The Beginning

Thanks to the remote work opportunities offered by Yumasoft, I decided to give this lifestyle a try. In May 2022, I purchased a van, an Opel Vivaro. Over the next 8 months, in my spare time, I transformed it into a campervan. The conversion itself was an adventure, requiring a significant amount of work, the acquisition of new knowledge and skills, and patience. The end result brought me great satisfaction and faith in my own abilities. In early January 2023, I set off on my journey.

The Route

I began my journey in Wrocław (Poland) and headed straight for Spain. I wanted to escape the cold and rainy weather as quickly as possible. In less than 4 days, I reached the French-Spanish border, and since then, the sun accompanied me for (almost) the entire six-month journey.

The plan was to travel around the Iberian Peninsula along the coast. And this plan almost succeeded. Almost, because to my surprise, in May, northern Spain was still chilly and rainy. I avoided the interior simply because it was much colder there than on the coast. You can see the route of my journey on the map.

The return journey, from the Spanish-French border to Wrocław, was also without many stops, except for a few days visiting friends in Brussels.

At the beginning of June, after traveling 10,000 kilometers on wheels and (luckily the last) 500 kilometers on a tow truck, I reached Wrocław.

Life in the Campervan

I equipped the campervan to be self-sufficient. That means I have a toilet on board, water tanks, and a solar panel providing electrical power. This allows me to avoid using campgrounds. Out of approximately 150 nights, I spent maybe 15 in campgrounds. This not only saved me a lot of money but, more importantly, allowed me to “live” in beautiful places: on beaches, cliffs, in pine forests, by lakes, rivers, and in the mountains. Although there were times when I slept in a supermarket parking lot or in the city center. I mainly found “wild” spots using the Park4Night app, which is popular among vanlifers, enabling me to meet like-minded people and chat with them around a campfire.

Life in the campervan is simple but not easy. It’s simple in a way, similar to life in the countryside: without haste, distractions, in peace, in contact with nature and its rhythm. It’s not easy because it lacks the conveniences we’re accustomed to: the amount of water in the tank is limited, as is the gas in the bottle, space is limited, and you have to search for a new place to stay almost every day, as well as places to refill clean water, empty dirty water, and the toilet every few days.

The combination of advantages, apparent disadvantages, and remote work provides flexibility and freedom, which is the essence of this lifestyle. You can plan your trips as you see fit, at your own pace, adapting to your work schedule and personal preferences.

Working in the Campervan

Working in the campervan is not simple and not easy! The limited space rules out having a comfortable chair, a large desk, or two additional monitors. It’s definitely less comfortable than at home or in an office. 

Just like working from home, working from a campervan requires self-discipline and good organization. Additionally, the beautiful changing view outside the window doesn’t help. You have to cultivate the mindset that it’s not a vacation; it’s a privilege to be able to work in such places. Despite these challenges, work provides additional satisfaction because it enables us to lead this kind of lifestyle.

Regarding the internet, in each country I purchased a local SIM card with mobile data. Usually, the coverage was good. When it was poor or nonexistent, I had to move a few kilometers or change plans altogether. Fortunately, this happened rarely. An alternative solution would be Starlink, but it’s very expensive.

Reflections

Living on the road allows you to feel the call of adventure, a thrill of excitement, step out of your comfort zone, and get to know yourself better. However, long-term travel like this isn’t for everyone. Therefore, it’s best to rent a campervan for a week first and see if it suits you. I sincerely recommend giving it a try.

Life in a campervan as a digital nomad has far more advantages than disadvantages. Besides work, traveling allows you to discover new cultures, flavors, and traditions. Meeting local residents and fellow travelers from all over Europe becomes a way to broaden your horizons and understand the diversity of the world. It’s a lifestyle that promotes a minimalist approach to material possessions and paying attention to what truly matters.

The post Half a year in a campervan in Spain and Portugal appeared first on Yumasoft.

The development of remote work has increased significantly in the recent months. How is that affecting the world and politics? Have governments already defined who a digital nomad is? How do countries see remote workers – are they welcome or not? What about visa problems for digital nomads – is it being solved, or is still kept in the gray area? ?

In today’s essay, I’m trying to answer these questions and make some predictions on how the future of remote work will look like.

Remote work in 2021

First, let’s see a few statistics. We’ve already taken a brief look at them, but it was more related to digital nomads. Let’s see, what can we say about the current state of telework.

This is quite interesting. As we all know, COVID increased the number of remote workers significantly in 2020. Now we can see the employees in the United States are slowly, but steadily, going back to offices. Even though, in June 2021, when the economy has already been going back on track for quite some time, 35% of employees are remote workers. Before the pandemic, this was only 7%.

In addition to that, 30% of people work in hybrid mode (few days in the office and few days working from home). That all means that 65% of the US workforce is capable of doing their work remotely.

These people will still want to leverage workations and living in different places than their employers or clients are based. This is especially true for those employed in big cities, where costs of living are relatively high. Often, by moving to a lower-cost area, these people can save a lot of money.

We know the scale, but what about quality?

As you can see, with time passing, more employees and employers think remote work increases productivity.

This makes sense, because with time, companies are refining their telework policies, getting used to using proper communication tools and techniques etc.

Fine. Now it’s clear that the working out-of-office has got really popular in the last 2 years. Employers and employees were forced to switch to this working mode, which was far from ideal at the beginning. However, in the end, they made it better. Tools improved and work’s quality followed ?

Sovereign Individuals – the new social class of the digital age

It might be surprising to most of you, but this scenario (common telework, physical borders losing their meaning etc.) was predicted in a 1999-book The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age. The authors provide a wide context on how societies change when a new era is coming. The modern era – information age – has been predicted to be the fastest-coming revolution in history. That’s exactly what we can see today, and this phenomenon is often called the digital era ?

One of the most significant predictions made by Sovereign Individual authors is that the nation states and governments, as we used to know them, will become obsolete and less significant in XXI century. As people can now easily vote with their feet, countries should start competing for digital workers, referred to as sovereign individuals.

I don’t want to go into too many details here. If you want to know more, I strongly recommend reading the book.

However, let’s try to see whether the governments really care about remote workers.

How are governments attracting remote workers?

Currently, in my view, governments can divided into 2 types from remote work point of view:

• completely ignoring the fact of digital workers’ existence and their troubles, keeping telework in the gray area
• seeing huge potential in remote workers and going ahead of their needs, welcoming and encouraging them to move into their countries and work remotely from there.

