outsized return mindset, you may have a hard time convincing a venture capitalist to fund you when you’re working from a beach in Cambodia. This is why many venture-backed startups (such as Buffer or Treehouse) that use remote work built leverage first. Buffer was profitable before taking on investment while Ryan Carson, the founder of Treehouse, had already proven himself with a previous startup.

Here’s a better way than venture capitalism: bootstrapping. It means financing your company with revenue from initial customers. In my opinion, it’s by far the superior approach because it enables you to build your company on your own terms and remain in control. However, it often requires working two jobs or freelancing on the side while you get your company started. It took me about two years working on both Planio and client projects (via my software development agency LAUNCH/CO) to get going, but it was well worth it.

Bootstrapping also forces you to build a business that generates revenue from the very beginning, which I find much healthier. Hint: Building a B2B SaaS makes this much easier than creating a consumer app because businesses are far more willing to pay monthly subscriptions if it adds value. You have to sell a lot of consumer iPhone apps at $0.99 to cover monthly payroll for even the smallest of teams.

Choose Bootstrapping over Venture Capital

Bootstrapping forces you to build a business that generates revenue from the very beginning.

Price your Products Strategically

One of our first clients was a massive technology company with billions in annual revenue. Obviously, I was delighted that they’d choose us over much bigger, more established competitors. They’re still a happy customer, but we have moved away from very large enterprise accounts; I’ve found that they require a lot of hand-holding and in-person meetings before they’ll become a customer.

As Jason Lemkin points out in his article on scaling customer success for SaaS, when you have big enterprise accounts, someone will have to get on a jet to visit them twice a year. If you’re a small company of two or three people, that person is going to be you, the CEO, the CMO and the CSO all rolled into one overworked hamster.

Keeping your pricing model within the rough bounds of a $49/$99/$249 model as suggested by developer-turned-entrepreneur Patrick McKenzie means avoiding having to hire an enterprise sales team, and having to earn the massive amount of capital required for it. You, the customer, don’t expect the CEO to pop in at Christmas with a box of chocolates when you’re paying $249 a month.

Build on Open Source

A venture-backed business based on proprietary software is great when your play is a “Winner Takes All” game and own the market. When you’re a bootstrapped company, open source software can give you reach and leverage you could never have achieved, otherwise.

There’s precedence of profitable tech companies building a business around open source software; Basecamp famously open-sourced Rails, guaranteeing themselves a supply of highly qualified engineers for the rest of eternity. GitHub has become a unicorn, leveraging the open source project Git that Linus Torvalds started to manage the Linux kernel sources. Our friends at Travis-CI started as an open source project, ran a crowdfunding campaign and then turned it into a remote-focused bootstrapped business (which also campaigns for diversity in tech through its foundation).

Planio is based on Redmine and we contribute many of our features and improvements back to the community. This works great in multiple ways; our contributions and engagement in the community help advance the open source project and Planio gets exposure to potential new customers. For us, it’s the most authentic way to build a brand; by showing our code and taking part in open technical discussions, we can demonstrate that we know our stuff!

Hire Proven Professionals

Hiring a fleet of interns every year makes sense only if you’re intent on scaling up your employee count as soon as you hit the next round of funding.

Outsourcing tasks is easy if it’s copy-and-paste, but you don’t want to outsource your DevOps to someone with the lowest hourly rate when you have thousands of customers relying on your servers. You’ll want proven professionals, such as those at Toptal.

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of the popular open-source blogging platform WordPress, stated that by focusing on quality means that his company, Automattic, predominantly hires experienced candidates who can handle the unstructured working environment of a remote company.

That means it “auditions” candidates by paying them to work on a project for several weeks, then hire them based on performance. Automattic has found this method is far more effective in finding the right candidates than traditional CVs and cover letters.

