the stories that I'm telling.

Tag: remote work

  • Wait, where exactly do I work?

    Wait, where exactly do I work?

    “Work” is kind of a funny concept. I do a lot of work on different fronts, but I’m currently only monetarily compensated for one of them. Things like blogging, writing TripAdvisor reviews, helping friends write CVs, exploring ideas for future projects, don’t have immediate financial dividends.

    However, I do have a paid job, working remotely for a tech startup based in San Francisco. Often when I talk about work, I’m talking about that job as well.

    The name of the company is RecruitLoop. Here’s our story:

    I met RecruitLoop when I worked at a different tech startup, Influitive, in Toronto. Influitive makes an advocate marketing software, which aims to help b2b companies create online communities of their best users/advocates. RecruitLoop was a customer, and I knew them quite well because I worked in frontline customer support.

    When they found out that I was quitting my job at Influitive to go abroad and spend some time living in southeast Asia, they offered me a job. Part of that job involves operating the community platform that Influitive created, since RecruitLoop is a customer.

    RecruitLoop began in Australia, and then opened a US office around 2 years ago.

    We’re a marketplace company, aimed at connecting independent, billable-by-the-hour recruiters with companies looking to hire. RecruitLoop finds the recruiters and the clients, bringing them both together, and makes a software that is used to manage the hiring engagement between the two parties (it’s kind of like Air BnB for recruiters that bill by the hour). You can see our list of recruiters here: recruitloop.com/recruiters

    They hired me to work with/manage our Australian client base, which is quite large since the company has been operating there since 2011.

    There was a big internal shift at the company recently, which has led to a much bigger focus on growing our number of recruiters, so my job has changed quite a bit (typical in a startup, particularly one as small as RecruitLoop – we’re just 9 people in total!).

    My job title is Customer Success Manager, but the focus of my job changes constantly. At any given time I can be selling RecruitLoop to clients, helping recruiters manage their client relationships, designing email marketing campaigns, managing our community of advocates, creating educational content for recruiters, troubleshooting technical issues, chasing invoice and revenue and beyond. It’s less a question “what do I do?” and more a question of “what needs to be done?”.

    With so much to do, you’d think it would be hard to work remotely, but fortunately it’s par for the course at RecruitLoop. We have people working in San Francisco, Berkley, Sydney, the Philippines, and wherever I am. I have Skype calls with various team members almost everyday, and I actually love working for a tech startup from outside of ‘the valley’. I think my remote location helps me keep a fresh perspective on my job and on the tech startup industry itself.

    As for my location, I’m very lucky – as long as I’m online for Australian hours, then I can be anywhere. This was obviously very easy in Asia. It was a bit challenging in Canada, and it’s quite awkward in Portugal – I typically work from 8pm to 4am GMT so I can be online for most the day in Australia.

    Working while travelling has been really great, though sometimes I wonder if I miss out, since I end up spending so much time indoors, working. Still, it means I can travel this way for longer, which I love.

    Here are some photos of the various places I worked over the past year:

     

    In the living room, my everyday workspace – with a good luck fish!
    view from our favourite cafe!
    Our unpacking space, and my workspace
    The view from the window beside my desk while working in our hotel in the UAE
    Sometimes in Cambodia I also worked from our balcony
    In the alley near our hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
    while working in Canterbury at night, I could see this beautiful church from my window!
  • Welcome to Portugal, where you can’t do things quickly, even if you try.

    Welcome to Portugal, where you can’t do things quickly, even if you try.

    At the beginning of 2015, I had 2 goals for this blog:

    1. Continue to write regularly

    2. Write more about my feelings and experiences, as opposed to a steady stream of I-went-here stories (though I do plan to continue those as well!)

    June is around the corner and I’ve published so few posts that I have an actual backlog list of 20 blog posts waiting to be written. They’re coming, I promise!

    Today I bring you a brief post about my personal state of mind and a rather funny realization that Kevin and I had today.

    You may have heard people joke about the slow pace of Europe, particularly southern Europe. Let me be the first to tell you, that shit is no joke.

    When you wake up to sunshine and birds singing and fresh orange juice from the backyard, work just doesn’t seem all that important. While I was in Cambodia, I worked non-stop. Don’t get me wrong, I took plenty of time for fun, but I didn’t have social ties or distractions, and so it was easy for me to throw myself head first into nonstop work. Without that, this blog probably wouldn’t even exist.