Still, most governments prefer the first, gray area option ?‍ Fortunately, there are more and more countries attracting digital nomads, offering tax incentives and easy visa processes. Let’s see a few of the most interesting examples in the next sections.

Georgia

Georgia (the country) has launched heir Remotely from Georgia program in the middle-2020 to attract digital workers from around the world. Citizens of 95 countries were allowed to enter the country and legally work remotely while in Georgia. All this happened during the global pandemic, when most countries in the world were closed to foreigners.

Would you ever think, that such a small country like Georgia proposes such a solution? It’s not common, even within the most popular digital nomad destinations, to give legal work permit in such an easy way. The only requirement was $2000 earnings per month for covering expenses while in the country.

What’s even more interesting, Georgia is offering very attractive tax rates for freelancers – you can pay as little as 1% tax on your income.

Portugal

Portugal has become a digital nomads’ hub in Europe in the last few months. It seems that the mild climate, quite affordable living costs and nomads-friendly attitude of government officials attracted a lot of digital nomads into the country.

In the recent interview, Portugal’s Minister of Labor and Social Security said:

Telework can be a ‘game changer’ if we profit from the advantages and reduce the disadvantages (…)

We consider Portugal one of the best places in the world for these digital nomads and remote workers to choose to live in, we want to attract them to Portugal.

Ana Mendes Godinho, Portugal’s Minister of Labor and Social Security, source

It is very nice to hear that some countries are welcoming digital nomads, a phrase that can’t often be heard in South-East Asia, for instance ?

EU citizens can easily travel to and work remotely from Portugal based on EU laws. However, what’s interesting is that Portugal is offering the D7 visa also to non-EU citizens. The requirement is to have a passive income equivalent to €7,620 per year. This allows anyone to live and work legally in Portugal, opening a business there or qualify for Portuguese citizenship after 5 years in the country.

Malta

Malta is another country which is very open to remote workers. They have launched an official program called Nomad Residence Permit. As long as you are employed by a foreign company, are a freelancer or owner of an offshore company and can work remotely, you qualify for the nomad permit. You must also have a gross monthly income of 2,700 EUR.

An interesting point here is that the digital nomads earning money remotely while in Malta are not subjected to personal income tax. You only need to pay the tax in the country where your income is generated (or where your tax residency is, but not in Malta).

Costa Rica

In August 2021, Costa Rica approved a law to introduce digital nomads visas. You need to earn at least $3000 per month (or $5000 per family). If your application is successful, you can stay in Costa Rica for up to a year, with a possibility to extend it for another year. Previously, a tourist visa allowed people from most countries to stay only for 90 days.

Similarly to Malta, digital nomad visa holders are exempt from paying local income tax in Costa Rica. Teleworkers can also easily open a bank account in the country.

Taiwan

Coming back to South-East Asia… As I already mentioned, countries in this region of the world still keep digital nomads mostly in gray area. However, there’s a tiny island which seems to have noticed the potential ?

This island country is Taiwan. Within their Gold Card program, foreigners can obtain resident visa and work permit in the country. The card allows you to work legally in Taiwan, but also work remotely for offshore clients or companies.

To be eligible for the Taiwanese Gold Card, your professional skills must be related to one of the following areas: Science and Technology, Economics, Education, Culture and Art, Sport, Finance, Law, or Architecture. As long as you can prove your skills in one of them (e.g. by presenting an academic thesis or work experience proof), the card should be given to you without bigger issues. As programmers, we are a perfect fit ?

Gold Card valid for 1 year costs around $160, while the one valid for 2 years costs around $200. You can also bring your spouse, who can also apply for residence and work permit in Taiwan. You will also be eligible for public healthcare after 6 months waiting period.

In addition to all that, for the first 3 years of living in Taiwan with Gold Card, half of your income up to around $110,000 will not be taxable. Sounds good, doesn’t it? ?

What about the most popular digital nomad destinations?

What’s surprising for me, most of the most popular digital nomads destinations and not doing their homework here. It seems they don’t see (or don’t want to see?) the potential in remote work and the changes that happened very quickly in the last few months.

A great example is Indonesia, the country which normally attracts a lot of teleworkers into its island Bali. They have recently announced to launch a digital nomad visa in the near future. However, the planned requirements are insane. You will have to deposit around $143,000 (or around $179,000 for family) in an Indonesian bank account in order to be eligible for the visa… ?‍

In my opinion, such countries will lose a lot in the years to come. Remote workers have a huge potential for bringing a lot of money into the country. The countries that realize that soon enough will be the winners.

The future of remote work

I think that more and more countries will realize the potential of telework. They will start defining who digital nomads are and how their income should be taxed. Easy-to-obtain work visas for remote workers will be more popular. As national borders are beginning to have much less meaning, countries will need to start competing for location-independent professionals. Digital workers will seek for a state in which the taxes they pay are proportional to the value they get.

Will the residency and associated benefits become a free market good? Will the governments be competing with each other, offering “a better residency package”? I guess we will see that in the years to come. For sure, COVID accelerated these movements a lot. Now the question is, which countries will realize that and enter the new “market” the fastest.

The post How Remote Work Is Changing The World appeared first on Yumasoft.

However, as with everything, being a digital nomad has its dark sides. In today’s article, I’m exploring the most annoying digital nomads problems. Read on to be well-prepared for this lifestyle before you decide to take it on! ?

Visas

When traveling full-time, visas can be a real pain. When living in your home country, you don’t think about that aspect of life at all. However, digital nomads who want to stay longer in a foreign country must apply for an appropriate visa first. What’s problematic is the permitted length of stay. In most Southeast Asian countries, which are very popular among remote workers, foreigners can stay in the country for up to one month. After that time passes, you need to either exit the country or apply for another, often expensive visa extension.

Because of that, there’s a common practice within digital nomads called a visa run. It basically means to leave a particular country by bus or plane for a day or two (sometimes even for just several hours!), only to go back and get another visa stamp in your passport ? Some countries are even trying to introduce mechanisms preventing visa runs. All this makes digital nomads life complicated, stressful and costly.

Taxes

One of the most frustrating digital nomads problems is taxation. In most countries in the world, if you stay for longer than 6 months, you should be paying taxes in the country you’re staying in. However, because remote work is still a gray area in most of the world, the taxes often cannot be technically paid by a foreigner.

The issue is that most of the world’s countries still have not defined what a remote work really is and how the taxation and visa rules relate to it. In effect, often you are not able to legally obtain a visa that gives you a tax ID, which is needed for paying taxes ?

