If working remotely was a tree, then digital nomadism would be one of the branches. Both are often considered equivalent- although in the same family, they aren’t synonymous! In this episode, Alexander Torrenegra opens up about his personal digital nomad experience, initiating a healthy round table discussion on this topic.
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A big thank you to our post-production wizard, Vanesa Monroy.
[A moderately paced, trip hop song that is best described as chill and cruising. Synth and techno drums are the primary instruments in this track. This is our podcast background music, it starts playing at the very beginning]
Andres: 00:00 Hi, I'm Andrés.
Josephine : 00:04 And I'm Josephine. Welcome to the Remoter Podcast.
Andres: 00:06 Follow us in season one of this journey as we cover anything and everything you need to know in order to successfully build and scale a remote first team. As someone who's been working remotely for over a decade or CEO, Alexander Torrenegra shares his personal experiences, lessons learned, and advice for those of you who are curious and interested in exploring the future of work.
Josephine : 00:33 This podcast is brought to you by Torre, the end to end recruitment solution for Remoters. Get our free AI powered sourcing and processing tools, or let Torre recruit on your behalf at Torre dot co, that's T O R R E. Dot. C O.
[Music stops playing]
Josephine : 00:53 Andres, what are we talking about today? What's the episode?
Andres: 00:55 So today we're talking about digital nomadism.
Josephine : 00:57 Like when people travel and work and go different places and bounce around?
Andres: 01:03 Yeah, it's, it's, it's that, but we're going to take a different angle because if you want to hear it all about the, you know, travel and Instagram life and making money while you smoke a joint on the beach or something, that's, there's 300,000 different podcasts and YouTube channels and books about that topic. In this podcast, we're going to be talking about reality. It's a reality check on digital nomadism. And by the way, this is a podcast, a series about remote work and remote work and digital nomadism are not the same thing. Digital nomadism is a way of working remotely. But I don't want you to think that in the next episode we'll be like, okay, this is the hack to make money while you're on a plane. No, that's not, I'm not like, that's not what this is about. But I still, I hope that you can get some insights on the first principles behind working remotely. And what is the story behind being a digital nomad um and what is it really like?
Erik: 01:58 So if we talk about remote work, this is that digital nomad romantic lifestyle, right?
Alex: 02:04 No, definitely not. I appreciate digital nomadism. I know many people that that do it, but I believe that they get an unfair amount of press compared to what most remote workers actually do.
Erik: 02:22 Well, it is romantic and compelling.
Andres: 02:25 It's, I think, a life you want to live, you know? Mojitos at the beach...
Alex: 02:28 Conferences in Bali...
Andres: 02:29 I can see the fun there. For context, future listeners, I am about to go to a conference in Bali on remote work and Alex is insistent that it's not going to be a lot of work and it's going to be a lot of partying. I'll let you, I'll, I'll update you on that.
Alex: 02:46 Most people that work remotely, they are usually working out of the same place. They are working out of their homes and more recently, they are working out of a coworking space. Digital nomadism is a small, a very tiny minority of the people that work remotely. One of the benefits of remote work is that it enables digital nomadism. In many instances, not always, in many instances, but it is not the only way. In fact, I believe that because of the unfair proportion of exposure that digital nomadism gets, it's even hurting remote work in general because for many people that haven't tried hiring remote employees, when you tell them, "yeah, I'm going to work remotely," they think, "oh, you're going to go to the beach and work out of the pool for two hours a day and pretend that you completed your day's work." And that's it.
Erik: 03:35 It's just an excuse to gif off- goof off, right?
Alex: 03:37 Exactly. which again, it's not a reflection of what I've seen as remote work. Do people do it? Yes. Every now and then they do it.
Alex: 03:45 But it's the exception to the rule. One of the challenges is that it's much easier to be a remote worker working out of your home, or working out of a co-working space than being a digital nomad. Being a digital nomad requires a lot of logistical coordination. I try to do it. I mean, I'm a remote worker for over 20 years now and for 15 or so of those years, I had been working out of my home. For the rest. I worked out of co-working spaces and for three months, I tried to be a digital nomad.
Andres: 04:18 With a backpack and everything?
Alex: 04:21 Actually, it was not even that. It was like, two weeks and it didn't work that well. So what happened is my wife Tania, and I, we had in our bucket list the idea of living in Japan and and I love Japanese food. My stomach is Japanese probably. The planets ended up aligning for us to be able to go to Japan with our parents so that they could take care of Azul, our daughter, while we worked. So this is 2015, we went there again because I know the risks of being a digital nomad. I wanted to make sure that most of my time there, I was going to be able to work well.