    In Portugal, there are many distractions. Both literal and mental. With a car and with Kevin’s familiarity with the Algarve, it’s all too easy to find things to do. And it’s hard to explain, but this place just feels relaxed. Life in the Algarve is just so damn pleasant, you never feel guilty for not “getting shit done”.

    On top of that, with Kevin’s dental disaster continuing on an open-ended schedule, we quickly learned to stop asking questions or talking about “what’s next”. It’s hard to plan the next adventure when you don’t even know when it can begin.

    This week has marked the first time since January that we’ve felt comfortable discussing that elusive “next”, possibly even laying down a timeline. We’re still in southern Europe, but these thoughts and possibilities kickstarted something in both of us.

    We’ve both spent the past 2 days working feverishly. It feels natural to fall back into a work-hard groove, getting lots of things done, and quickly.

    Which brings us to today. We had big plans: get up early-ish (11am, since we stay up till 4am while I work – more on that later!), go to the grocery store at the Algarve Shopping mall, come home, then head back to the mall to see a mid-afternoon screening of Mad Max. After all, it’s Tuesday. Indulging in Tuesday movie deals was a well-followed tradition for us in Toronto.

    So that was our plan. A bit more rushed than our typical schedule, but that’s no problem, right?

    Ha!

    Instead of a quick trip to the grocery store with Kevin’s grandmother, the three of us ended up checking out several shops throughout the mall, then having lunch, and then realizing,”shit, it’s 3pm, we’ll have to rush, but we can definitely make that film at 4:30 if we hustle”.

    Ha!

    We did the fastest grocery shopping we’ve ever done in Portugal. We thought that by rushing our shopping, we’d get in and out quickly, and home in time to go to the movies. Of course, we couldn’t have planned for this:

    – the grocery store was under construction and every single section had been moved somewhere new

    – at this grocery store, you have to weigh your produce at a special station before the checkout. Not only did we forget to weigh our watermelon, so did the two families in line ahead of us. And obviously it took them twice as long as us to resolve that issue.

    – for almost 10 minutes on our drive home, we were stuck behind a rather slow-moving tractor

    Ha!

    On the drive home, the realization hit me: we’re back in North American mode, but we’re still in Southern Europe.

    Even if we’re in the mood to really ‘get shit done’, we’ll drive ourselves mad if we don’t keep in mind that the Algarve is too relaxed to be compatible with our North American, do-things-fast mentality.

    Fingers crossed that this new surge of energy for working will keep me posting more regularly!

    And just for all that reading, here’s a series of photos us relaxing around Alte and of me making orange juice in true, laid-back, Algarvian fashion:

    oranges from one grandmother, grapefruits from another
    making orange juice in my PJs!
    the lemon tree before its trim
    orange trees in the backyard.
    picking oranges from the tree
    collecting oranges for juice!
    the formerly crazy lemon tree in the back yard
    oranges!
    view from our favourite cafe!
    snack time!
    reading by the fire, keeping warm in January.
    reading!
    pick-em-up-truck spotted in Alte!
    our juicer!
  • We went to Vietnam this weekend!

    We went to Vietnam this weekend!

    When we moved over here, we’d always expected that regular travel would be an added bonus of living in such an interesting, inexpensive, and interconnected region. We ventured to Bangkok and to the Philippines, but after beginning work a few weeks ago (more on that later this week) I was wondering if I’d ever actually be able to balance travel and work.

    Well, we tested that theory this weekend, and it went well!

    For the past week, Kevin and our 2 friends, Chris and Marie (our first couple-friends! every day is a double date!), were talking about needing to take a trip to Vietnam soon, partly for business, but also partly because we needed a new visa. Visas are only good for 30 days, at which point you can either get an extension, or travel outside the country and get a new one upon your return. I wasn’t really planning to go with them, because my visa was okay for a bit longer, and I was pretty nervous about whether or not I’d be able to manage working and travelling together. Both Kevin and my family can verify that I tend to let my work become the central figure in my life, at the expense of everything else.

    I was putting off the decision about whether to go, when on Tuesday they said “hey Heather, we’re going Ho Chi Minh City on Thursday and we’re going to get our travel visas right now. Are you in or out? Come with us!!”

    I quickly chose yes, and then figured out how to make it work. Fortunately, my new work team is kindly flexible. So, I packed our bags, I had my daily Skype call with my manager at 7am, and by 8:30am the 4 of us were on a bus to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) in Vietnam.

