Forgetfulness is the enemy of the road warrior. One of my biggest challenges is remembering what I’ve learned over 25 years of being on the road.
I don’t know if the following ideas will be new or unique, but I do believe they’ll be important and helpful reminders:
- Be kind to travel industry employees even when you’d like to beat them with a stick. Don’t fight jerk behavior with jerk behavior. I know how hard it is. I ashamedly have lost my cool in the past and am doing better in my advancing years. I just wish I had learned this lesson earlier.
- Quit complaining. Can you think of a time when whining made you feel better? It isn’t catharsis. I have found that even other inconvenienced travelers aren’t sympathetic to anything vaguely resembling whining. You might think you’re commiserating with like-minded folks; they think you’re bitching and moaning.
- Bring dead time back to life. I’ve learned that the quicker I get over being frustrated or upset, the quicker I can become engaged and productive. Time spent in a funk would be better spent reading, returning calls, writing reports, etc.
- Have a plan. This seems like travel basics 101 but I’m surprised how many road warriors don’t have a plan for when travel goes bad. Keep needed travel numbers programmed in your phone, familiarize yourself with alternative flights or travel arrangement in advance and think ahead.
- Accept that there are no guarantees. You can have the best plans and be extremely travel savvy and still get screwed. Hope springs eternal in the road warrior and we sometimes mistake optimism for control over the situation. Being proactive is largely a myth; as travelers we are interactive: we don’t control the stuff that happens but we interact with those circumstances to create the outcome we desire. Sometimes, however, the circumstances win.
I trust that these travel tips will be of some value to you and will help you avoid some of the less pleasant aspects of being a digital nomad.
One lonely night in a hotel room far, far away … I decided to share my essential executive travel gear.
I like to be prepared on the road to an obsessive degree. I hope one of these things saves your hide one time.
For making speeches
1. Cough drops
2. Throat spray
3. Bookmarks featuring my book and blog (for fans I meet, or when end up next to Oprah on the flight and need to impress her quick).
4. Happy Face buttons for nice people I meet.
5. Travel clock to put on the podium. Nothing ruins a speech more than going over time.
6. Logitech Cordless Presenter — essential: it has a timer on the front, so you can pace your speech.
Music
8. NXT speakers — fills your hotel room with sound, weighs nothing. Be sure to look for NXT technology.
9. Shure Sound-Isolating Earphones — Don’t get the gimmicky electronic noise reduction headphones. Get sound isolating earphones like professional musicians use.
10. iPod
Gear
11. Eagle Creek Packing Cubes — amazingly useful.
12. iPod charger and video output to show movies on hotel TV.
13. Batteries for laptop, remotes, cell phone.
14. Power splitter will make you a hero at the airport, and helps in those one-outlet hotel rooms.
Paperwork & Organizers
15. Thank you notes to write.
16. Envelope for receipts.
17. Fold-up shopping bags to carry stuff.
18. Plastic folders for paperwork.
Entertainment
19. Harvard Business Review so people think you’re smart.
20. Books, fiction and non-fiction.
21. Mindless movies
More Gear
22. $30,000 in unmarked small bills (not shown).
23. Earplugs
24. USB stick – Copy all important documents to this before the trip. Keep another one in your pocket.
25. Ick remover
26. Zebra F-301 pen — the greatest $2 pen on earth.
27. Field Notes notepad
28. Clipboard — lifesaver in many situations, and handy for keeping a hot laptop off your lap.
My business is pretty much 100 percent Internet-enabled. I do all my “paid” work from a small, cheap office in an equally small and cheap town in the high West Texas desert, about 400 miles West of Austin. It’s the frugal, Highland Scots in me - I abhor expensive overhead expenses.
Though most of what I do is about monetizing the cartoons I draw online, I still need to regularly visit with clients, customers and allies. Like any sales rep will tell you, there’s no substitute for face time.
But from out here in west Texas, it pretty much takes a full day’s travel to get anywhere, often more. Seven hours to drive to Austin. A four-hour drive to the El Paso Airport. A three-hour drive to the Midland-Odessa airport. Then all the hassle of catching a plane to London, New York, Miami, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Paris, maybe with an overnight stop-over (just to mention a few of the places my work has taken me recently). Add the cost of hotels, cocktail bars, restaurants, jet lag, taxicabs and all the other stuff we’re all too familiar with, and it starts adding up. My business is tiny, compared to what it costs me to do my thing here in West Texas, the “burn rate” is off the scale.
