In this Origin Story session, I speak with Adrian Pinon, a first generation college grad who took an unlikely path of self-promotion to his first job: Visiting tech company HQs around California with his message on a sign, garnering attention from ABC News, CBS News and other outlets. By doing this, Adrian proved himself to be a master marketer.
We talk through the journey Adrian took to land his first job out of university: Not knowing about college until late in life, overcoming naysayers, and learning how to market himself. Adrian even founded his own events app before graduation!
Words of wisdom: • A closed mouth does not get fed. • Talk to a person. Don’t let applicant tracking systems hold you back. • Attend that networking event. You could randomly meet a lifelong connection.
On this session of Origin Story, I speak with Nadia Harris of Remote Work Advocate. We chat about emerging issues like location bias, the viability of hybrid offices, and how young professionals can build relationships during COVID. Surprisingly, we also touch on workplaces where in-person work may be most appropriate!
DISCLAIMER: This article represents my personal views and not those of my employer or any affiliated organizations.
In this article, I’ll walk you through my own experiences living on the road, moving from vacation rental to vacation rental. Being a digital nomad takes a lot of effort. This is especially true if you’re working while doing it.
If you’re going to travel by vehicle, vs. by air, you need to be prepared.
The rental market for vehicles tends to fluctuate immensely. A few months into the virus crisis, many rental centers were practically begging customers to lease cars and trucks from their lots. Now post-crisis, rental and used vehicle prices are sky high, with a car computer chip shortage meaning fewer new vehicles are produced.
Buying a vehicle is a big decision to make. It comes with many commitments: Doing your own upkeep, inherited mechanical problems, and having to register in a home state. Rental centers typically will take care of maintenance, repairs, and you can drop your vehicle off in most major cities. This means you’re never worried about where you’re located.
The upside of buying is that (if purchasing with cash), you’ll never have to make a monthly payment again. You can also customize your vehicle however you like. For whatever money you put into buying the vehicle, you can get most of it back when reselling it.
Choosing a Vehicle
It’s important to choose a vehicle that suits your nomad lifestyle. Do you spend most of your time in urban areas? Perhaps something smaller, faster with better miles per gallon is best for you (like a Honda CR-V or RAV4). Do you do lots of off-roading to get to remote trailheads? You’ll need a truck or SUV with 4 Wheel Drive or All Wheel Drive capability and high ground clearance. Do you tend to sleep or camp in your vehicle often? You’ll want an SUV or van with a lot of space. Pickup trucks with a fitted canopy work well for this too.
Choosing Where to Do your Registration and Title
Believe it or not, the state or province that you register your vehicle in matters a lot. You may have to return there once a year to renew your registration, or to do emissions testing. You can only register in a state where you hold residence.
Outfitting your Vehicle for Weather Conditions and Terrain
There are all sorts of conditions that can pop up on the road.
If you’re traveling on the road, you’re going to need a lot of space. For this reason, it’s best to be a minimalist with your belongings while traveling.
We managed to stuff all of our things into the backseat of a 4-door Ford Ranger pickup, but it was quite a squeeze. Now, with a Honda Pilot, we’ve got a 6 seat SUV, able to fold 2 of those seat rows flat. That makes for a lot of room.
Another great trick for pickup trucks: Make use of that flat bed space. Our solution was a large sports cooler and a Thermos strapped into the back of our truck. We used 4 elastic straps to secure both containers, and not once had an issue, even on interstate highways.
You’ll want to load your vehicle up the night before your rental reservation ends. The reasoning? You’ll be spending checkout day cleaning the place up. You don’t want to be searching around for lost possessions.
Protecting your Vehicle
If you’re going to be taking long-haul road trips, you need to do regular upkeep and maintenance on your vehicle.