    We took the Mekong Express Bus, and it was a rather pleasant trip – despite being only 300km or so, it took us 5 or 6 hours. Still, the scenery was great, movies were playing, and the wifi on the bus allowed me to continue working until we reached the Cambodia-Vietnam border.

    As with most things in Cambodia, the trip was filled with interesting, unique occurrences. For me, the highlight was when our bus rode onto a boat that carried us across the Mekong. Whereas this experience, being crammed on a boat in a bus, surrounded by motorcycles and scooters while kids and women manoeuvred around trying to sell water and snacks, was curious and interesting, it was far from surprising. What was surprising was the suspension-bridge-in-progress that we could see just down the river. So, this trip might get a bit more modern in a few months’ (hopefully) time.

    Check out the photos here of the boat ride and the bridge:

    We were very impressed with Ho Chi Minh City, though were a bit shocked by how much modern it was than Phnom Penh. In some ways it’s like a combination of Phnom Penh and Bangkok – modern, but yet with a relaxed European-influenced charm and architecture. It was also remarkably clean.

    The traffic, of course, was next level. Mom and Dad, Kevin took this video specifically for you guys to watch – he wanted to capture the intensity and volume of scooters, and I think he succeeded:

    We stayed at Hello Hotel, the cleanest hotel we’ve stayed at throughout all of our travels, which was a very welcome surprise.

    The fun in Ho Chi Minh City started right away, and obviously involved food, as all our travels do. We headed to an incredible sushi restaurant, Ichiban Sushi, for dinner, followed by an Internations event at a new restaurant in the city. I’ll write more about Internations later, but it’s basically an online social media site that is used to connected ex-pats at in-person events. We met lots of interesting people, and then headed home to bed.

    During the day on Friday, I worked in our hotel room, while Kevin and our friends went to a business conference to try to make some new connections in Vietnam. When they got back from work, we were off to dinner again, this time to Cyclo Resto. It was truly a special experience. The restaurant offers one set menu per night – a mix of modern and traditional Vietnamese food, served family style. When the food is that good, there’s no need to be concerned that you don’t get to choose – and this way you can just focus on enjoying each other’s company.

    After dinner, we checked out a rooftop bar that had been recommended by someone at the Internations event. One drink turned into a few, and before we knew it, we’d been relaxing and chatting for 5 hours. Before we called it a night, we headed McDonalds from some late-night McNuggets. To be honest, I was a complete McDonalds fiend during this trip. There’s no McDonalds in all of Cambodia, and I was craving it big time. In the span of three days, we went to McDonalds twice. Sound gross? You should read my bff Rebecca’s blog – she’d agree with you.

    On Saturday, we took our sweet time getting our day started. Eventually we headed to a different conference. That conference was closing that day at 5pm. Naturally, when we arrived at 1pm, it was 80% packed up and torn down. With our “work day” now over, we went on the hunt for a mani-pedi location. Marie and I found one that was pretty sketchy and had a very basic mani-pedi done for $2 each. I’d rushed our choice of location due to fear of impending rain, which is not something I’ll ever do again. Everything went fine, but let’s just say that place wasn’t winning any awards for hygiene.

    No worries – in keeping with our relaxed lifestyle over here, we then went and grabbed coffee, before heading back to Ichiban Sushi for dinner (it was that good!!). Kevin and Chris started off dinner with “Sake Boom”:

    After dinner, we got the restaurant owner to recommend a good foot massage/spa place just down the street. You see, Kevin has a whole host of post-blister skin injuries on his one foot, and we’d been hoping he could get a proper spa pedicure to fix it up. Our earlier location didn’t fit the bill, but this new place did. Marie and I enjoyed our second pedicure of the day, while Kevin enjoyed the first ‘spa pedicure’ of his life. Let’s just say, this will become a repeat activity in our lives. I couldn’t be happier, and neither could he. Watching Kevin enjoy the massage chair while getting his feet done was a true delight – he looked like a cat who’d just discovered the joys of napping in sunbeams.

    Sunday morning, we boarded a bus and headed back to Cambodia. The trip went off without a hitch, and now we’re back in Phnom Penh, watching Formula 1 and thinking about our next trip!

    Also the alley near our hotel
    The view from OMG Rooftop Bar
    Standing and watching the rain at Cyclo Resto
    In the alley near our hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
    Me attempting a “jump shot”
    Spa time!
    Ichiban Sushi