How to work and move around at the same time

Author of the article: Tatiana Zhakova

Journalist, linguist, teacher of storytelling with 10 years of experience

In 2015 she created and promoted her project about Nizhny Novgorod, nnstories.ru, after which she created a course called "Storytelling: How to Tell Your Story" based on it. Over 4,000 students have taken the course.

A linguist by education, she quickly masters new areas. Now she is actively studying screenwriting and storytelling in movies/serials, and writes about it in her project's blog.

I observe now how many friends and acquaintances move in space. It makes the globe seem so small, because now you know that this friend is now in Bali, that one is in Turkey, and that one is still in Kazakhstan, but he's actually aiming for Argentina. And it seems now that in order for us to meet, we have to take tickets to Bishkek, or even farther.

But besides that I see that the majority of expats now have a question of making money. And not only "how to make money", but, actually, how to work. Because the task of moving and organizing life takes a lot of time and effort, the Internet is constantly unstable, and morale is even more unstable than the Internet - I want to crawl under the covers and anxiously scrolling news, rather than conquer the top and start new projects.

I've been traveling quite a bit over the past couple of years, and on none of the trips have I stopped working in parallel with moving. And to be honest, I remember writing posts back in 2017-18 called "How to work and travel at the same time.

So if I can't tell you where to find work now, then I can describe how to work in an unstable body position.

First, you have to admit from now on that "inspiration is gone. There is no convenient moment when you will quietly pour yourself a Nescafe Creme in your favorite mug and cozy up in a chair by the window to write an article. No, that's not going to happen anymore.

You'll be working at the airport, on the flight, in the backyard of the cheapest hostel, on your way to the immigration center. Anytime there is that time. Not inspiration. If you wait for both time and inspiration at the same time, you might not wait for anything.

I usually divide all work cases into:

Momentary
When it is urgent to answer, post, write, call
Technical
When you don't need a lot of brainpower, like posting pictures on Pinterest
For the future
which require strategic planning
Creative
Where it takes a resource to give some part of yourself and information
Correspondence
endless issues that need to be resolved with the team/partners

with the Internet - to post a video, find a rils, send something somewhere
without internet - write an article, edit a video, take apart the footage
requiring a lot of phone charging - uploading photos to the cloud, working with video
in silence - dubbing videos, recording podcasts, etc.

And accordingly, I pick up the case at the moment based on the circumstances. Am I sitting in a room with good Internet? I'll upload the reels to all the social networks. Internet's gone - I'll edit a piece of the course. I'm sitting in a cafe and the charge on my phone leaves a lot to be desired - I'll write an article in the meantime. The electricity in the whole area was cut off (in Uzbekistan in July, such things happened everywhere) - it's time to do strategic planning, generate topics and write them down in a notebook with pens.

The next principle is that if the work is optional and non-stressful, you can perceive it as a vacation from the trip. That is, you can't walk around 24/7 and admire the sights around you - you'll run out of impressions. And sitting in your room, constantly scrolling through social media also gets boring pretty quickly.

So to work becomes a great option for switching activities and recharging emotionally.

And the main thing you need to remember if you find yourself in a situation where you have to work not sitting at a comfortable desk, but on your knees - turn off your perfectionism. Bad text is better than none, and any imperfection can be corrected later.

The main thing is to do it. And take care of your resource, because you are the most important thing.