Even if you finally get a tax ID in the country you live in, there are issues with double taxation. Assuming you have your company registered in your home country and are still paying taxes there, you might be taxed twice – both by your home country and your new residence country. In such case, digital nomads must analyze the double taxation agreements between the two countries, which are often hard to understand. Establishing your double taxation rules sometimes requires consulting a local tax advisor, which adds up to the cost of your trip.

Apartments not suitable for remote work

For me, this is a very annoying point! If I were to choose one of the digital nomads problems I could magically solve, I would vote for apartments not adjusted for working. Sometimes even such a would-seem-irrelevant thing like a bad table or chair not suitable for working with a laptop can be a disaster for your stay. Especially if you book a flat for a longer period.

What I hate the most are these IKEA chairs, popular in the whole world ?:

I can’t even express how much I do hate this chair ? Maybe they look fancy, but try sitting on it and working with laptop for 8 hours… The back of this chair is very flexible/elastic, so it is impossible to sit straight on it. So I am publicly asking all apartments owners – please stop buying IKEA FANBYN (and similar) chairs! ?

Adding to that too low/too high tables, poor WiFi quality and not enough light, the apartment you book for a few months can become your remote work prison!

Internet

Digital nomads need constant Internet access. While in most cities it is not a problem, when you want to travel to a bit more remote areas it becomes painful. WiFi is often unreliable, and mobile networks also often can’t be counted on.

I remember joining our daily meeting with Yumasoft team in late 2019, when I was living in a remote part of Bali, Indonesia. Amed is a beautiful place, with rice fields and volcano views, but the Internet really sucks there ? On a video call, I couldn’t use my camera of course. Even with only voice, I remember me saying something and the guys in Poland hearing it after 20-30 seconds. It was fun, but also a bit of stress.

Time zones

Another challenge digital nomads face on a daily basis are time zones. Working from different continents than your colleagues requires you to adjust to the majority of the team’s timezone. Having my team based in Europe while living in Asia, I had to start working around noon and finish work around 8PM.

This becomes even more problematic if most of your team is based in the same place all the time. This has been my case for almost 3 years at Yumasoft. Fortunately, we are quite flexible with working hours, and we try to use asynchronous communication as much as we can. Nevertheless, if you want to become a digital nomad, be prepared that time zones will most probably not be your best friends ? Of course, remember to always check the timezone in the country you are going to travel to!

Making friends/socializing

Many digital nomads problems are related to social aspects of life. Working remotely, it might be hard to make new friends. If you are not an outgoing person or maybe an introvert (as many programmers are), you will not have the safe physical office space to expose you to some social interactions.

Getting trapped at your apartment may make you more isolated than you have ever been before. The solution is to sometimes go out to a café or a coworking space. You can always meet like-minded people there. However, for introverts, it may come at a price.

The same applies to the team you work at. If some of your teammates work at the office, you may feel “out of sync”. Some jokes and stories are always only told in the office, and you will not hear them. It might make you feel “out of the team” at some point.

That is why, at Yumasoft we try to organize remote work properly. It is very important that everyone feels part of the team. However, be prepared that it may not work ideally in every company you may work for.

Work-traveling balance

This point is similar to work-life balance, but what work takes from us in case of digital nomads is not life, but traveling ?

Imagine you are living on an exotic island in Thailand. The weather is great, there are some stunning beaches around you have not visited yet – you arrived just 3 days ago. However, you must finish this important task… Maybe you can go on Saturday? Not this time – you must visit the local immigration office for your visa extension.

That is what I mean by work-traveling balance. Being in exotic and interesting places makes you wanting to explore them, not work ? Going further – sometimes you cannot go to some place, because it is not suitable for remote work (poor Internet etc.). It makes you resign from visiting some cool places around, because you need to work. Even if they are at your fingertips. Unfortunately, being a digital nomad is not a constant holiday ?

Not being understood by others

After you start a digital nomad lifestyle, you will notice that no one really understands what you do. Your friends and family members will soon be introducing you as “the guy who travels”. Most of your family will have no idea what you actually do at work. They will say: “she does something on her laptop”.

Unfortunately, most people will also not understand your decision to leave home and constantly travel. This is not the lifestyle most people can and choose to have. Be prepared for not being understood by people who surrounded you until this moment. On the positive side, when leading a digital nomad lifestyle, you will quickly meet fellow nomads who will understand you very well ?

Medical insurance

Last but not least – medical insurance. When traveling the world, it can be one of the most costs-generating digital nomads problems. You may still be covered by a public healthcare in your home country, but in most of the countries in the world you are not covered for health problems at local hospitals. If something happens, you have to pay even for using local public healthcare.

That is why digital nomads must but a worldwide medical insurance. Most of the typical travel insurances will not work, because they are usually time-limited. It means that you cannot travel for few years on a travel insurance. You should buy a nomad medical insurance.

Prices for good medical insurance for digital nomads start from 500 USD per year. If you suffer from chronic diseases, it will be even more expensive. You should also read the insurance policy very carefully to be sure it will cover your medical expenses in every case. Especially now, during COVID-19 pandemic.

Digital nomads problems – summary

As you can see, nomadic lifestyle is not perfect – it has its drawbacks as any other lifestyle ? For me, after almost 3 years of working remotely and traveling, I can surely say that the benefits of being a digital nomad outweigh all of these problems. But it is important that you are prepared for them, so they do not surprise you when you get on the road.

Of course, it is always best to check it yourself! There are now many more companies like Yumasoft that allow their employees to work remotely. Just give it a try and see for yourself! ?

The post Most Annoying Digital Nomads Problems appeared first on Yumasoft.

At Yumasoft, we leverage remote work. It allows people who cooperate with us to freely travel if they’d like to. Everyone can choose to live in a place they feel comfortable. Especially in current times, when pandemic has changed a lot in terms of remote work. Let’s make a good use of it ?

Bali, Indonesia

This is my top of the places for digital nomads in Southeast Asia. Bali was one of the first remote workers spots in the world. It combines Western amenities with magical Balinese culture.

In Bali, you can easily find nice cafés suitable for working with laptop. The Internet on the island is not the fastest in the world, but usually stable and good enough for video calls. There are also plenty of coworking spaces. One of them is Hubud, probably the most popular cowork and digital nomads community in the world.