And then there’s productivity. Sure, when I travel I can e-mail folk on my Blackberry, present a PowerPoint or two, but the REAL WORK I do, the drawings, can only really be done from my office in West Texas. Simply put, my work dictates that I have LOTS of time to think. I personally find that hard to achieve in a taxicab between La Guardia and downtown Manhattan.
There’s a certain paradox to face time. Any college freshman can see the value of it, its actual economics continually confound the smartest minds on the planet.
So how do I handle it? Short Answer: brutal honesty. I tell my people, look, I can travel only one week a month, and that’s it. The remaining 3 weeks I HAVE TO BE back here in West Texas, to give me enough time and mental space in order to do my job. If you and I can’t work around this limitation, then I’m afraid I’m not really the person for you.
I’m fortunate that most clients are cool with this. They can relate, as with all ambitious people over the age of fourteen these days, they’re over-extended in their own way as well. And the ones who aren’t cool with it, I immediately tag them as “Intellectually Dishonest,” and drop them quickly.
The other part of the equation is knowing when face time will actually pay off. Sure, it’s nice to go visit Mr. Fabulous Client up in New York and have a great conversation over a fine, wine-enabled, three-course meal, but will that actually justify the cost, in terms of both travel expenses and lost productivity? Sometimes yes, but all too often, it sadly will not.
So I try to limit my face time to ONLY WHEN I have something very tangible to offer, something that can either deepen the relationship, and/or evolve the actual work we’re doing together. Or yeah, something tangible to actually sell. For money. I may be an “artiste,” but I still have a business to run.
This is no different than any other business. You have to make stuff to get paid, you have to sell stuff to get paid. How do you achieve the balance? How do you find the sweet spot between “Make” and “Sell”? Trial and error, and perhaps a bit of luck. But no amount of gee-whiz, hyper-connected technology is going make that sweet spot appear any less elusive.
In the new age of mobility, the mental state of “work” is changing. Work is home, home is work, and you’re never really away from anything when you’re traveling. With the benefits of flexibility come some major challenges as well. Some of the biggest challenges include staying focused, productive, and balanced. After hundreds of interviews with free-range workers, we’ve identified a few best practices for working without boundaries.
Stay Focused: Use Weekdays for Execution, Weekends for Inspiration
If Thomas Edison was right when he said that genius is “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration,” then we should question why creative people – especially freelancers - spend so much time brainstorming and “seeking inspiration.” A few especially productive freelancers interviewed by Behance claim that they use every weekday for execution and preserve their weekends for inspiration and “unfocused thinking.” This is not to suggest that weekdays should be void of creativity, but rather that we should focus on moving the ball forward during the week and then contemplating the ball itself on the weekend!
After all, weekends are spent out of the typical flow of work and are more relaxing and conducive for thinking of new ideas. Consider keeping your weekdays for relentless execution and then your weekends for reflection.
Stay Productive: Measure Your Progress in Action Steps
You can fill your day with deep thoughts, back-to-back meetings, and extensive planning — and still fail to actually make progress on your projects. Ultimately, achievement starts with taking action. As such, we believe that people should work with a bias towards action. This means that you should focus less on note taking and organizing and more on simply capturing and completing action steps. When our team was developing ActionMethod (an online productivity tool), we interviewed some of the most productive creative people we could find across industries. One commonality we discovered was an obsession with intricate to-do lists. Daily rituals of reviewing and re-writing lists of action steps were not uncommon. As you decide how to spend your time, consider the argument that JUST capturing and completing action steps (yet alone anything else) might put you in the top 5% of productive professionals!
Stay Balanced: Compartmentalize Your Work & Your Thoughts
One consequence of mobility is the ability to “always check.” Your email and voicemail are easily accessible, and your tendency is to want to check it. When you get up in the morning or before you go to bed, your blackberry flirts with you via the subtle blinking LED light – and you decide to take a quick peak. The integration of work and life becomes troublesome when we fail to set limits.
The precious period of peace you have before or after work is easily tainted by a quick glimpse of your work. Even if you spend just five minutes checking email, the messages themselves remain in your mind. Inevitably, your time unplugged becomes consumed by work-related thoughts. The best practice is to only check your work when you’re willing to be in a “work state of mind” for at least 2 hours afterwards.
I’ve spent the last 30 years with three global corporations. I’ve traveled several million miles around the world. I’ve lived in Switzerland, France and twice in the United States. I am a digital nomad, a global digital nomad.