Emphasize Quality of Life

Work takes up a massive amount of our time, year in and year out. It should not be something that you just do to be done with; you’d probably end up wasting a huge chunk of your life. The best source of motivation and the main ingredient for great results is a work environment that’s inspiring, enjoyable and fun. Travelling, learning and engaging with people from different cultures makes work feel less of a sacrifice or necessary evil (at least in my life) than when working a nine-to-five office job.

Emphasize Quality of Life

Work takes up a massive amount of our time, year in and year out. It should not be something that you just do to be done with.

It’s not just about travelling the world, though, there’s the personal freedom aspect. Parents get to spend more time with their kids, thanks to avoiding a two-hour commute. You don’t have to live in Silicon Valley to earn San Francisco wages. Maybe, your significant other gets a great job opportunity abroad, too. You’re not faced with the painful choice between staying at your job and continuing your career or becoming a “trailing spouse” with limited career options.

At Planio, even though many of us work remotely, we all try to meet up at least once a year in a fun location. Last year, we spent a few weeks of summer in Barcelona, and several of us met here in Koh Lanta, this year. I’m still looking for ideas for the next destination, so let me know if you have any travel tips!

What tools, ideas or techniques have you found that make working remotely easier and more effective? Leave a comment below.

This article is from Toptal.

Digital Nomads Can Manage Teams, And Manage To See The World

Posted on by Irina Papuc

You always read about those individuals who travel the world, freelancing their tanned asses away, enviously concluding that it is easy for them; they must be alone and well off, while you have a spouse and a dog, or a kid or two, along with a whole team of people working with you. You can’t imagine how it would even work if you didn’t come to the office every day and have your daily stand-ups with the team, and then have lunches together and gossip about the latest developments in the endless iOS vs Android battle, debated in comments beneath a Techcrunch article.

OK, if you have a kid and a dog (or maybe a cat), I agree you might have a few more obstacles to overcome, and in the end, digital nomadism might not suit everybody, although, nothing is impossible when you really want something, right? Besides, you might not like moving that much and going through the ordeal of adapting to a new culture and new sets of rules. Or, on the other hand you might get so distracted by all these new, exciting things and forget that you actually need to work your 8 hours a day, and not just roam the streets, exploring.

Digital Nomads Working

Anyone who has ever worked from home knows that you get shedloads of work done without constant interruptions. However, many bosses still view remote work differently. Even if you really are at the beach, chances are you are super focused and productive, inspired by the waves and the sun. If conditions around you are relaxed and calming, isn’t that the best situation for doing a super neat job? Not to forget that you might even feel a bit guilty that you are having it too good in your life, so you put more effort into your work, to compensate for not being with your team.

If you are not there yet (at a beach, that is), this article is for you. It explains how you can also achieve the luxury of working while traveling the world in four easy steps, as a freelancer or as a part of a team, maintaining the same level of communication and productivity.

A Change Of Pace Often Helps

Some people like the known and predictable. They freak out when their daily routine gets disrupted. But, I’ll bet if you are doing any kind of creative work like programming or design, you are not one of those people. You like humanity’s evolutionary advantage of being able to adapt to new circumstances and actually get a kick out of it.

  • Remove yourself from toxic environments and into working remotely. Your sanity will thank you, even though clients will be demanding.

Ordinary day-to-day office work will kill you. It will eventually strip your motivation, creativity or flare for what you do. I’ve been there. It’s not that you don’t like your job, your colleagues or your office, it’s just that you don’t like it every day. You are a creative being and you strive to gather new experiences, learn new things, get inspired by new situations, new people, and new cultures. Two weeks of vacation a year just doesn’t do it. The good news is that you don’t need to be on vacation to travel or to change your daily routine.

  • Think no-one wants a remote worker? Ask any of the many freelancing sites what they think about that!