Andres: 04:59 Was there a lot of preparation?
Alex: 05:00 Yeah. So identifying the Airbnb for example, was important. I wanted an Airbnb with an area where I could actually work and be focused and not distracted by my daughter. I wanted an Airbnb with physical internet connection and a phone base, backup internet connection just in case. Also with nearby coffee shops in case those two internet connections failed by any chance and other things.
Erik: 05:25 So you had the space and the connections and all that set up.
Alex: 05:28 I also identify the co-working space that we could go and work from in case the original plan didn't work and yeah, it requires some preparation, but it turned out to be well while we were working out of this apartment in the suburbs of Tokyo, everything went according to plan. Okay. Now while being there, I took one week off, completely off to go visit Japan and I fell in love and before coming back to San Francisco, I wanted to visit other places in Japan that I had not been able to visit. So I decided to do digital nomadism for around 10 days or so. And that is, continue working while traveling. I thought it was going to work. I tried to book hotels and Airbnbs with the internet connection. I tried to time the times we're traveling with the time of the meetings I was supposed to be attending for work and the first two days, everything went according to plan. Then on the third day, my daughter got sick.
Erik: 06:25 Oh no.
Alex: 06:26 It's very difficult to find an English speaking doctor in Japan, in Tokyo. It's even more difficult to get such a doctor in the countryside of rural Japan, where we were. So forget about not only many of the things we were planning on doing, I had to forget about work as well because just figuring out how to get to a doctor, just figuring out how to communicate with a doctor in the U.S. To translate what was happening, it took enough time for me not to be able to do anything else. What's interesting is that we had identified doctors in Tokyo, so if something had happened in Tokyo, my parents would have taken my daughter to the doctor and I would have been able to continue working as usual.
Erik: 07:05 Right.
Alex: 07:06 It was the fact that I was traveling and trying to work at the same time that ended up leading to these loss of all logistics. So I had to take unscheduled time off from work to be able to address these situation. Of course, this doesn't happen all the time, but in digital nomadism when you're jumping from one place to another, it's very easy to find yourself in a place where maybe you cannot focus on work. Maybe you lose your computer, maybe there is no internet connection. Maybe the internet connection is too slow. In this trip by the way, something happened and that is, I tested the internet connection in one of the places and download speed was great. So I thought, Oh that's, that's great internet. I don't have an issue. Next day when I joined a video conference, the upload speed was terrible. So they could, I could see them, I could hear them, they could barely hear me back. So, et cetera, et cetera.
Erik: 07:59 Yeah, and anybody who's honest about their travels, I mean getting sick is part of it, right?
Alex: 08:04 So yeah, indeed indeed. But when you are traveling, on vacation, like that's, that's part of what, what's going to happen. When you, when you are doing that and working at the same time and trying to meet deadlines and such, work is the first thing that goes out of your list of things to do, if something like that happens.
Erik: 08:21 So once it becomes about the travel, it can't be about the work. It's just one or the other.
Alex: 08:25 I mean it can, it can, but for a small minority of people in very specific jobs. I mean, like for freelancers for example, I think that that it's more, is better fitted than for full time workers.
Erik: 08:35 Okay.
Andres: 08:36 I feel it has to do a lot with the cognitive load that it takes to arrange logistics for you to be traveling around. And in the same token, I feel like if you want to be traveling- the whole purpose of really, traveling, is discovering new places, right? And new cultures and experimenting new things. If you're a full time worker for a company, we only have a number of hours in the day and moving around and traveling and being able to experiment the culture and get to know new things and at the same time work with the same levels of productivity and same levels of commitment, I don't know how easy that is.
Alex: 09:12 It is not easy, and I don't think it's for the majority of people. I mean, discipline and routine are important things for most people to be able to reach their maximum productivity output. And when that's changing very frequently, you don't get there, you don't get those benefits,
Andres: 09:29 I feel like you still have to have the flexibility, right? Because sometimes for me, for example, routine and having uh you know, going to the same place and working out of the same places and doing the typical routine, it blocks my creativity. So, for example, the possibility just because I work remotely and I have to be mindful about this, but just because I, I can work remotely sometimes I, I decide to work one week out of a different city or a couple of weeks out of the different city or right now I'm working out of a different country you know, and having that option seems like a, like a good thing to have. What I think that it's important, it's just not making it a constant or continuous kind of situation.
