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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2257 4 Tech Must-Haves When Working While Traveling + Free Ride Friday
00:17:58
Don’t leave home without these — and we’re not talking about hardware. You can’t put these items in your bag, but if you’re working on the road, each and every one is a potential lifesaver.
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Omar Zenhom
Foreign welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show where you get better at business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started my co founder back in 2014 and today is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Friday, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away our Automated webinar challenge, our 30 day course on how to automate your leads and sales with automated webinars. It retails for $500 over at webinar ninja.com awc or you can win it for free. Just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like right now to see if you won. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's episode you will learn my four tech must haves when it comes to working while traveling. Now, I'm not going to cover physical hardware like your computer or chargers or converters. I've covered that in previous episodes. This is more software and strategy when it comes to traveling. Listen, when you're out of your workspace, your home office, your office office, you're out of your comfort zone. You're out of where you normally operate and solve problems. This means things can happen that you do not expect. You got to be prepared. You got to be ready for anything. You got to have a backup plan for the backup plan. I've started traveling after COVID 19 while working and I have made a list of things that I want to share with you that really have covered my back. There are a few times where I was so grateful that I had this set up and that I had these tools at my disposal. Otherwise I would have been in big, big trouble and it would ruin my traveling experience because I'd be so stress stressed out. These are lifesavers and hopefully by passing them on to you, they'll save you a lot of stress and a lot of heartache while you're traveling and getting your work done. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So like I mentioned in previous episodes, I've covered hardware and tools and gadgets that really do well in having your back when it comes to working while traveling. Things like power converters, backup power supplies or chargers, webcam, wired headphones, all kinds of stuff that really help you to do your normal tasks, whether it's meeting or webinars or recording or podcasting like I do. This episode doesn't cover that. This episode covers the things we take for granted when we're not traveling and sometimes fall short. Sometimes they. They really fail you, especially when you're going to a different country, a different environment. Things can get hairy quickly. So let me get started so you can start grabbing these for your next trip. So my first of the four is reliable Internet. I know this sounds kind of obvious, but I'm going to talk a little bit in detail how I make sure I have reliable Internet. Before I book any of my hotels, I like to email them directly with a few questions. The first question is, do you have wired Internet? Meaning can I plug in my computer with an ethernet cable that's connected directly to your Internet? Depending on the city, the location, the country, this could be very common. And this could be completely unavailable, right? It's just not a thing. But I like to have this as a backup. Hardwiring your computer, especially if you are running a conference or a webinar or an online course or some sort of live workshop, you need to make sure that you can't lose connection. My next question I ask is, okay, what, whether you have it or not, whether you have wired Internet or not, do you have wireless Internet? And if you do, what is the speed? And I give them a link to speedtest.net and I ask them to run a test of their wifi and send me a screenshot. This is very easy to do and most hotels are happy to do this if it means earning your business. And speedtest.net just basically runs a test on the upload and the download speed of their Internet connection. And it gives me understanding. Okay, this is good enough. I like to look for at least the 30 down and 20 up. 20 is kind of a lot for upload speed. But make sure that, hey, even if this is a good number, meaning it's a low traffic time on their Ethernet or on their wifi. Okay, great, I can rely on some solid Internet. Now. This is not where I stop my reliable Internet plan, right? I gotta make sure wherever I go, wherever I travel, I can be connected to, to the Internet. This is my whole business, my whole life is on the Internet. So I gotta make sure that I can be able to work. So my backup plan to the Ethernet, to the WI fi, just in case something happens when I'm there, there's a power outage, their wifi goes down. It could happen is I always have data on my phone now. I always roam with my own cellular phone. What does that mean? It means that I don't buy local sims when I land a country. A lot of countries they offer like visitor sims where when you go to their country, whether it's in Europe or in Japan or Asia, this is actually a good deal. Usually these visitor SIM cards, you can just pop it into your smartphone and it'll give you, you know, lots of data for a pretty reasonable price, probably cheaper than you roaming every day. But my company, my cellular phone provider has an option where I can roam every day when I travel for only additional $5. Now when I travel for an extended period of time, like more than two weeks or so, this can add up and it can get expensive, but it's the price I want to pay because I know for sure I have a connection on my phone because I'm roaming. And I can always tether or use my phone as a hotspot to connect to my laptop or connect directly on my phone to whatever I want to do on