I know, I know. Your current job is your safe place. You don’t have to worry about anything. You don’t have to put yourself out there and find work yourself. Your bosses are doing that for you. They are taking care of operational stuff and making sure that you get your paycheck. The step of quitting and finding clients yourself seems as terrifying as Mount Fuji spewing lava all over you. Besides, you know your mother would throw a fit if you came to her with such nonsense ideas. If you like to play it safe, then you should definitely take a gradual approach. Try it out by doing some side jobs via one of the freelancing sites and see where it takes you. See if you are able to fight your own battles, bake your own bread, sleep with the wolves, and so on. If you manage to gather a team, even better. There is strength in numbers, and you will be able to find and complete jobs quicker.

Technology Makes Remote Work Efficient And Affordable

  • Technology, nowadays, provides everything you need as long as you have a good internet connection. There are no excuses left.

There is Skype, and Slack, and Viber, and Hangouts, and a myriad of other tools designed to make your life easier. There are tons of collaborative tools, project management tools, and virtual conference tools. You just need to pick the ones that best suit you and your team and voila! You are ready to go anywhere in the world there is a reasonably stable internet connection.

It is true that many things get solved and clarified faster when you are sharing an office with your team, but even if you are 2,000 miles away, you are just a video call away. I do believe that it is important to be able to look at a person, not just hear their voice, especially when important discussions are in order. For more routine meetings, or short questions, you can still use chat. You will be even more efficient because if you are in the same office, you would ask that question, thus interrupting everyone. But remotely, you ping your colleagues on Slack and they can quickly reply.

Here is a useful link with a list of top tools for remote workers.

  • No, you don’t have to win the lottery to travel.

You usually read about couples (even with kids!) who sold all their belongings and hit the road. They sold their house, their car, their furniture, even little Suzie’s teddy bear! I never cared much for such radical moves, which seems to be more common for people from in North America. We Europeans seem to be more in touch with our roots and rarely decide to leave everything behind; perhaps most Europeans who were in the mood to leave everything already emigrated to the Americas.

This doesn’t change much in the scheme of things. You might like the place you live, but still want to see the world. There may come a time when you’ll want to settle, so you might not want to sell your condo or your grandma’s house by the sea. Good. You shouldn’t! You can rent your apartment while you travel. If you fall in love with another place and decide to settle there, you can take care of your affairs later. Basically, if you have real estate, it can be a huge bonus in becoming a citizen of the world.

Recently I tried house swapping and that was the best discovery. I live in Zagreb, Croatia, but thanks to house swapping sites, I spent a month on Bali. We had a house to ourselves, all for free, pool included. These were some crazy times, I tell you. So, if you own real estate, try that and maybe save a small fortune. Also, traveling to countries with lower relative incomes is a good idea. There is a reason why Asian countries are the top choice for many digital nomads.

Good Management And Work Ethic Will Get You Anywhere

Having written all this, you probably noticed that I couldn’t decide whether to focus on freelancers or on remote teams. I believe all I’ve said applies to both, plus it applies whether you would be traveling alone or with your significant other.

You may also have noticed I didn’t make any difference between pure remote working, and remote working as a digital nomad. The only difference (admittedly, not a small one) is your location and how often you change it. Speaking of that, maybe we should redefine what a home is? Is home where your laptop and charger are? Add to it a WiFi connection you named, and you can definitely feel at home. Is home not a place, but a feeling? I’d agree with that.

I am not a freelancer. Sure, I get clients from Toptal sometimes, but I am actually the CEO of Mašinerija, a small shop developing mobile and web applications. Still, running a company did not prepare me to be location dependent. Managing my team and projects isn’t much different when sitting with my team in the same office or halfway around the world. I still get a business analysis of requirements the same way. I still discuss obstacles with my team the same way. I still plan tasks and delegate the same way. A project can easily fall apart having your teammates sitting across the room if you don’t communicate with each other often and thoroughly, and if you don’t organize your work well.

Productivity has nothing to do with miles, locations, or time zones.

You can be a full-time digital nomad, hopping around the world for several years, working remotely for your clients, or you can stay put and have clients many miles away and do your work for them remotely. You can be a sporadic digital nomad, as I am, meaning that sometimes I work closely with my team in our Zagreb office, or I manage my team remotely. Our clients reside in UK and US, so, for our clients, it doesn’t really make a difference whether I travel around or stay put. There is a time zone issue, but that can be managed with good organization.