Bali offers a great value for money ? For similar amount of money you’d spend in Europe, you can live here on a much higher lever than back home. In the same time, you can find most of the European products in local supermarkets. The same applies for cafés and restaurants – if you are fed up with local food (which is great, by the way!), you can easily find Western dishes.

Another great thing about living in Bali is that you basically live in nature. Independently of a place in Bali you choose to stay in, you will be surrounded with palms, rice fields and waterfalls. From almost every corner in Bali, you can see one of its volcanoes. In an hour drive you can reach seaside or mountains. Bali also has really nice beaches in its south part of Uluwatu.

Last but not least, Bali has a relatively mild tropical climate, as for this part of Asia. While there are crazily hot summers in Thailand or north of Indonesia with 40+ Celsius degrees, you can still find nice, chilly places in Bali. For me, this is very important, as I can’t stand scorching weather for longer periods ?

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Chiang Mai is another sentimental place for me. I visited this city in the north of Thailand twice, and I always felt great there.

Similarly to Bali, you can easily find many fancy cafés and coworking spaces in Chiang Mai. Going out to work with laptop is never a problem ?

There’s a quite big digital nomads community in Chiang Mai with many events happening. The Internet is fast (around 30MB/s should be a minimum) and stable.

Modern, condo-style, swimming-pool-equipped apartments are easy to find and affordable.

In terms of location, Chiang Mai is close to mountains. In 1-1.5 hours scooter drive north of CM, you can reach the mountainous parts with chilly weather and nice waterfalls. From Chiang May you can also find cheap flights to Bangkok or the southern part of the country with beautiful islands – more on that below ?

Da Nang, Vietnam

From all places for digital nomads in Southeast Asia, Da Nang was one of the most surprising for me. It’s not as “european” and fancy as Bali or Chiang Mai, but is has something to it.

What distinguished Da Nang from other cities I visited in SE Asia is coffee ? There are plenty of cafés where you can have a really cheap and delicious Vietnamese coffee. I will never forget the taste of coconut coffee ? I would visit Da Nang again just for it! Of course, while drinking it you can comfortably work with your laptop at nice cafés.

Apart from coffee, Da Nang also unites quite a lot of nomads (not like Bali or CM, but still). What’s nice about the city is one of the best city beaches I’ve ever seen and sea access. There’s also a nice promenade along the sea for running, if you’re into sports ?

Islands in the South of Thailand

Thailand somehow always comes back to me ? It must have been mentioned twice in this article!

While I love Chiang Mai and the northern, chilly climate of Thailand, islands in the south are hard to beat. Crystal clear water, awesome beaches, tasty food and nice local people are one of the things I will always appreciate south of Thailand for.

The most popular Thai islands for expatriates and digital nomads are Phuket, Ko Samui, Ko Lanta and Ko Chang. There are a looot more, but just check them out in Google and tell me you are still not sure these islands are good places to live?! ?

What’s important is that on the islands I listed, you have easy access to Western products and food. This is important if you don’t want to completely switch to Thai food, which is not the healthiest on the planet in the long run ?

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

If you prefer more of a big city life, Kuala Lumpur should be on your list. The city is an international hub in SE Asia. It really has this international vibe.

There are also many digital nomads living in the capital of Malaysia. You can easily tell that based on the number of coworking spaces available there. What’s interesting, few of them offer a free 1-day trial, so you can check them out before deciding to buy a monthly pass.

Kuala Lumpur is also famous for its food ? You can find restaurants and dishes from all over the world in Malaysian capital. It’s a heaven if you like Indian food – I especially recommend to check Pelita food chain. Oh, I need to get back there one day!

Another nice thing about Kuala Lumpur is that you can find reasonably-priced condo-style apartments, similar to the ones in Thailand.

The location of the Malaysian capital is also great. It allows you to fly cheaply to Malaysian islands or Penang with its great capital of Georgetown. From Kuala Lumpur, you can also easily visit Singapore, which is connected to the south of Malaysia with a bridge. It’s even reachable by bus from Kuala Lumpur.

Summary

That’s it for my top 5 places for digital nomads in Southeast Asia. Would you add something to this list? If you’ve never been to SE Asia, which of those places would you choose? ?

The post Top 5 Places for Digital Nomads in Southeast Asia appeared first on Yumasoft.

More remote offers

Only between March 2020 and July 2020, number of remote offers on LinkedIn has almost tripled:

What’s more, the number of remote offers increased significantly all over the world:

It only confirms that remote work has become much more popular than ever. Remote workers have more opportunities now, which also makes companies offering better conditions to be competitive.

Many remote work newbies

In March 2020, many companies were forced to switch from in-office presence to fully-remote working. The global situation showed to such companies that remote work is possible and – surprise – it works ? Even if it was unimaginable for them before.

Having more remote work newbie companies is in general a good thing, but it also has its dark sides…

Pathological remote work popularization

Unfortunately, many companies were not prepared for switching to remote work. No one taught them the right principles, like asynchronous communication or good organization of their online environment.

This led to popularization of what I like to call a pathological remote work. Many companies basically transferred their in-office habits into the online world. It means a lot of meetings, often without agenda and inviting many people. Because some managers didn’t know how to control their employees away from the office, they decided to stay in constant touch with them via meetings and calls. Instead of leveraging the advantages of remote work, they made their employees much less effective and more stressed. That’s not the remote work companies like Yumasoft fought for ?

More digital nomads

According to the research done by MBO Partners, the number of digital nomads in the USA has increased by almost 50% in 2020:

This only means that remote work changed the world. Without the pandemic, this wouldn’t have happened so quickly. I think that as soon as travel restrictions are lifted, many of those people will start traveling and leading a really nomadic life.

Better tools

Pandemic “produced” massive traffic in collaboration tools like Skype of Microsoft Teams. When most schools switched to online learning and had to use Teams, Microsoft had a lot of struggles with that. Servers were down and slow in the beginning. Which is not surprising, as the number of Teams users increased from 20 million in 2019 to 145 million in Q2 2021. It’s an increase of 625% ? Of course, during this time, the produce has been significantly improved, with more very useful features added.

It was similar with Zoom, which is visible in the surge in their stock prices since March 2020:

That’s good, not only because these companies’ shareholders made tons of money ?, but also good for all of us. These better tools will stay with us and help us to be more productive.

Better laws and rules for remote workers

While the digital nomadism is still a “gray area” in most places in the world, pandemic made some countries realizing this gap. Those few countries are offering a legal stay and taxing solutions for remote workers.

Georgia (the country) introduced Remote from Georgia program, which allows to legally stay and work remotely from the country. Portuguese island Madeira created a coworking space for digital nomads, which is free of charge.

