Weekly Digest: September 30, 2016

Guten tag (good day in German)! Here is your weekly dose of my best tips for how to travel the world while you grow your career and make a difference.

Travel the world

My obsession with both travel and tech leads me to try every travel app that comes to the market. I recently did an audit to see which apps I continue to use on my trips and I came up with the following (relatively) shortlist.

• Things to do: TripScout, Foursquare, AFAR
• Travel info: XE Currency, Google Translate, Elves
• Flights/transportation: Skyscanner, Hitlist, Rome2Rio, Uber
• Hotel/lodging: Hostelworld, Airbnb, Hotel Tonight, Booking.com, Orbitz
• Layovers: GateGuru, PriorityPass
• A few that did not make the shortlist, but I’m keeping a close eye on: Gogobot, Spot, Google Trips, and some of the new concierge apps (e.g., Lola, Pana, Facet)

I describe each app and provide download links for iPhone and Android in this post: Best Travel Apps You Actually Need.

Grow your career

I have been a longtime advocate of remote teams. Working where you want has huge productivity, lifestyle, cost, and recruiting benefits to both organizations and employees. However, most advocates neglect to mention the level of hard work and conscious effort required to build a culture, manage a team, and keep people in the loop with distributed environments. I recommend anyone interested in the topic to study how Automaticc (the creators of WordPress) does it. They commit significant thought and effort to make it work and have scaled their remote culture to 500 hundred employees across 57 countries. They prioritize transparency with everything, pay for teams to get together throughout the year, and communicate obsessively. Here is a good article about how they operate. Also, after over a decade of experimentation, here are the tools they use to make their culture work: Slack, P2, wikis, and Zoom. We currently use the same tools (except for P2) at TripScout as well.

Make a difference

If you have a passion for a cause, but don’t feel like you have the resources to make a real difference, then I recommend launching a campaign on CrowdRise. They are an insanely easy and friendly platform to help you raise money for any cause that inspires you. I was hesitant to launch my first campaign publicly, but I was immediately overwhelmed at the generosity of friends who helped us exceed our goal in just a few days. Crowdfunding not only lets you help your cause way more than you can do on your own, it also helps spread the word about important issues and provides an easy opportunity for others to get involved with a good cause (which most people want to do). I am looking to kick off another campaign on Crowdrise very soon.

Fun updates:

• Most popular post on Instagram  –  A throwback to my honeymoon in the Maldives
• Featured article  –  I recently launched a travel show on YouTube! Check out my channel here and it would be so amazing if you subscribed :). Let me know if you have ANY travel questions you need answered.
• Quote of the week  –  “You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.” – John Wooden

Thanks for your attention and have an awesome weekend!

Konrad

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