There are a few things you will do differently as a digital nomad than as a home/office-stay remote worker. When traveling, you need to be practical, you need to think about SIM cards, internet connections, power outlet compatibility and reachability, so there is some planning involved, but hey, not that much different than planning a vacation! There is plenty of good advice from traveling digital nomads. I’ll help you with the first link, and you should try googling for more.

So, there there are no excuses left for keeping your butt in your comfy office chair, longingly looking at your friends’ photos from faraway places. The only thing you really need for this endeavour is good health. Even partners come and go (well, it’s the truth!), but good health takes you places. And when in bad health… who wouldn’t like to be in a familiar place with loved ones taking the pain away. On the road, it might not be easily accessible. But not to invoke bad things, let me get back on track. Let me remind you why you shouldn’t put this decision off anymore! We – developers, designers, marketers, managers, basically anyone who can get their work done on a laptop – live in a digital era in which the world really is our oyster. Since my team is working remotely with clients anyway, I realized that my physical location doesn’t mean anything, not with today’s tools and means of communication.

The only regret I have now is that nobody told me sooner about remote working. If you follow the above listed rationales, I’m sure it won’t be long before I meet you somewhere along the way. For me, the next stop is London.

Potential Remote Work Issues for Digital Nomads

While I am an advocate of remote teamwork and digital nomadism, I have to conclude on a cautionary note: It’s not for everyone.

A lot of people find travel stressful enough, without the added burden of having to work 8 or 10 hours a day. Many others may find their productiveness goes down when the are in perpetual tourist mode, so to speak.

A nomadic lifestyle can also have a negative effect on personal relationships. While an extrovert full-time nomad will get to meet a lot of interesting people, there is no substitute for having a social safety net comprised of friends, family and colleagues.

This of course, is entirely subjective. Some people are bound to enjoy the new, nomadic lifestyle, made possible by technology. Others may not cope with it nearly as well, or may not be interested in spending year after year travelling the world, because they miss the comforts of home.

This article was written by Lora Plesko, a Toptal web designer.

Productivity On The Road: Work Full-Time, Travel Solo, Have Fun

Posted on by Irina Papuc

I’ve traveled solo while working full-time for ten-plus months, across more than 15 countries. It’s one of the most fun and rewarding things I’ve ever done. My work breaks over the past year have included things like scuba diving in Belize, polo lessons in Buenos Aires, music festivals in Hungary, and more.

Working full-time while on the road is not easy, but it’s definitely a skill that can be mastered over time.

For those interested in the nuts and bolts of how to travel while working, there are already several great articles out there explaining how it’s done. If you’re not familiar, I recommend starting with Toptal COO Breanden Beneschott’s guide.

In terms of logistics and planning, pulling off a full-time work schedule while on the road is much easier and cheaper than you probably think (at least in my experience), and the infrastructure for doing so continues to grow rapidly.

However, the following problem is far more difficult to solve, especially when traveling solo: Can you fully enjoy your travels while not sacrificing the quality of your work?

Striking The Right Balance

Can you navigate travel logistics, work full-time, and take care of yourself physically and mentally, all while setting aside enough time to explore the places you’re visiting, find fun things to do, and meet new people?

Since you won’t have much of a support system when you’re alone in a foreign country and (usually) don’t speak the language, finding the right balance is critical. Your routine has to be sustainable in the long run, and if you aren’t careful, things can go downhill in a hurry.

As I’ve been traveling, I’ve gotten a lot of questions from friends and colleagues about the psychology of this lifestyle, including everything from how to avoid loneliness to how to maximize productivity.

It’s not for everyone, but this lifestyle can be both incredibly fun and extremely productive, provided you figure out how to do it in a way that works for you. As I’ve traveled, I’ve noticed some key habits, mindsets, and tricks that are important for anyone who is considering working and traveling to keep in mind, regardless of their occupation or interests.