Amongst others, the following countries have recently started offering similar solutions: Barbados, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Croatia, Estonia and Mexico.

More work-friendly venues

While traveling the world during pandemic times, I see a lot of new working-friendly venues like cafés or coworking spaces. In Poland, because of COVID-19 restrictions, many places transformed from being a café to a rented coworking space. This all means that remote workers will have more laptop-friendly places to choose from ?

Working from home to stay

After many companies implemented remote work and tried it in practice, home office will stay with us for good. I really hope that most companies will treat allowing their employees working from home at least a few days a month a casual thing.

In today’s world, with well-development online collaboration software, there are no reasons for tying employees to offices. Let’s use this somehow forced remote work movement for something good and maximally leverage it ?

More asynchronous communication

Except of the new, pathological online work environments, many companies did it well ? It includes popularizing asynchronous communication, which should be a default when working remotely.

Measuring work done, not hours

The companies who transformed into remote work properly, noticed that they don’t need to measure employees’ productivity by the exact working time.

In offices, most companies used some kind of clocking. Either you clocked your employee card when entering and exiting the office or reported your working hours in some kind of internal time tracking application. It was very comfortable for employees. In theory, you could have spent your whole day on the meetings without doing anything productive. But your working day was still counted. If your manager then asked why the project is progressing so slowly, you could always say that you had to attend a lot of meetings. This was easy ?

With proper remote work, managers prefer to measure the work results, not the clocked in hours. It’s important what and how fast you deliver, not how much you exactly work. This is a plus for well-organized and productive people, while it should motivate those meetings fans to work more productively. What is sure, is that remote work changes the way we measure performance.

Remote work after pandemic

I hope that most good things, like more remote offers, better tools and home office as a standard will stay with us after the pandemic is over. While COVID-19 crisis is still an unbelievable and terrible thing, let’s try to get some good from it. We are continuing to hire remote professionals at Yumasoft because we believe that remote work can be even more effective than constant in-office collaboration.

What are your thoughts? How has your company managed with introducing remote work? Did you do it well, or there are still some caveats? ?

The post 10 Things Pandemic Changed in Remote Work appeared first on Yumasoft.

Why asynchronous communication?

In one of the previous articles about remote work I proposed different techniques on managing a remote team. One of them was to communicate asynchronously. You can read this point from the article to know why the async communication is important.

I see the asynchronous communication as a key to effective remote work. It helps everyone stay focused when they need to. It embraces the working hours’ flexibility which is inevitable staying at home. Finally, it eliminates some of the bad habits we used to have working in the office that decreased our productivity.

Below, I’m presenting 10 techniques that can make your team’s communication more asynchronous. By implementing them, your employees can focus on their work, instead of being interrupted by meetings or random talks. The order of techniques is random ?

Learn clear writing

Learn to ask precise questions, so they can be precisely answered. You will see the results in practice. If the person you ask something gives you the clear and precise answer straightaway (so you don’t have to ask again), it’s a good sign. If they ask you to be more precise or give more details, it means you need to work more on asking the question. Use your interlocutor’s remarks as signs on what to improve when asking next time.

Try to avoid questions to which the answer is open. Prefer yes-no questions, meaning the questions to which the answer is one from given set of options. For example, ask questions to which the answer could be a “yes” or “no”. If the question is more complex, offer the other persons few options to choose from (a,b,c,…) and ask them to choose exactly one.

If you want someone to do something (e.g. test something), describe it step-by-step (example: 1. login to the system, 2. click on X, 3. click on Y 4. see the result of Z, …).

Always read your question again before sending it. Sometimes the answer may magically come to you just before you press the “send” button… ?

Use public chats

Remote work is often criticized for offering no social interactions. People start feeling alone and a bit out of the loop. One of the reasons for that is that remote workers communicate too much on private channels. It makes the rest of the team unaware of the issues being discussed between two coworkers.

The solution is to overcommunicate. It means that it’s better to write more to more people than less to fewer people. Try to use public channels (like a group Skype chat or Slack channel) as often as possible. It makes everyone in the loop and feeling more like a team.

Private communication should be used for solving personal manners or providing feedback. Especially negative feedback, which shouldn’t be provided publicly.

Record screencasts

If you have an idea to spread, consider using a screencasts recording software for that. It basically means to record what you do on your computer’s screen and show it to the rest of the team asynchronously.
Screencasts are great for showing the rest of the team results of your work, or a bug you just found in your app. They are also perfect for presenting the other developers some new framework/tool/technique you just learned and want to share this knowledge.

You don’t have to organize a meeting to present something. Download one of the free screencasts recorder tools – for Windows you can use ShareX, while macOS seems to support it out-of-the-box. Record your screen, preferably with your voice comments. Then upload the video to YouTube, generate a private link and send it to interested people. They can watch and comment in their own time. No more wasting the team’s time at a meeting.

Use tasks management tool

Tasks management tool is the core of every team’s productivity. It not only allows to track the effectiveness of the team, but also organizes everyone’s work in a nice way. Some of these tools allow a task-based communication which even more empowers remote and async work.

You can use tools like JIRA, GitHub or Nozbe for organizing your team’s work. It doesn’t really matter which of them you use. The most important is to keep your work organized and divided into small tasks. I recommend creating tasks that can be realized in 2-4 hours. It makes it all measurable while you can keep getting this god feeling when checking the next tasks our from the list ?

Consider resigning from Pull Requests (if they block your process)

There’s recently a hype in some IT environments on hating the Pull Requests technique. If you are not familiar with that, a Pull Request is a step in the software development process where a programmer, having his code finished, asks his/her colleagues for approval. This is often the moment when the code review is done and the newly checked-in code is accepted or not.

I don’t see Pull Requests as a totally bad thing. They help the team stay up-to-date with what’s happening in the codebase. They also let people learn from each other. However, in your case the Pull Requests might be blocking your team’s work. In effect, it might badly affect the productivity of the team. If your colleagues hate Pull Requests and don’t see any value in them, try to resign from this step in your development process. It may increase your team’s productivity a lot.

You can read more about Pull Requests and their dark sides in this article.

Avoid unnecessary meetings (unless you have a goal in them)

Meetings should have a goal and address a specific problem. It applies especially to scheduled meetings that occur on a regular basis.


