Jason Langstorf Continuous Travel Experiments

Some time ago, Jason Lengstorf presented his article “ The cult of the work you were not going to join ”, which expanded the Medium collection and became one of the most readable on the site. I really liked his syllable and the arguments he gave about work. Now Jason shares the experience that he received as a result of his experiment with continuous travel.

“Hi, Jason, what are you doing now?”

- Now I have a lot of work with video calls. I work with one client on the basis of a long-term contract, and our goal is to create new tools in order to provide people with communication with each other no matter where they are. Let me explain to geeks: this is a video call system created on the basis of the WebRTC project. It works on a stack of MEAN + Socket.IO to implement interesting pieces.
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- Tell me about your travel experience. Where would you like to stay the longest?

- I have not been tied to any particular place for the past eight years, and I have been traveling for five years now. I got my first great experience of combining work and travel in 2010 (3 weeks in the UK / Holland / Belgium), and since then I have significantly improved this skill. I became a real digital nomad since 2014, from the moment when I stopped renting housing and, together with my girlfriend, Marisha, I ordered one-way tickets to Milan.

Before that, I stayed for a long time in Barcelona, ​​Madrid, London and the major city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. In other places, I spent less than a week, which is not enough time to learn and feel them.

Most of all I liked Barcelona and Chiang Mai.

London turned out to be very expensive, and for me as a citizen of the USA, it was too similar to the States. We stayed in Dalston - it can be said that it is a hipster district located north of Shoredch. And it really was like returning to Portland, but we paid for this privilege twice as much.

Madrid is a wonderful city, but we were there in February and shattered to the bone. I would like to go back there in a warmer period and try again, because I feel that I could love this city if it were not covered with hoarfrost.

Barcelona was a terrific experience. The mild climate in winter (the temperature never drops below zero) and the fantastic pace of life. Great food, reasonable prices (we spent less than the average monthly we spent in Portland, which we consider an achievement), and very friendly people. For the sake of justice, I must say that I have warm feelings for this city also because they adore the “time of the vermouth” (light meal at noon while waiting for dinner) during the day and frequent snacks.



Chiang Mai is all that you have heard about it: cheap, beautiful, friendly and surprisingly well equipped to lead a lifestyle that is not tied to a place. The only thing I could complain about was too far from the beach. When it's so hot outside, I prefer to spend a lot of time in the ocean. However, the lack of reservoirs is more than covered by high quality and low cost food. #protip : Make friends with the owners of small restaurants.)

My work style is slightly different from generally accepted standards: I do not like to sit in offices. Most of my work I do from a cafe, and I can do a lot of my projects with a slow Internet connection or even without it. So my workplace requirements are minimal. I tend to choose more carefully what I can do in my free time - both Barcelona and Chiang Mai represent a sea of ​​possibilities.

- Can you tell us more about how you build your work schedule while traveling? What helps you, and do you have any tricks to increase productivity that you could recommend to others?

“Every time I read about people who combine work and travel, they complain that they are in exotic places and have to sit and work, looking at it all from the window.”

You can call me strange, but I do not have a similar problem.

My working philosophy, to put it simply, consists of three elements:

1. To spend at the computer 40 hours a week or less . (This includes social networks, watching videos online (for example, I use Netfix), and everything I do while my laptop is open).
2. I group tasks by type of work, so that I can maintain concentration , not be distracted and work at the same pace by switching between tasks. (I wrote a separate article on how to improve your schedule for increased productivity, if you are interested in reading more information on this topic).
3. I spend time thinking and planning carefully what I'm doing . Without a plan, I lose a lot of time.

In those weeks when I follow these three rules, I manage to do everything on my list, and I have plenty of time to explore the places I visit.



Yes, if you have the opportunity, spend at least a month in every place you visit. It is much less productive to stop at the week: if you have to “pack up” and go further every week or two, it is very easy to wake up in a panic and get stuck in a routine of total lack of time. If you give yourself time to really settle down (which in addition helps you save money and get to know the city by looking at it through the eyes of a local resident), then this creates a sufficient period of time in which you can work productively without unnecessary stress.

If you do not want to stay somewhere for a whole month, then consider it as a vacation and do not plan to work at this time.

- How do the people you work with (clients, teams) relate to your lifestyle and work? How do your friends, family and just familiar homebodies react to this?

- For most of them, nothing has changed. I have always worked at home, so my clients do not know where I am, or they do not care, given that I am always in touch and doing everything on time. I always remotely hired my employees and contacted partners. In fact, I “see” my team after leaving even more than before.

Long ago, I realized that remote work is very beneficial for a business, perhaps even more profitable than for the workers themselves. The very fact that you hire people without seeing them live may look frightening, but in reality this is not much different from the situation when they are sitting in the office (unless, of course, you are used to controlling every step that turns out to be you fail).

My family is very supportive of me, although it’s all pretty hard for my mom. She is experiencing, and I am powerless to convince her that in many places that I visit, I’m probably more secure than in New York. But it seems to me that, if we discard anxiety, she finds it very exciting. We communicate using Skype and Google Hangouts, so I am always there.

All my friends travel a lot, so I can meet them in different places. After a couple of weeks, I meet with friends at a conference in London where I speak. In June, we had a large group in Las Vegas, and soon after that there was a meeting in Toronto.

In addition, during my travels it was surprisingly easy to meet new friends. With the help of various online communities (for example, #nomads ), as well as using traditional personal acquaintances at events, you can meet other travelers, not to mention the local people with whom I happened to make friends. I'm not as lonely as you might think.

- What are your biggest difficulties in the nomadic way of life, and how do you cope with them?

- Sometimes you want to plunge into the routine and do the same thing every day. It goes against everything that I wanted, starting to travel. So I have to take note of my tendency to set comfortable rhythms for life. A certain mode is important, but only when you use it in moderation.

I also have certain difficulties in keeping in touch with friends and family. I sat up over the project or got carried away with the book, and by the time I remember that I wanted to call my brother, he was already three in the morning. I need to put communication with loved ones above in my list of priorities.

- What do you think is the future of digital nomadism?

- It seems to me that now is the Golden Age for remote work. Lawmakers could not decide what to do with regular travelers, so that we could seep through a lot of "cracks" and various nuances unnoticed.

I worry that in the relatively near future, these loopholes will be closed - especially those related to the uncertainty of exactly where the workflow takes place when we sit at our computers. Then we will look for other ways.

However, I hope my opinion is mistaken. Perhaps our quantity is still too small to attract the attention of the government.

In addition, I also see that this lifestyle can be made even more accessible by websites like Airbnb, which make it easier to find places to stay; Recently, the popularity and reliability of Wi-Fi has increased, and more and more companies are beginning to realize that they will not keep top-notch professionals chained to offices.

- What, in your opinion, is the best way for novice nomads to prepare for a long-term journey and begin a nomadic life?

“The main thing is to remove anchors from your life and think that most of the expenses that make us make ends meet in the states just disappear when you live exclusively on tourist visas (for example, utilities and contracts with mobile operators).

This life is much more accessible than it may seem to anyone who has not tried it. And, if you treat those who love challenges, this life is more worthwhile than I might have imagined.

This post first appeared in Nomadlist Stories as part of a series of interviews with interesting travelers. If you like it, you can follow the Nomadlist on Twitter for information on upcoming interviews. If you are already a digital nomad, we invite you to join the #nomads community. If we inspired you, support our independent documentary on digital nomads called One Way Ticket .