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Josephine : 10:16 I know you guys recorded that conversation a couple months ago, but I think it's pretty cool how the things you've said still ring true. For example, you're right here with me in Canada. You just moved from the States. Remote work allows people this kind of flexibility that people don't, people who work somewhere set, who go to an office or whatever, they don't get that kind of flexibility. So it's cool for me to hear something you said a couple months ago, kind of still ring true in another, in another aspect.
Andres: 10:48 You know, that's kind of what we're trying to cover here in the, in the podcast. We're trying to go for the first principles behind everything that's going on with remote work. This is not a fad. This is the future. And we want to make sure that we figure out what is the best way to shape that future. So, so yeah, I mean that's, that's like, right now I think you're going to fly into Mexico in a couple of weeks, aren't you?
Josephine : 11:11 Yeah. I'm moving to Mexico City just... Cause I can.
Andres: 11:13 Wait. But are you moving like, and you're planning to stay there for several months?
Josephine : 11:19 Long term stay. If I can. However with our upcoming plans for Remoter.com, I'm, will probably be jumping around and won't get to do that. But for now I'm looking to spend at least two months there. So yeah.
Andres: 11:36 Fun. Well, you know, that's, that's entirely the, the, the purpose of, of working remotely. To have flexibility in the micro aspects, like in your day to day being able to say, you know, guys, I have to log off for awhile because I have to go to a doctor, or it become my kid or, I need some time off or whatever. And also in the macro, like you're able to move from a city to another city and still figure out a way to work from there. Now it's very important to say there's a difference between doing that and because between doing that and going, you know, full digital nomad where priorities are different, right? So for some digital nomads, the priority is to travel and to discover the world and the work aspect of it. It's just the way they make money to keep on paying for their travel. And that's fine. But we need to understand that there's a difference between those two things and that when companies are looking for talent, they are also want to make sure you know, the, the difference is clear.
Josephine : 12:33 Exactly. Yeah. And that's why I decided to do a long-term, a longer term stay in Mexico City. I don't plan on jumping around or anything. I kind of want to set a routine for myself and kind of build a community from scratch in Mexico City. See what I can do. But I will be there, like that is my base.
Andres: 12:54 I think it's a matter of mindset and like priorities as I was saying, like if your mind and your priorities are like, "Where should I go next? How can I discover the world in a different place?" Like if that's your priority, that's fine. But in your case, for example, you're eager about you're going to Mexico cause you love it so much. But your priority is to be able to work from Mexico, not to like, okay, let's see what city can I hop into and how can I get the money to go into their city and so on.
Josephine : 13:18 Exactly. And I wanted to mention that I recently got a book called Global Careers for my birthday and it's by a guy named Michael Swigunski and he teaches digital nomadism but if you read the book, it really isn't about hopping around all over the world. He does long-term stays. He does promote that as well.
Andres: 13:42 Reality is that once you have a full time employment or like in my case, you're working on a full time project, it's like an anchorage in a way. I think. Yeah. Like once you have, I need to optimize for being able to work 10 hours in my case, 10, 12, 14 hours from somewhere that feels comfortable. So my, my priorities to be able to set those things. And I think I've learned how to do it in the past couple of years and the book, it goes into a lot of detail and how to structure those things, I think. I love that it goes into that kind of detail. I think it's very valuable for someone that's getting started.
Josephine : 14:17 But I guess like you're in a position where you already have that figured out in a sense.
Andres: 14:22 So the reason I'm saying this is because I know a lot of friends and colleagues who are already working remotely and, and perhaps this is not the guide that they need. But if you are getting started and you want to learn how to work remotely or you know, become a digital nomad, that is a, I think that is a good starting place.
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Andres: 14:45 Thank you so much for tuning in. A few last words, if you enjoyed that episode. Please...
Josephine : 14:52 Follow us on social media at remoter project and let us know what you think about the latest episode.
Andres: 14:56 We'd love for you to join us as we continue building the Remoter Library on our website, remoter dot com. That's R E M O T E R dot com.
Josephine : 15:05 If you want even more resources, sign up for our free Founding and Growing Remotely online course. You can find that on our website or check the description for links. Don't forget to follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Andres: 15:20 And remember, we're here to make work fulfilling. So I'd like to ask you, what part will you play in shaping the future of work?