I’ve been technologically savvy for some time, well before we even had mobile devices. I grew up with microprocessors in 1977 at Motorola Europe because it was great to have an interactive dialogue with a machine. During my studies in the 70s, I was programming in Fortran and we used the first ‘windows’ system. At the time you had to knock on the window, an operator would open it and you would hand over your programming cards… :), it was VERY intuitive.
Well, back to the future. What practical tips have I learned along the way?
Let’s start with today’s two fundamental enablers: your mobile phone, which should be a PDA or smartphone (if you don’t have one, I’d suggest getting one) and your laptop.
In both cases, the most important aspects of these devices to have well-organized and complete are your contacts and your calendar. Make sure you enter your phone number using the international format, that is + then (country code) and then the (number). My number is +1 512 426-4037. I’d also suggest you write it this way on your business card or e-mail signature. That way when you travel abroad, you don’t have to figure out what the international outside code is in the country you are in.
Then make sure you understand time zone differences - most PDA phones provide that information. You also might want to check the setting and enable the time change by the carrier so wherever you are, your phone displays the local time.
On your laptop, assuming you use Microsoft Outlook, you have a dual-time feature that is very handy. Just right click on your calendar in the vertical time column and use the option “Change time Zone” and in the new menu enter the time zone you are in and click the show dual time zone.
If you use Apple’s iCal , other time zone are available on the right top corner or when you enter an appointment.
Assuming you have to set-up conference calls with people in different time zones, I suggest you use the meeting planner that is available for free here. It is quite handy.
If you have multiple geographies in which you do business, you can extract the data on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to reformat it and print. See an extract of my version here for winter times for the regions in which I do most of my business.
Now that we’ve talked about the importance of keeping your contacts, calendars and time zones right, let’s look at your hardware. The two most important areas are your power supplies (Laptop, phones, etc…) and your Internet Connectivity.
For the power supply, in addition to carrying a universal plug adaptor, always carry an extension cord with a multi-plug end. Power plugs in hotels or conference rooms are seldomly located in convenient places and I’m confident you won’t regret the little bit of extra weight in your luggage. Make sure you have a power supply that does not require a ground pin and that it is light. My personal view is that the laptop makers still have work to do lighten the weight of their power supplies.
Finally, connecting to the Internet is a real challenge is some parts of the world. I was very happy when I had my Nokia 61E, which provides 3G and Internet modem capability on a worldwide basis. Now that I am on iPhone, I’m in Net jail, as the iPhone doesn’t allow modem capability. Yes you can buy a broadband adaptor but that only works for the USA and is costly (pure highway robbery when you already pay for a data plan with your phone).
Or you get a 3G card or get on a WiFi global plan that some companies provide. International communications costs can kill you or your company so you have to get smarter — find free WiFi spots and in most hotels it is in their lobby or the conference room floor. Have a hands-free headset and make your international calls using Skype from your laptop if you need to call landline or mobile phones. If your colleague is on a PC or Mac, you can use common instant messaging (IM) services such as iChat or Microsoft Messenger (MSN). When traveling, use Skype or IM with your family, do regular video calls with your PC or Mac to stay in touch with your loved ones. After all, while pictures are worth a thousand words, video is what really makes you realize what a small world we live in.
Throughout this post, I have assumed you are fluent in setting up your wireless connection and know about proxy and all these good things. If not, ask your IT support person, or perhaps your son our daughter :).
Well, there is more to talk about such as printing while on the road (always carry a USB key so you can use someone else’s computer), internal country codes, credit card dialing, insurance while traveling, currencies, the must-know issues about the local culture but that will be for another time.
Globally nomadically yours.
Jean-Claude
Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia, the open -content encyclopedia that launched in 2001. You’ve likely heard of it, and used it, almost every day for the past few years. Whenever you search for something, more oft than not, the Wikipedia entry is the first thing that comes up. His work with Wikipedia, which has become the world’s largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world’s most influential people. Wales has graciously appeared on Big Think a couple of times, and has always been eloquent about how technology is shaping our lives. Here he is, speaking about the importance of about mobile personal technology and how Wikipedia will adapt to mobile devices in the future.
This interview is part of a series on BigThink, sponsored by Dell and Digital Nomads.
I often hear friends and colleagues, generally people on the cutting edge of social media and technology, remark that we are ‘living in the future,’ i.e. we have available to us many of the daily conveniences that were the staples of science fiction in times past. As exciting as it is to be a digital nomad in real life in the early 21st century, it’s important to keep in mind that you never really know where you are unless you also know where you came from. So let’s take a look at the top 10 digital nomads of our collective imagination. These are the imaginary people who fueled the dreams that generated the innovation that made digital nomads today a reality.