Scheduled meetings are fine, as long as they have a precise and really necessary goal. One of these goals may be to socialize, especially in current pandemic times. However, such coffee meetings might often be transferring the bad habits of random chats in the corporate kitchen from the office environment. Remember to be clear about such meetings’ goals. If possible, make such meetings optional, so people don’t feel overwhelmed by having to attend them.

Prefer ad-hoc communication to scheduled meetings

You might be wondering – if there are no (or less) scheduled meetings, are there any meetings at all?

I think meetings are not a bad thing, as long as they have a purpose. I prefer ad-hoc communication to scheduled meetings.

Having an issue? Organize a quick 1-1 or a group call (optional to join) to solve the problem together. Such spontaneous meetings are good for knowledge sharing and better interaction between teammates. Such unexpected meetings can also be more interesting than scheduled ones.

Don’t expect immediate answers in asynchronous communication

If I sorted the points in this article by importance, this would be the number 1. When working remotely, don’t expect that someone will answer your message/call/question immediately. We work asynchronously – it means that the person you ask might not be available at the exact same moment as you are.

It seems obvious, but it’s a change of mindset to stop expecting immediate answers. However, when learned, it really frees your mind.

Let everyone work on anything

Try to avoid specializing in a given area of your work. If you are a software developers team, don’t let programmers specialize in given areas of your system. It’s better if everyone can work on anything. Why? See the last point.

Always have some spare tasks prepared

In most cases we work on one thing at a time. But what if you are blocked waiting for a crucial answer about this issue (don’t expect immediate answers, remember?) to be able to continue?

It’s good to always have more tasks defined than there are people working on the project. It’s even better if all of them are able to work on any of these tasks. In case a person waits for an asynchronous answer from someone else, (s)he can take any other task from the list and start working on it in the meantime.

I hope you found these advices useful. If you work synchronously today, give asynchronous communication a try. If you’re not a decision-maker in your team, send the link to this article to your manager. Maybe it encourages them to at least try asynchronous communication ?

The post Asynchronous Communication and Its Importance For Remote Work appeared first on Yumasoft.

People have various images of remote teams. Even though remote work becomes more and more common nowadays, there are still many stereotypes about non-stationary teams. In today’s article I’m demystifying 5 biggest of such myths.

Remote teams are not productive

I think this is the most common misconception about remote teams. We often think that working from home may lead to unproductivity. Sure, it’s tempting, especially for remote work beginners, to do some household duties instead of working. Your favourite couch in a very close proximity also doesn’t help…

However, on the other hand, think how often you are disturbed in the office. People come and ask questions and interrupt you in the middle of working. Another colleague comes and invites you for coffee or lunch. Maybe there’s another, very interesting meeting which you have to – of course – attend? All these interruptions can be easily eliminated while working from home. Most of them are just not present there. The rest of tempting things such as your comfortable couch can be easily forgotten if you organize your day and workspace properly.

From my experience, I can say that I’m much more productive working remotely than being at the office. I like to organize my workspace to suit my needs in the best possible way, so I’m not disturbed by anyone (or anything) while working.

Remote teams have no social interactions

Ever imagined remote workers as sitting in front of their PCs, home alone, without talking to anyone? This might be another of the myths about remote teams.

This image is totally not true! At Yumasoft, half of our team works 100% remotely. The other guys work from home twice a week. During the pandemic in Poland everyone worked remotely for several months. We talk a lot, also about non-work-related stuff. We have team-synchronization video meetings every day. We discuss not only current tasks, but also our personal stuff. Sometimes we also share funny stories and memes ?

Aside from daily meetings, we have a Skype group chat on which we share all kinds of information. When we sometimes meet in person in the office, we don’t feel “out of sync” from each other. Everyone knows much about the others and we really feel like a team.

Feeling connected is a matter of good company’s organization and attitude. If the company doesn’t care about good social interactions, its employees will be out of sync even sitting in the office. What’s more, remote teams need to put more attention to creating social interactions, which might even make such teams more socialized than stationary one.

Communication is very hard in a distributed team

This is one of the mostly repeated myths about remote teams. Bad communication has nothing to do with the type of team you’re part of. If the company and/or team is not well-organized, the communication can’t be smooth.

That’s true, that remote teams face a few more challenges to organize their communication channels. If everyone works from a different place, one can’t go to another person’s desk and ask something immediately. However, there are many tools and applications that make communication super easy. I already mentioned a few of them, as well as a few tips for remote work organization, in this article.

In my team at Yumasoft, we’re not only a distributed remote group of programmers, but our client is based in the Netherlands. It means that we’ve always communicated with them remotely. We’re developing and changing the product and the communication is not an issue at all. There are challenges like in every two teams’ cooperation. However, being distributed is not an excuse for bad communication practices and lack of organization.

It’s hard to find a good remote employee

Remote workers might be considered worse employees than the “stationary” ones. Also, company’s managers might be worried that they won’t be able to assess a given employee well enough before hiring her/him.

The first statement is totally not true. I would look from another perspective: if your team is remote, you can search for the best employees in the whole country (or even the whole world). You’re not limited to people looking for a job in your city or area. This gives a lot of possibilities and flexibility.

Assessing an employee’s skills remotely is also not a challenge anymore. There are many tools that make this process straightforward and easy. One of such tools is Codility – a platform that helps to perform online code assessments. Even Skype has added the Interviews feature to help to perform live recruitment.

Remote workers work less

It might be hard to associate home office with a productive environment. Traditional images of working in the office make us think that home is not a place for working, but rather for resting and relaxation.

The reality is that remote teams are often even more productive than office employees. This research says that only 7% of workers feel more productive in the office. It means that working the same amount of time, remote workers accomplish more than being in the office. That could be the reason to say that remote workers work less. They might work less, because they achieve their results faster. In reality it means that remote workers have more time to focus on quality and deliver better outcomes as a result.

On the other hand, many remote workers are freelancers or people starting their own online business. Such people work much more than office employees. Working on their own projects, especially in the beginning, often requires putting more attention than to traditional 9-5 work. Working hours are not limited and no one pays for hours worked, but for the results. Over-hours work is not uncommon amongst online entrepreneurs.

Myths about remote teams – summary

I hope this article gives a glance over myths around remote teams. Remote work is becoming much more common nowadays, which means that more people will experience it themselves. I’m sure that if you start working in a remote team you’ll see that it might be as good – or even better – as working in the office.

The post 5 Myths About Remote Teams appeared first on Yumasoft.

Is that all true or just a set of stereotypes? In today’s article I’m debunking the 5 biggest myths about remote workers who decided to travel the world.