This post covers some of the most important strategies I’ve picked up while on the road.

Go To X To Do Y

When you have the option of living anywhere, it can be difficult to choose a destination, and going to places to see/do touristy things can get old fast. I’m a big fan of going to places to do specific (non-touristy) activities, as opposed to just going to places that sound interesting on paper.

In the past months, I’ve gone to:

  • Portugal to learn how to surf.
  • Berlin and Zurich for conferences.
  • The UK to take a trip through Wales.
  • Santorini to join friends who were on vacation.
  • Israel to visit family and work on my Hebrew.
  • Belize to learn how to scuba dive.
  • Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina for the Toptal Roadtrip.

Working full-time and traveling the world might be easier than you think, especially when you’re traveling for a purpose.

Working full-time and traveling the world might be easier than you think, especially when you’re traveling for a purpose.

I’ve found that having a purpose to your travels leads to a few great outcomes:

  • It’s a lot easier to structure your time and priorities.
  • It’s easier to meet fascinating people with shared interests.
  • You learn amazing new skills that you’ve always wanted to learn.

When you’re traveling solo and devoting a lot of time to work, it’s important to limit the extent to which you’re “re-solving” the same problems on a daily basis. What I mean by that is, you don’t want to find yourself waking up every morning without any plans for where you’re going to work, what you’re going to work on, where you’re going to eat, who you’re going to meet, what non-work things you’re going to do, and so on.

Not only is it easy to waste a lot of time and energy answering the same questions over and over again, but it will also quickly make you feel like you’re swimming in circles without accomplishing much.

To be clear, I am just as strongly against doing anything that’s “too organized” while traveling. I’m pretty averse to resorts, guided tours, and so on.

As a good friend of mine likes to say:

“I always love seeing big cruise ships. The more I see of them, the fewer people there will be wherever I am.”

The adventure and uncertainty of traveling is half the fun, and it’s important not to lose sight of that by planning too much.

In short, don’t just go to Thailand. Go to Thailand to motorbike from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. Go to Brazil because you’ve always wanted to experience Carnival. Go to Nepal because you dream of hiking the Annapurna trail.

The possibilities are endless, and it’s when you go somewhere with a goal in mind that things begin to take off.

Set Aside Time Every Day For Learning

When you’re working at a startup, there are always a million different tasks that need to be accomplished, and you’re constantly in a race against time. You can easily spend all of your waking hours knocking things off of your to-do list, and with so much that needs to get done, it can be hard to justify investing time in anything that’s not the task at hand, or at least directly related to the task.

Being on the road is no excuse for complacency. You can work, play, and master new skills, just as you would from home.

Being on the road is no excuse for complacency. You can work, play, and master new skills, just as you would from home.

However, taking time each day for the explicit purpose of improving your skills and learning new things has a profound and positive impact in several important ways:

  • You become much better at your job. Whether it’s taking a data science course, reading case studies on hyper-growth companies, or learning SEO best practices, investing in developing a strong cross-functional skillset will invariably make you more effective at your job in the long run. Every time I read or watch something just because I want to learn about it, I always come away with a bundle of new ideas, even if that thing was only tangentially related to my job.
  • You’ll be happier. If you’re like me and enjoy picking up new skills and being productive, you’ll be a more outgoing, adventurous, and happy person when you’re learning new things. I usually feel pretty great after spending a few hours reading in a cafe or getting a machine learning crash course by the beach. But after binge-watching movies? Not so much.
  • It’s easier to meet people with shared interests. The more diverse interests you have, the more likely you are to have something in common with a stranger. More importantly, when you’re interested in learning something (especially if it’s related to tech or startups), you can almost always find groups on Meetup.com or elsewhere that are full of people who organize events centered around the topic. This is a great way to meet and learn from people who share your interests.

Much like the “Go To X To Do Y” strategy, setting aside time every day for learning is all about feeling like you’re moving forward. By carving out time to pick up new skills, I work more effectively, stay happier, and enjoy my travels much more.

