It is a couple of years now since my first conference and now that I am working in remote, it is even harder to combine traveling and work.
Mainly because now that I don’t need to go to an office I travel more often, and usually conference are a better more far away too. It means that I spent more time, not in my usual workplace.
It is a very challenging and exciting opportunity, and I am glad to live it. This is the first important things I think. If you are not happy about what you do, even if it is challenging, you are going to give up.
But other things help me a lot. In general, they are come back to planning. I
feel better when I have the time to look around and to be prepared for the city
I am going to visit. There are a couple of apps that help me with that:
WorkFrom
It is a community of digital nomad and remote worker. It keeps up to date a database of pubs, libraries, restaurants, bars where you can work from. It is very nice, and it has some nice feature like:
- A map, so you can see what is around you
- Net speed measurement inside the app. Other than a detailed description of the place it also shares (if the person who reviewed the area made it) how the internet connection is fast and sometimes even the WiFi password, in this way you don’t need to ask.
- As I mentioned it is a community, so there is also a Slack Channel that you can use to speak with another remote worker.
I used it in Berlin, Munich, Copenaghen, Amsterdam and it worked pretty well.
bike and other local transport applications I am using
oBike as an example because just because I used it recently in Munich but I think you should always have a look to what the city uses for bike sharing, for instance, because at least for me even if I love to walk around take a ride time to time is faster and helpful.
Bonus point a lot of these apps have a free tier in means that you can even use them for free the first time you visit that city!
Yelp
In general, I find Yelp better than TripAdvisor for what concerns restaurant and place to eat. So when I am not able to spot nothing good by myself during my walks around the city or when I am looking for a specific kind of good I use Yelp.
Adobe Scan
For this app I need to give credit to Lorenzo because he showed that app to me the first time. I use it a lot after a trip when I need to submit the expenses. It is always a very annoying work to do but at least with this app, I can take a set of pictures, and it will generate a single pdf ready to be submitted!
Revolut
A few years ago when I was working at CurrencyFair I started to test and play with online banks and Revolut is very good when you are traveling around, and you need to manage different currencies. First of all, I like the idea to use a different card when I buy on Amazon or when I travel because in case of any trouble I will have a limited amount of money there. For example in Cube I had my card cloned but I only had 10 Euro, so it was not the first count. (the bank give me the money back in any case btw).
Plus Revolut has some excellent features to track where and what you spent. You can label your transfers to easy lookup them when you need to expense or calculate how much you spent. The exchange commission low compared with the more traditional banks, so this is a free win!
Let me know on Twitter if you have any other applications to suggest I will be happy to try them next time and maybe to add them here!