Digital nomad always works on the beach

Even though it might sound tempting to take your laptop to the beach ?, I must take you out of that illusion straight away ? I’ve been there and tried that. You really don’t want to have all these grains of sand all over your laptop’s keyboard. I bet that you won’t last more than 10 minutes sitting on the beach and typing – your back would die. Also – what do you think about the sun shining directly at your screen? Last, but not least – believe me that it’s very hard to find an electricity socket on the beach ?

Joking aside, I’ve never seen anyone working with a laptop on the beach. Except for taking pictures, which are then published on the Internet and make people believe this illusion. The most digital nomad can afford is sitting in a nice bar close to the beach. Assuming it has comfortable seats, good Wi-Fi and access to electricity. The truth is that remote workers spend most of their working time at the rented apartment or co-working space.

Remote workers work for 1-2 hours a day

That’s totally opposite to what I experienced being a member of the digital nomads community. Digital nomads who work for a single client or employer spend 8-9 hours a day working, like every other “normal” employee. Those of them who are solopreneurs or “solopreneurs-wannabes” work even longer. In the end, they’re working to boost their own business, which – in most cases – requires much more than 8 hours a day.

The same goes for influencers. Many people think that conducting a blog or Instagram profile is very easy and doesn’t consume a lot of time. In reality, it’s the other way around. Working on a single social media profile with an engaged community can take even 10-12 hours a day.

On the positive side, there is a group of digital nomads who can afford working for 1-2 hours a day. These are mostly people having their own business for years, which is now well-automated so it can mostly work on its own only being supervised. This is however a rather small group and definitely not a majority of remote workers.

Digital nomads are mostly programmers

This is another common belief within people who never actually joined the remote workers community. That’s true that programmers can easily switch to remote work. Probably it’s still the most obvious profession for working remotely. However, that’s totally false that most digital nomads are software developers. While traveling South-East Asia I met dozens of digital nomads who are not programmers. Many of them worked as copywriters, interpreters, graphic designers, English teachers or accountants. All of this can easily be done online.

Many digital nomads are also solopreneurs. Having their own business (selling digital products or online courses) makes their life more flexible. Being able to define your own working hours and schedule can be very helpful when traveling.

Another group of people who travel the world and work are influencers. They are people who communicate with their community via social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and/or a blog. Influencers earn money by entering cooperation with brands or becoming solopreneurs with time.

All digital nomads are freelancers

Many people think that to be able to travel the world and work, one needs to become a freelancer. Well, it sounds good – you can be “freely” defining how much and when you want to work. On the other hand you not only can do that, but you have to do that. No one will find a new project for you and ensure you are paid on time. As a freelancer, all of that is your responsibility.

However, being a freelancer is not the only way of becoming a digital nomad. Thanks to companies like Yumasoft, you can work full-time remotely and still be able to travel. In practice, you simply change the physical office for your laptop and can work from almost any place in the world.

So if you ever wondered about working and traveling, consider companies like Yumasoft. Being a freelancer is also an option, but working full-time you don’t have to worry about looking for another client or getting paid on time.

Digital nomads are lonely nerds

I heard many times that remote work is perfect for nerds. People asked me if I was not afraid about becoming lonely and “out of society” after deciding to work from all over the world. The answer is simple – it depends on a person, exactly the same as working in the office. If a person is nerdy and prefers to work on her/his own, avoiding social contacts – it will be the same in the office and when traveling.

I would even say that living in digital nomads hotspots, like Bali or Thailand, there are many more opportunities for meeting people than when living a “casual” life. There are dozens of co-working spaces, bars and meetups created especially for digital nomads. Remote workers often intentionally travel to places like Ubud just to feel this digital nomads vibe. It’s actually hard to avoid meeting another remote workers in such places ?

In South-East Asia, digital nomads communities are actively encouraging their members to meet. Remote workers can meet other remote workers at various meetups. Such meetings often lead to starting a new business together. It means that starting as a lonely and nerdy digital nomad, you can even become an entrepreneur working with your clients and co-workers or co-founders ?

Myths about digital nomads – summary

Being a digital nomad is a great way of living, but it also has its downsides. It’s very important to know how it looks in reality, so your expectations are not too high. Don’t always believe in what you read on the Internet or the pictures you see. I still encourage everyone to at least try working remotely from another country. Trying is the best way to see whether this lifestyle is good for you or not ?

The post 5 Biggest Myths About Digital Nomads appeared first on Yumasoft.

The tips mentioned in this article can be applied to not only team of software developers, but to any kind of remote team that involves communication and cooperation between its members

Types of remote teams

First of all, we should define what a remote team is. In general, remote team is associated with remote work. However, there can be several types of remote teams:

• Fully remote team – all team members work remotely and there’s no physical office at all. Team members can meet from time to time to socialize, but generally everyone is working 100% remotely.
• Part-remote team – some team members are remotees, while the others are working physically in an office.
• Sometimes-remote team – all members usually work in the office, but can get some home-office days, e.g. 1 or 2 times a week.

In this article we’re focusing on the first and second type of remote teams. We’ll not discuss sometimes-remote teams, because in that case completely different organization rules apply. We assume that our team is mostly remote, so the remote team organization must be put in place.

Let’s now move straight into the remote programmers team organization tips.

Plan constant communication time (if you have a goal in it)

Our team at Yumasoft is the second type – a part-remote team. Half of our team works remotely, while the other half works at the office with 2 days during the week working from home. Thanks to that, everyone – also “non-remote” guys, are remote-minded. Before kicking-off this remote work style, we agreed on a common, constant communication time. We established a daily meeting once per day.

We decided to meet at some constant hour, which suits everyone – also me being in different time-zones. There are a few goals of such a daily video meeting:

• to feel like being a team, seeing everyone at least once per day
• socialize, talk about normal, casual stuff like you’d talk in the office – not necessarily related to work
• to share the status of the work tasks if needed – it somehow helps to unblock someone or perform a live, group “code review”
• to organize help – if anyone needs it, we arrange the next calls/meetings individually during this daily status meeting

As mentioned above, the meeting is a video call. We use Skype or Microsoft Teams for that. It actually doesn’t matter which tool you use. The most important lesson here is that it’s good to create the team feeling between remote workers. Daily meeting is a great way to achieve that.

On the other hand, remember to only schedule such a meeting when you have a precise goal in it. Notice how I listed 4 goals we have in our daily meetings. Nowadays, when more companies are switching to remote work, such scheduled meetings can be a trial to move their office habits into the online world. This is not a good thing. Remote work gives us new possibilities, and we shouldn’t transfer every thing we used to do in the office to an online environment.