Pack Light, Stay Mobile, And Make Logistics Easy

It’s no fun when an airline loses your luggage. It’s even worse when an airline loses your luggage and you’re alone in a foreign country, don’t speak the language, have no contacts, and have a long list of unread work messages that you desperately need to check.

You’re traveling solo, so you can maintain an amazing level of flexibility. You won’t end up using at least half of what you were originally going to pack, so ditch the suitcase, put that extra sweater you’ll never wear back in your closet, and go carry-on instead.

I fit all of my belongings into one Deuter 65L travel pack and 25L Marmot backpack. There’s plenty of space for everything I need, and I can carry everything comfortably on my back without trouble.

Stay lean with your luggage and dozens of roadblocks that would’ve become huge pains will never happen in the first place.

Road warrior essentials: Hardware, travel packs, and SIM cards. Don’t get carried away. Pack light, but pack smart.

Road warrior essentials: Hardware, travel packs, and SIM cards. Don’t get carried away. Pack light, but pack smart.

The final thing I’ll add here is that travel logistics are way, way easier than you probably think, especially once you get a prepaid SIM card. These usually only cost $10-20 for a few GB of data, and getting one is pretty much the first thing I do when moving to a new place (it’s also absolutely essential for working from the road). This Wikia page is a great resource for an accurate overview of pre-paid SIM card options in most countries. If possible, make sure you get a SIM card that allows tethering. For bonus points, you can also look into getting dual-SIM smartphones or 3G/4G routers.

With a working phone and the rapid global rise of Airbnb and Uber, not only can you typically find a nice, reasonably inexpensive place to stay within a few hours and get a ride there within a few minutes, but you can do all of this from your phone, without ever taking your wallet out of your pocket. Sidenote: It pays off to do a little research on Airbnb hosts; if you’re in a country where you don’t speak the language, finding a host who does (and who might share some of your interests) can make a big difference.

These solutions, coupled with the steady decrease in flight costs, mean that many of the pains associated with travel are quickly disappearing. You can decide to jump halfway across the world tomorrow and have everything planned out just a few minutes later without breaking the bank.

Take Care Of Yourself: Exercise And Eat Well

This isn’t exactly a huge revelation, but it’s important. When you’re abroad, your support system is minimal, so it’s critical that you invest in making your lifestyle sustainable. This goes both ways: Working non-stop is as dangerous over the long run as failing to work at all.

You’re on the road, but you’re not on holiday! Take care of yourself, eat healthy, and make sure you get enough exercise.

You’re on the road, but you’re not on holiday! Take care of yourself, eat healthy, and make sure you get enough exercise.

My colleagues at Toptal are extremely smart and impossibly efficient, and teams here strive to move very fast and execute ruthlessly. What may be high priority one week will no longer be relevant the next. Everyone needs to not just keep up, but actively push things forward, and the occasional psychological strains of travel can’t ever get in the way of that. In this type of environment, you absolutely must take the time to take care of yourself. Even small habits such as being mindful of posture or buying boxes of protein bars can make a big difference when you don’t have time to eat and need to be operating at a high level. If you’re working at a computer all day, you need to be taking a few minutes every hour or two to at least do some basic bodyweight exercises.

If you’re spending an extended period of time in a new city, a good habit to develop is to spend time familiarizing yourself with the grocery stores and markets in your neighborhood. Cooking regularly saves you time when you need to focus on work, and can really help keep costs down. If you’re concerned about food quality or have dietary restrictions, it will also pay off to do some research on destinations ahead of time.

Aside from watching what you’re putting into your body, taking care of yourself means that you need to carve out time for regular exercise and figure out a reasonable sleep schedule to which you’re going to stick. Note that this definitely doesn’t mean your schedule has to be “normal”—you don’t have to simulate an office-to-gym-to-dinner-to-bed routine. Being able to design your own schedule is one of the major bonuses of a flexible lifestyle, after all. There are people who do their best work in the dead of night and sleep in every day, but the point is that they choose habits that are sustainable for them.