Even if you may think you’re in the “middle of nowhere”, you may be surprised. Trailheads and rural areas are some of the most common points of theft and break-ins. They are community gathering points where most people leave their vehicles unattended. This makes it easy for would-be thieves. To prevent this, make sure to buy a vehicle with a car alarm, or have one installed (Banvie car alarms are great and cheap). More importantly, buy a tarp to cover your belongings, so thieves can’t see what you “have to offer”. I recommend a Guard Rhino tarp, they’re only $14, and you can use them for many other purposes like camping and as a rain shield.
In the SUV, we also have a secret compartment under the truck bed, which contains a camp stove, fuel, a first aid kit, and a tire jack. (A Big Red 10 ton bottle jack should handle pretty much any vehicle). These emergency supplies will help us to survive a night in the wilderness with a flat tire, if we really need to.
Last but not least, protect the exterior of your vehicle. Desert sun can actually melt your paint. Too much water can make it rust. You can sustain scratches from not just rocks, but even tiny branches. So be sure to buy an external ceramic coating (like TriNova Hydrophobic Sealant). By doing this, you’re also insuring the resale value of your vehicle.
Happy Travels!
Okay! You’re ready to hit the road. Just remember: Vehicles that are loved and cared for have better resale value. Have fun in your vehicle, but be careful with it. You want to be able to trade it in for an even better model eventually, or to sell it if you want to “digital nomad” by plane, or “settle down”.
DISCLAIMER: This article represents my personal views and not those of my employer or any affiliated organizations.
When is the last time you took a business travel trip?
If you’re fresh out of college, that answer may be never.
Business travel has been romanticized in popular culture since the inception of passenger airlines. How many movies have you seen where a suited figure in first class reclines, sipping on a cocktail while reading through a business newspaper? How about a group of industry colleagues rolling up in a private car to an extravagant hotel? If you’ve watched Mad Men, Don Draper sharing a glass of whiskey during a business pitch may have come to mind.
The virus crisis has changed business travel forever. Will business travel exist after the pandemic? Certainly. However, its absence during the crisis has shown numerous companies just how many resources they were expending on business travel.
The first scheduled passenger plane flight departed on January 1st, 1914. Some of the longest standing airlines were KLM, Qantas and Avianca. Since the U.S. entered WWII later than European countries, they had more time to spend developing commercial aircraft. The U.S. industry since 1945 essentially set the standard for international air travel.
During the Golden Age of air travel, flying was a novelty experience defined by fine dining experiences and upscale services. The experience back then was probably similar to today’s first class section. The first “business class” was rolled out in December 1977 by Thai Airlines.
The decades leading up to the pandemic were filled withpractically unlimited expense accounts, luxury hotels, and exorbitant meals out. Business travel has not returned to its pre-virus levels. We’ll likely be videoconferencing for some time to come. I discuss this a bit in my recent article “We’re Never Going Back to the ‘Office‘”.
Business tourism? Yeah, that was a thing.
Pre-crisis, business travel would often be tauted as a perk. You would do the business trip at the end of the week, then stay the weekend to explore on your own time. Some individuals would even bring their spouse/partner who’d fly out separately.
My own dad still displays plaques for the company trips he won on the wall. The U.S. Virgin Islands. The Bahamas. Lake Tahoe. Vancouver, BC. He would take my mother along on each of these trips. In his own words, “I was in the top percentile of the entire country to win those trips.” He says they’re going to mean something, to somebody, and that I should “keep them in the family”. I’ll probably just put them in storage.
Environmental impacts of business travel
For service-based organisations, business travel and aviation are the biggest contributors to their total emissions, often above the collective carbon footprint of their offices. Air travel impacts the local environment through increased nitrogen pollutants, particulates and noise levels.
Companies across the spectrum discovered an unexpected benefit of grounding their employees during the pandemic: a lowering of carbon emissions from business travel.
Many businesses are announcing new promises to reduce (and offset) business travel emissions as a way to reach their sustainability goals. Only one in four organizations consider their “carbon footprint” to be a top priority.