Be open to what your team things about the meeting. Ask if they find it useful or disturbing. As soon as it becomes an obstacle for them – try resigning from it and switch to as-hoc calls.

Launch an off-topic communication channel

When working in an office, there are moments for small talks. Coffee break, lunch or just talking in the corridor. You don’t have it in the remote team or… You can have it ? It’s important to keep all team members in the loop, also remote ones, so create an off-topic channel in your communication tool of choice. At Yumasoft, we have some Skype chats for that purpose. It’s very engaging and just funny to have a place where people can share everything, including memes and other interesting stuff ? Socializing is an important aspect of remote work organization.

Try to synchronize working hours

Even if some members of your remote team are in different time-zones, try to organize everyone’s working hours to have some common ground. It’s good to be flexible, but it’s also very efficient to have everyone together at least 3-4 hours every day. If possible, try to organize your team like that.

If that’s not possible or not desired by your team, see the next point.

Learn asynchronous communication

In a remote team, especially in a distributed team, where its members are located in different parts of the world, it’s important to communicate asynchronously. It means that often you’d ask someone about something, but they will not respond immediately. The reason for that could be the above-mentioned time-zones differences.

Asynchronous communication requires the sender to ask precise and clear questions. It’s worth learning how to write short and concrete emails or instant messages. It’s also a good idea to get the other team members used to communicate asynchronously. Especially if the team is like our – part-remote, the non-fully-remote people might get frustrated if you don’t answer or answer late. With time, practice and a lot of understanding from all the team members it all can be learned and dealt with ?

Async communication can make remote work organization much easier. It might limit the need to synchronize working hours as well. You can read more about asynchronous communication in this article.

Use proper, but not too many tools

In a remote team, it becomes much more important than ever to use proper work management tools. It includes both project management apps and communication tools.

It’s good to have the documentation and data about your tasks organized in some kind of system, which is not Word document files only. It’s good to use a system like GitHub, JIRA or Nozbe for tasks management and information exchange within the team. The exact choice is not that important – choose one that suits your team and is easy to use. It’s just important to not keep all information on emails or in Word documents – otherwise you can get lost quickly. Especially if the communication is asynchronous (as it should be in a remote team). Having proper tasks management system, the knowledge can be exchanged using task-based-communication, which suits very well the asynchronous communication model.

The same applies for online communicator tool. If Skype or Slack does its job for everyone – don’t overcomplicate and keep using it. At our team in Yumasoft, we tried few different communicators and while none of them is perfect, we keep using Microsoft Teams for online meetings and screen sharing. It works, so it’s not worth overcomplicating things.

Remote work organization – summary

I hope these tips are helpful for organizing work of your remote team. Remember to not overcomplicate things and always keep all members in the loop on what’s happening in the team ?

What are your ways of working remotely? Share in the comments!

The post 5 Tips on Remote Programmers Team Work Organization appeared first on Yumasoft.

Who is a digital nomad?

There are many terms defining people who work remotely and travel. Such people call themselves digital nomads, location independent professionals or freelancers. I won’t focus on exact definitions here, but for me a digital nomad is a person who is location-independent, but is still doing some kind of paid professional work.

Being location-independent means that you can be at any place in the world and still get your work done. There are some limitations, like Internet access and electricity, but it’s just to grasp the general idea ?

How programming allowed me to travel full-time?

There are many professions in which you can find a remote job. However, IT is definitely the most popular one. It’s relatively easy to find a fully-remote job, especially being a programmer. Despite remote working is very popular in western countries and in the US, it’s still not that popular in Poland. According to 2019 research results, around 30% of Polish companies allow remote working. However, most of them allow only part-time remote working e.g. one day per week. Number of companies offering 100% remote positions is much lower.

Fortunately, I managed to find my full-time, 100% remote job at Yumasoft as a software developer. Thanks to that I could start our round-the-world trip with my wife. As for the time of writing this article, we’ve been traveling for 8 months and lived in 8 different Asian countries. All this time I’ve been working remotely.

3 lessons learnt from digital nomad lifestyle

Working remotely and traveling for several months has taught me a few interesting lessons. I’m presenting 3 most interesting ones below.

We don’t need much in life

When starting our travel, we got rid of most of the things we possessed. We sold our car, unneeded clothes other stuff we didn’t take with us. We left with two 50-L backpacks (+2 small ones for laptops mostly), but with time we dropped out one of them and stayed with only one. Traveling teaches a lot about possession, especially seeing how simply people live in places like SE Asia. As soon as you decide to be a digital nomad, you just need a laptop, smartphone, chargers and a few clothes to live. Really ?

You can work remotely as effectively as in the office

To become a digital nomad, you need to be a well-organized person. I was initially afraid if I’d be able to organize my days and work being away from the office and teammates. As it turned out, with good organization you can be as productive as sitting in the office. As a side effect, you can also happen to be drinking a lot of cheap and great Vietnamese coffee ?

Life is too short to stay in one place

With nowadays possibilities of working remotely the world is literally open for us. I remember the excitement of coming holidays few times a year when I still lived in Poland. It was finally the time to go and see something new. Now, when traveling and changing the places we live in frequently, I’m getting bored after 2 weeks in a single place. There’s so much to see in the world that it’s not worth spending it in a single place. Just try it and you’ll see! ?

Can you become a digital nomad?

I assume that if you read this article until this point, you either already are a digital nomad or you’re at least thinking about such a lifestyle. If you belong to the second group, let’s see – can you become a digital nomad and start traveling the world?

Of course you can! Especially if you work in IT. Try to talk with your employer about a possibility to work remotely. Even it’s not a common practice at your workplace, start by asking for a possibility to work remotely few times a month. If it goes well, why not convincing your boss to let you work more remotely and maybe even 100% remotely in the future?

If this isn’t possible at your current company, try to find another workplace. It’s really worth it! There are companies in Poland like Yumasoft offering remote positions, especially for programmers. It doesn’t even need to be a fully remote team. Our team in Yumasoft is half-remote – some of the people work in the office, while few other of us work remotely. If well-organized, every team will manage remote and asynchronous work.

There’s one feature that you should possess or gain – bravery. Don’t be afraid to take the final decision about starting a new lifestyle. Don’t think what others will say or think. Think and do it for yourself. You really don’t have much to lose, so give it a try! ?

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