Exercising while traveling can be very easy or very hard. While it can be annoying to find a new gym every time you move to a new place, traveling solo means that you can specifically seek out places where adopting a healthy routine comes naturally.

For me, this means getting an apartment by the pickup basketball courts in Tel Aviv or a place on the beach by a surf school in Lisbon. Figure out what you like doing that’s fun and also healthy, and then go somewhere that makes it really, really easy for you to do it.

Join Communities Of People With Shared Interests

As I pointed out earlier, the infrastructure that is available around this nomadic lifestyle is growing rapidly, and I’m curious to see what things will look like a year from now.

For people who don’t have a travel partner but are wary of going it alone, there are options such as Hacker Paradise or Remote Year that invite you to join small communities of people who are also working from the road. There are also many combined co-working and co-living spaces establishing footholds in exotic locations around the world, including the Surf Office in Lisbon and Gran Canaria, for example.

In terms of online communities and meetup groups, in addition to Meetup.com, groups such as InterNationsand the Hashtag Nomads Slack community are good ways to making friends in new places. However, in my experience, none of these compare to the Toptal Community when it comes to finding people to meet up with for trips, events, or just a nice dinner.

Regardless of whether you choose to be a part of such communities, it’s useful to know that they’re there if you need them. The infrastructure for making friends exists in most sizable cities around the world if you know where to look.

Spend Time Traveling With Coworkers

This is especially important if you’re new to a company, or if you are just starting your career and need to do everything possible to learn as fast as you can.

Every time I’ve visited or traveled with colleagues at Toptal (who are located in over 100 countries), not only has it been incredibly fun, it’s also led to immediate and substantial jumps both in my understanding of different aspects of the company and in the quality of my own work.

Travel with fellow Toptalers or go solo. We have communities in hundreds of cities all over the world.

Travel with fellow Toptalers or go solo. We have communities in hundreds of cities all over the world.

There’s so much to learn from spending full weeks traveling, having meals, and working with colleagues across the company, and it always leads me to intriguing new ideas. The Toptal Roadtrip and the Toptal Academy React Course (that 200-plus Toptalers are currently completing) are two initiatives that have been a direct result of spending time visiting colleagues.

Moreover, the chemistry you build by traveling with coworkers, while not as tangible as an exciting new idea, is just as important to the long-term success of you and your team. Proper communication is the lifeblood of distributed teams. By spending extended in-person time with coworkers, you’ll be able to accelerate how fast you get to know each other’s habits, interests, strengths, and weaknesses. The productivity gains will be apparent immediately.

There are plenty of opportunities to do awesome things with coworkers, including attending conferences, traveling to exotic locations, or simply visiting them in their hometowns. Doing so frequently and regularly is a great way to enjoy your travels while accelerating your personal and professional growth.

In Conclusion…

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that it might seem daunting to try to do everything at once: travel, work full-time, stay healthy, make new friends, and find time to actually enjoy yourself while exploring new places.

It’s important to understand that it’s a balancing act, not a to-do list, and there’s definitely a domino effect. Spending quality time on one thing doesn’t take away from the others; it’s all interrelated. When you’re having a great time traveling, it’s easier to meet compelling people. When you’re spending time learning new skills, it’s easier to be hyper-productive at work and meet people who share the same professional interests.

It’s when you hit that sweet spot that this lifestyle really reaches the next level. Before you know it, you find yourself doing such things as executing high-impact company initiatives from rooftop beachside apartments before taking a lunch break to go jet skiing, or reading data science books between asados with new friends.

The possibilities are endless, and there are always new places to visit and exciting goals to achieve. The world is an amazing place, and I hope everyone gets a chance to see it. Good luck and happy travels!

If you have questions about anything in this post or are just curious to know more, you can reach me at dror@toptal.com.

This article was written by DROR LIEBENTHAL, Toptal’s Director of Operations.