1. Sam Beckett
The hero of Quantum Leap was bodily trapped in the future, but his mind jumped from person to person (and sometimes non-person), across space and time, requiring him to uncover and then right some mysterious wrong in each episode. Once he solves the latest problem, he “leaps” to the next, always incrementally moving back to the life he left behind.
Amazingly, Sam’s far-flung nomadic lifestyle still comes with a boss. Al (Dean Stockwell) appears as a holographic projection, feeding Sam parameters for each assignment, clarifying his objectives, and providing any necessary background info.
Advantage: Sam can’t be fired. Disadvantage: He can’t quit. Also, no downtime between projects.
2. Michael Knight
One benefit of working for “The Foundation” is that your company car is equipped with all the tools you need to do your job, and includes an automated secretary/chaeufer that can place calls, handle nasty traffic problems, and do some quick and dirty research on clients you’re on the way to have meetings with.
Another perk: when you need to meet with your boss, he actually comes to you, in a mobile office built into the back of a semi.
3. J.F. Sebastian
Genetic designers for the Tyrell Corporation get to work at home, which is particularly cool if you live in the Bradbury Building. It’s understood that the mini-androids you create with your 20% time will stay in your residence as personal assistants, which will help keep you in touch with any user experience issues they may be having (e.g. walking into walls). While my CEO follows me on Twitter, J.F.’s plays remote chess with him while he’s riding the company elevator in the middle of the night; talk about getting personal attention from the top.
Advantages: Home office, occasional visits to corporate headquarters in cool pyramid building. Disadvantages: You are also front-line tech support, which can lead to some unpleasant confrontations.
4. John Connor
Giving new meaning to “be your own boss,” Connor is destined to be the leader of the the resistance movement that protects humanity from a race of evil robots.
The biggest downside is that his subordinates owe their allegiance, not to him, but to his future self, a detail they often use to “manage up” and leverage their own agenda. He can’t be fired, but there is a constant threat of having his position eliminated as the result of a hostile takeover.
5. Ethan Hunt
Hunt enjoys extreme sports such as rope-free inverted rock climbing, and his company allows him to manage his own time, provided that he stays constantly on call. Unfortunately, all the time he spends outside the office sometimes leaves him out of the loop, and then he has to put in overtime in order to preserve his standing in the organization. Ah, water cooler politics. They follow you everywhere.
6. Dick Tracy
We all know guys like Dick. He’s the grizzled older co-worker who goes through the motions of embracing the latest technology without really understanding what it does. Back in the day, his two-way wrist radio was the stuff of legends. When he upgraded to a two-way wrist TV, his younger co-workers all had to admit it was a cool UI, even if the cost of running it was greater than his salary. About the time his organization was finally ready to deploy the infrastructure to support the TV, Dick started strutting around the office, showing off his “two-way wrist computer.” None of the younger detectives even asked what that meant; they all just winced and looked away.
7. Neo
Instant on-the-job training, unlimited access to company resources (awesome supply closet known as “the construct”), and a designer wardrobe are some of the advantages of working for Morpheus. Morpheus is also very supportive of promotional opportunities, even to the point where he ties back his own goals to the furthering of his subordinates. (When asked about his meeting with the head of HR, Morpheus remarked simply: “She told me I would find the One.”) But beware: working in such a progressive environment can really rip the wool from your eyes. Talk about seeing how the sausage is made.
8. Doctor Who
With the ultimate mobile office (transdimensional engineering makes it bigger on the inside than the outside), The Doctor can literally set his own hours. His supervisors, which he once saw as meddlesome micro-managers, have all been released from duty. However, the burden of carrying the whole infrastructure on his own shoulders is often hard to bear, resulting in a constant shuffling of personal assistants, each of whom is constantly torn between resigning due to stress, and toughing it out in order to benefit from the intense on-the-job training and the frequent trips to exotic locations.
9. Flynn
Previously discussed here. Much like Neo, Flynn’s nomadic lifestyle is both completely virtual and completely involuntary, but he quickly shows himself to be a natural. As a former engineer, working his way back into his former employer’s company as a consultant proves difficult. But Flynn’s first-hand knowledge of user experience, plus all the time he’s had to play ultimate frisbee, clearly gives him an edge. He’s also an excellent diplomat, interfacing successfully with both IT workers and the software they create.
10. Oh heck, you caught me. Number 10 hasn’t been chosen. Who should it be? David Banner? Speed Racer? Wonder Woman?
Neo image by NightRPStar
Nomad Contributors