Employee wellbeing
Environmental impact is not the only pitfall of business travel. A World Bank study showed that 75% of staff reported high or very high stress related to business travel. Americans took more than 500 Million business trips in 2016. (Harvard Business Review)
Stress, sleep interruption, unhealthy eating and drinking, and lack of exercise are all common factors of business travel burnout. The odds of being obese are 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month, compared to those who traveled only one to six nights per month
Business travel could mean traveling to company HQ abroad
I recently wrote about my personal return to the office experience. With much of the knowledge workforce still remote, and business travel at an indefinite standstill, the show must go on. As such, large annual company offsite meetings may now turn into ONSITE meetings. This entails all of the domestic (or international) staff flying into the company headquarters to “reconnect”. If that would prove too difficult, employee visits to the headquarters could be staggered.
Take advantage of a geographically diverse team
Distributed teams have been the lifeblood of tech businesses since the dawn of the internet. The model was much harder to achieve before global telecommunications. So why is remote work such a hard concept to justify, when your engineering team is already in India, your HR team is in London, and your office is in New York City?
In many businesses, regions are divided up by time zones. For example, The Americas, EMEA and APAC.
What we forget, however, is that these also represent shared time zones. For instance, someone in Bogota, Columbia could work the same hours as a colleague in New York. The same with Lagos, Nigeria for London, or Tokyo for Sydney. Location bias doesn’t have to be a concept anymore.
Distributed workforce could be opportunity for businesses to extend their reach
The other benefit of a distributed workforce is the ability to meet customers where they are, and *when* they are. The pre-crisis world had executives flying all over the world for “face time”. As a requirement of the role, this lifestyle was popular for some, but not for all. For instance, working parents were often strained to find child care or juggle their home life while on the road.
Instead of this, why not embrace decentralized command by briefing the representatives located closest to customers to meet them on their terms? This tactic has been used by regional sales teams for decades, and can be extended to any aspect of business.
To be an effective leader, regular check-ins and ensuring decentralized command is important
Remote work calls for a different kind of management style. Gone are the “hall monitor” management days of the “Bill Lumberg” character looking over the shoulders of staff. We live in an age with a broad amount of productivity platforms that can be accessed anywhere in the world.
Instead of a checklist, an idea for status meetings is to set milestones beyond “next steps”. It’s important to teach core concepts, set an agenda, and train “microleaders” to act as an extension of command. A robust project management tool can show visibility into tasks without constant Slack check-ins.
Temporary rental platforms are assigning importance to customers that are now permanently remote
You may have heard that “the office is not a place, it’s a concept”. This is more true than ever. We are at the point where opening a satellite office doesn’t require a multi-year lease. Even the most stalwart of commercial real estate companies are looking into an office-as-you-need model, mirroring companies like WeWork, Convene and Regus.
Finally, vacation rental platforms like AirBnB and VRBO realize the classic business model of working out of an expensive (or no-frills) hotel room isn’t that comfortable. Business travelers can book a vacation rental instead, and stay in a private house without neighbors who frequent the hotel bar keeping them up. Even better news? It’s cost-effective, too.
Traveling while working remotely is true freedom
With remote work, there’s no more “caboose trips” after a business conference. There’s no more sweating a flight delay because you have to be back in the office the next day. No more late nights figuring out your personal expenses vs. company expenses.
You can travel over a weekend, work or meet business contacts during the week, go to a different attraction each night, and fly out the next weekend. All on your own schedule. How cool is that?
Before the crisis, I had a daily commute to Times Square. It was an improvement on previous years, when I’d travel from Brooklyn to “the city” proper. I was now living in the Financial District at the south end of Manhattan. My alarm would go off at 7 AM. I’d sometimes get a chance to go on a ultra-quick jog, before my shower (7:30). After showering, I’d throw on my clothes, scarf down a yogurt and a cup of coffee (8:00).