the Internet. This gives me like a surefire way that I have a connection when I'm traveling. Now the other reason this is kind of a bonus tip here that I like to roam with my phone and not use a local SIM card is I want to maintain my phone number because often, and we'll talk about this in a moment, when you're traveling abroad and you sign into your accounts online with your email marketing or personal email software that you use, they won't recognize you and feel like you're at a different location. And they'll ask you to do two factor authentication, which means they might send you an SMS to your phone. And if your phone is not working because you swapped the SIM cards and your phone number is not connected, then you're not going to get that sms. So this is another reason why I like to roam. This is especially safe, especially when it comes to banking and you need to verify things. You don't want to get cut off. So reliable Internet. I have a plan for hardwired Internet if possible. Even if that's in the lobby, in their office or their business room, whatever they might call it. I have the WI fi and I get them to do a speed test. And then I have my own phone just in case. Roaming with Internet with 4G or 5G and I can go ahead and tether with my phone just in case. My next tech must have is related to the Internet and that's a vpn. I always use a VPN even back in my office in My home. But I specially use a vpn meaning I make sure it's always on. On my computer, on my phone. Why is that? Because a lot of the Internet, wi fi that's available at your hotel or at cafes or whatever you are, they're very unsecure, right? They're very unsecure. They're easily penetrable. It's a hacker's playground, okay? And the worst thing that can happen is you getting hacked or one of your accounts getting hacked while you're traveling. Has happened to me. And once you get burned, once, you really, really remember it. For those who know me, know that my background is Egyptian. And the Egyptians have a saying. They say that those who burn their mouth on hot soup start blowing on their yogurt. Which means you're over cautious, right? And I make sure I have a VPN at all times. It protects you. And what a VPN does is that it encrypts your IP address. It reroutes the way the Internet is connected to your computer to make sure it's safe. The other reason why you may want to use your VPN is you want to maybe make sure that you're still connecting to the Internet as if you are still back home. So you'll connect to to Australia or the US or wherever you're from. And your computer and the Internet will interact with you as if you're still in your local country. Meaning it's not going to take you to sites and translate them into Mandarin. If you're in China, for example, or if you are trying to buy something on the Apple Store because you forgot your charger and you're in France, it's not going to take you to the French Apple Store. So basically a VPN makes sure that you are connected to the Internet as if you are in your home country. Because you could choose the country you connect to. But most importantly, it's a great security measure to secure your Internet connection. Also, just in terms of entertainment, if you like to watch a bit of Netflix or your favorite shows on whatever streaming service while you're away, you want to make sure that you have a VPN so you can connect to your home country. Because sometimes the shows that you watch are not available in the country. You are at just a little bit of a fun tip here when it comes to, you know, a little bit of R and R while you're traveling. All right. My fourth must have, when it comes to working while traveling is a cloud backup. So I'm a Mac user. I have all my data Backed up to Apple's cloud. That means every file that I save on any device, computer, phone, iPad, my second computer, it doesn't matter. It's backed up to my cloud account. Why is this important? Well, for any reason, if I'm traveling and my computer conks out, just totally dies. Happened to me, by the way. I was at a conference in Bali. My computer just totally conked out, and I couldn't work anymore. So I had to buy a new computer. And because I had the cloud backup, I was able to not skip a beat. I didn't have to worry about the hard drive and all the data and the files that were on the, you know, broken computer. I migrated it to the new computer, and I didn't skip a beat. It was able to continue to work. This is especially important for me because I publish a lot of content. I record a lot. I want to make sure those episodes still live. And the best way to make sure of it is to have a backup in the cloud. This also helps you sync all your files. So you might have a desktop computer and a laptop computer, and you can access all your files in one place when you're traveling. That's the cloud. And it's just brilliant. Yes, you pay a monthly fee, but it's so worth it given the fact that you have peace of mind that everything is going to be okay. The other reason why I love the cloud backup is because with my iPhone, I can go to my files on my phone and access them if I ever need them. For example, a photocopy of my passport, a photocopy of my driver's license is in my files on my computer, but I can reach it because it's backed up to the cloud on my phone. And if I ever need to show it to somebody at a hotel, at a rental office, whatever, I'm covered. And again, if any of your devices decide to just break or you lose them or they get stolen, you have a backup in the cloud. I can't stress this enough. Even if you just do this while you're away, this is well worth it. But I recommend you do it all the time, because this is going to happen even back home. But you're especially vulnerable when you're out of your comfort zone and you're traveling. When you're going from hotel to hotel, train to train, plane to plane, it's one of those things that you don't need it until you need it. Kind of like insurance. All right, my fourth must have. When it comes to working while traveling, I'm A big, big