I am sure you know at least a few people that are working remotely while traveling. If you don’t, just think of some of the people whose travel adventures you follow on social media and wonder how do they do it. some are actually building successful businesses while exploring the world.

I won’t write about discipline, determination and the ability to quickly adjust to new environments, but  I will share some of the tools that we use that will help us manage while growing on the go.

 

My home base is Miami Beach, however I spent more then half of last year traveling and living in different places. It did not really matter, since most of our team has always been working remotely, from NYC, Miami, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Milan and Ukraine.

 

CRM:

It is absolutely necessary to have your clients and contacts organized. I have used and explored many CRM’s in the past and what I look for beyond functionality are a clean simple interface and something easy to train on. Since we do most of our communication via email, specifically   Gmail for Business (Gsuite), we found it time wasting to manually enter or copy and paste info from emails into a CRM.

 

If there were any features that can turn Gmail into a serious center point for your business operations, ProsperWorks has got it all. It plugs right into your Gmail so you can literally add a contact to your CRM with one click while you are reading their email and set tasks, reminders, assign tasks to other teammates etc.

What’s really powerful is how ProsperWorks automatically gathers a sh*t tone of information like company name, address, social media, article mentions etc so you not only don’t need to copy paste or manually enter, you actually get more information on your contact than you might have thought of.

 

Project Management:

Since most of our team is collaborating on creating content, it’s important for us to have a simple clear board with projects, tasks and the stages they are holding, our choice is trello as simple as sticky notes as functional as modern tech should be, plus lots of integrations.

 

People and Time Management:

I feel like this is a lesser known tool that not enough people utilize, I get asked all the time how do you manage a remote team, I mean how do you pay them and how do you track their time and how it’s being used.

 

HubStaff is so simple yet so powerful, think of it as a timeclock your team members can download, they simply press play and pause when they start and stop working for you. Now on your end, you will not only have the exact amount of time they worked and the exact amount of pay owed to the penny, you will also see screenshots

 

of their computer while working on your project, you can set this to different time increments like every 5, 10 or 15 minutes and you can see the percentage of keyboard and mouse activity during work time. When working with multiple people doing similar work, its lets you really see clearly who is being most productive.

It’s like walking into the office and seeing your teammates computer screen, sometimes you might want them to be prioritizing something else, this lets you peek on their screen virtually. They, of course, see a notification whenever their screen is being captured. In conclusion, HubStaff gives teams full transparency and takes care of freelancer payroll.

 

Focus:

In a generation that seems almost A.D.D by default, getting your mind to stay focused can be really challenging.

 

Have you ever thought that sound can replace Adderall? Seriously though, music is super powerful, it can fuel happiness or sadness, some music can put you to sleep and some can really wake you up, think of a really good beat that goes on just as you were gonna leave the party and decide to stay for one more song.

Last year I got to interview Will Henshall the founder of focus@will you can read more in the original article but pretty much Will was a British musician who got together the top neuroscientists to collectively brainstorm, they designed music for various brain types or A.D.D. levels. Seriously, this works, some of their users include a large percentage of Google and Tesla’s teams.

 

Knowledge:

Being content with the knowledge you have will not advance you any farther than you currently are, it’s important to read and learn constantly.

 

I think there is nothing like reading a print book cover to cover, it does take a lot of discipline in our fast-paced lifestyle.

What if I told you that you can get through a book in 15 minutes on average? I’m not a speed reader and I am not kidding. Blinkist is an app that summarizes all their books into short blinks, in audio as well as in text. Next time you go for a run you can get through two books before your day even began.

 

Warning, you might get tempted to go to Amazon and  purchase the full version of books you really enjoy.

 

Let us know what tools help your business in the comments.