I’d then speed walk the 20 minutes to the subway train (8:20). Once on the train, I’d hopefully make it to my stop in 30 minutes (8:50). Some days, the train would be delayed for up to an hour. (9:50). Either way, I’d be speed-walking through the Times Square crowds, getting into the office out of breath with scrambled thoughts.
This would be similar for someone who commuted by car (which I once did). The difference is that they’d be worried about wrecking their vehicle in a fender bender, versus avoiding characters and bodily injury.
Do People Actually Want to Go Back to the Office?
There have been a lot of articles recently reminiscing about the commute. The status quo says “people miss the office environment”, but data often points to the opposite, that “workers prefer a hybrid office model”.
Research has also shown that workers are more productive when working remotely, with most managers agreeing to the same.
Many companies that flirted with the idea of long-term remote work are now calling employees back. Some have slated a return to office as early as this summer.
Another frequent nod, “With remote work, there is no separation between work and home life”. Why do we feel we need to be forced to commute, vs. making that time for ourselves?
Take a Break from your Devices
When you worked in the office, how long did you stare at your computer screen before taking a break? Probably 30 minutes. You walked over to a coworker to ask a question, or stopped by the kitchen to grab a snack.
Why is working at home any different?
An estimated 58% of people who work on computers experience “Computer Vision Syndrome”. The symptoms include eye strain, blurred vision, headaches, neck and back pain.
Lucky for you, there’s ways to mitigate this. Like me, you could purchase prescription (or non-prescription) blue light glasses. If you work on a Macbook Pro, there is a feature called Night Shift. It’s quite easy. You can also set when it turns on, “Sunset to Sunrise”, turn it on manually, and select the color temperature.
Just click on the Apple Icon > System Preferences > Displays > Night Shift
Time Management
With no commutes, there has been a time shift. Some people do not realize this.
If you’re working in a different time zone (Pacific, for example), you’re starting your work day 3 hours earlier than the East Coast.
Let’s say you start your work day at 8 AM PST, that’s 11 AM EST.
If you end your work day at 2 PM PST, that’s 5 PM EST.
However, you have only worked for 6 hours, not a full 8 hour day.
Instead of going to run errands, why not power it out and finish your day at 4 PM PST?
Commutes are Bad for the Environment (Poor Health, Wasted Gas & Electricity, Pollution)
This may seem obvious, but commutes by vehicle or train are extremely harmful to the environment.
Studies show that the average drive to work adds 4.3 metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere a year, per car.
People with longer commutes tend to be less physically active. They also have higher rates of obesity and high blood pressure.
I was personally gobsmacked, when the MTA announced they’d be bleaching subway trains every night at the dawn of the virus.
How often was it cleaned before then? What kind of microscopic virii were floating around the subway car?
These are a few (of many) risks that workers will face in the return to the office.
The Importance of Setting Boundaries at Home
If you co-habit with a family, significant other, or roommate, working from home can be a strain. It does not have to be, as long as you keep distance between yourself and your “boarding mates”.
Being a parent is a whole other ball game. However, balancing structure and play for your kids is a good idea. If you’re driving eachother nuts, go outside for a bit, or recommend they go outside to play.
Many people have a “home office” room where they lock themselves away, and yet their kids or dogs still find a way into their lap. What if you actually created your working space outside? During warmer months, you could work from the garage or even the garden shed if you wanted to.
If you work from a laptop, creating a mobile workspace is also an idea. Move around the house. I’ve used any variety of surfaces as a desk – The kitchen table, a recliner, the garden table, even wide window ledges (as a standing desk).
As the crisis comes to an end, it’s more likely that you’ll work out of a coffee shop or a co-working space within your own neighborhood.
Recommended for Remote Work:
So do you see? It’s not so bad.
There will be a need for companies to subsidize remote working office setups. It pays for itself as those workers may not be using office resources (office equipment, printers, snacks, etc.). There are even companies dedicated to working from home, like WFH Zone UK.
Much of the workforce has now had a taste of remote working. The likelihood they’ll want to go back to an outdated, 20th century office is highly unlikely.
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