user of Google Docs, sheets, files, forms, all kinds of Google office tools, right? My bread and butter is sheets and docs. We use that a lot in our business. Whether it's sheets to organize our podcast episodes or docs to organize our blog post, or our copy or email scripts we want to send out to partners. I'm constantly using these tools. I'm constantly using docs and sheets, and probably there's not a day that goes by that I don't have a doc or sheet open. Now, the cool thing about Google Docs and Google Sheets and all their tools is that on your phone, on the app, you can save your sheets and your docs for offline use. So my little strategies. Every time before I travel, I open up my phone and I make sure that it's available to offline, meaning it will save the last copy to your local phone. When you have Internet now, say, for example, you lose Internet connection. You don't have, you know, 4G connection. You don't have wifi anywhere. You're on a train in a tunnel for a half hour. Happens, happens all the time. And you need to connect to one of these docks, one of these sheets. You need to work on it by having offline mode, you can work on it, you can open it up on your phone, on your iPad, you can get a lot done, and then it will sync automatically and update it with the new content once you have Internet connection. Sometimes I just want to plan out my episodes, like my podcast episodes on a notebook. I just want to see the names of the episodes and the dates and when they are. And if I can't open that because it's not available offline, because I don't have connection at the time, I'm stuck. I can't work right. And that's what I love about Google Docs. It allows you to download it and make sure that it's ready for use even when you're offline. So my strategy is every time I'm about to travel, I make sure all my favorite sheets and docs are made available offline. I could do this on my computer, I can do this on my iPad. On my phone, I just go to file and go to make available offline. Down the list, I click that and it's set to go. All right, I went through my four must haves reliable Internet, including using my phone as a backup, a VPN. I like to use ExpressVPN. That's my VPN of choice. There's a lot out there, a lot of different options, but this is the most reliable, safest one I know. I've been using them for over a decade. Cloud backup. I'm an Apple user, so I use the icloud and of course Google Docs and sheets and using their offline mode. And I got a bonus one for you. World Time Buddy. World Time Buddy is a tool that allows you to see easily on a grid how your local time zone compares to other time zones. Now, we use World Time Buddy all the time, even when we're not traveling back home, because we have a remote team that is across, I don't know, four continent and something like that, tons of different time zones. So when we're scheduling meetings, we use it all the time. But I think World Time Buddy is a great travel companion because sometimes you need to compare your new time zone, wherever you're traveling to, to your home time zone. Because sometimes you're going to be booking meetings, making appointments for when you get back, and you want to make sure that you're not messing up that appointment or that time for that appointment, thinking you're gonna stay on the time zone you are while traveling. It's really hard to Mess up with WorldTime Buddy because again, it's a grid. You can just pop in your time zone, your local time zone, whatever city you're in, and then your home time zone. And you can say, okay, when it's this time at home, what time is it here? So when I make that appointment on my calendar, I'm mindful, especially if your calendar automatically changes to the local time zone, they can get really confusing. So WorldTime Buddy's a time saver. It's kind of the ultimate place of truth when it comes to time. And it allows you to really know what you're doing when you're doing it before and after your trip. Well, there you have it, guys. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. Hope today's episode was helpful. But today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is Terry Legs. Terry Legs says good advice. This show has some good advice. Thanks, Terry Legs, for that great review. Your mission is to eat. Email me over at Omar100- MBA-NET so I can hook you up with the lifetime membership through the automated webinar challenge, our $500 course over at webinar ninja.com AWC showing you how to automate your leads and sales with automated webinars. You just want it for free. If you want to win a free ride, just like Terry did, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review. It's that simple. That's how you enter our weekly random draw where we announce a winner every single week on Friday. Just like right now, you can't win. It's if you don't play. So go ahead and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Traveling is stressful. You can't get around that. It's an adventure, it's fun. A lot of people enjoy it. But there is a level of stress that is involved. You're out of your comfort zone. There are new things that are getting thrown at you. You have to acclimate. So anything that can lower your stress levels, that can allow you to worry less and cover your back and make sure that you have backup plans for if things go wrong. Hopefully nothing goes wrong, but if things go wrong, this gives you peace of mind. And then when something kind of goes awry or not as planned, you can calmly take on that situation because you know you have a plan in place and you have these tools in mind. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode where we continue our four part series, Part two on the Business of Japan. Fun, quirky, cute, interesting things that Japan does that you can do in your business to help grow. Just like Japan has to be the third world's largest economy and one of the healthiest gdp in the G7 nations. I traveled to Japan to find out how do they do it and how we can do it as well. Until then, take care.