digital nomad – Nowbridge Blog

Nowbridge’s newest feature

As you know, we’re always working to improve our remote working software and our latest feature allows you even more control.

Nowbridge is a desktop application which sits unobtrusively in the background and helps you stay part of the team. If you need to check whether your colleague is at their desk, you just click on the icon and Nowbridge comes to the front of the screen. It’s really useful for remote workers because it allows you to see your colleagues throughout the working day, send them chat messages, files and initiate Skype conversations with them. If you’d like to read more about the Nowbridge features and why we created the software, we wrote a blog about it recently.

Another key feature for people who work remotely is the ability to turn it off or press pause throughout the day, which is a useful indicator to your colleagues that you have finished for the day or are on a break.

Anyway, our new feature allows you to keep the application on top of the other windows, you can set the transparency to whatever you prefer so it’s not distracting, but you can quickly see who is there and if they’re free without having to switch windows or pause what you’re doing.

It can be a real time-saver! Plus, you don’t have to activate the feature if you’d prefer to keep it in the background. Like most of the features on Nowbridge, this option can be controlled by pressing the settings button and ticking the box next to ‘Always on top’.

What do you think of our new feature?

Tips for staying well when you work from home

We often talk about the benefits of remote working:

It’s easy
It saves money
It helps save the planet
It can increase productivity and focus

…and we have covered the difficulties of working remotely, but something that is also coming to the forefront of discussion in the workplace and the wider world is mental health awareness. While remote working does come with lots of perks, it can lead to feelings of isolation and make it hard to switch off between your work and personal life.

Take a break

Just as you would during your working day in an office, it’s important to take regular breaks both from the screen and from sitting down. Take a short walk, make a cup of tea, meditate for a few minutes etc.

Take your lunch hour

We’re all guilty of working through our lunch break but it can become a slippery slope into blurring the lines between working and having a personal life.

Take a sick day when you need one

If you were working in an office, it would be normal to take a sick day for physical illness or mental health, the same applies for remote working.

Take your annual leave

Working remotely doesn’t mean that you work any less hard than in-office staff. It’s important to take a break from work every now and then, to recharge your batteries, to spend time with friends or family etc.

Talk to people

Although you work alone, you aren’t. There’s a whole remote working community out there! Whether you join other remote workers on social media or use a live-chat or similar (like Nowbridge) to keep in touch with your in-house colleagues, it’s good to talk. Also, schedule dinners with friends or gym classes for after work so that you’ve got some real human interaction in your day.

Turn your computer off

Okay, this sounds obvious but we don’t just mean your computer. Set some expectations with your colleagues or clients about what your working hours are and when you will and will not be replying to messages. This will help you mentally switch off as well as physically.

There are lots of well-known benefits to remote work and we personally think they outweigh the difficulties, but it’s important to look out for yourself and make sure that you keep your work/life balance, balanced.

Handy tools for remote workers

There has been a huge rise in the past couple of years of new software and apps to increase productivity, streamline connectivity and all in all, make it easier for both in-house and remote workers to improve the efficiency of their working days.

For productivity and project management there are the usual suspects, Trello, Asana, Jira and Axosoft, which crop up a lot in reviews and articles about remote working. Also Slack, which is technically more of a messaging app for teams, but you can do a fair bit more than that, including file sharing and prioritizing conversations into topics and themes.

Another clever tool for remote teams split across different time zones is EveryTimeZone, which shows you how the time zones of your coworkers overlap with yours so you can coordinate efforts more easily.

Google Cloud Print eliminates the need to print huge documents at home and allows you to send the documents to a printer at the office or, any printer in the world really! Speaking of clouds, Dropbox and WeTransfer are great for sharing large documents with your colleagues – you don’t need an account for the latter and can transfer up to 2GB a time as often as you need.

Need to drown out some background noise but find the radio or television too distracting? Try Noisli, a white noise app. You can pick and choose the high quality ambient sounds and see what works for you!

A new contender that we’re quite excited about is Moleskine’s Smart Writing Set, which lets you hand write your notes and see them transferred to an app on your phone, so they are instantly digitized. Eliminating the need to write up your notes or scan in diagrams or drawings to send to colleagues, this will save you time and reduce the risk of losing the work. We can’t wait to give this one a try!

Nowbridge is our offering; a remote working software that allows you to stay part of the team by sharing live still images every few seconds with your colleagues so you can see who is available and who isn’t. You can send instant chat messages, leave voice messages and even call someone on Skype from within the desktop app. There are a number of different photo filters available and the images are only shared with people who you allow to see you. It gives you a clear boundary between when you’re at work and when you’ve finished for the day and helps you stay part of the team, wherever you are in the world.

Are there any other great apps or software we should be aware of? Let us know!

10 tips for staying sane when you work from home

Although working from home is pretty great, it can be tough to stay motivated. Here are our top ten tips for keeping sane and staying motivated.

Get dressed, have a shower and prepare for work like you would usually.
Make a list of daily tasks and make sure you do them, block out time in your calendar if you need to discourage colleagues from putting in too many meetings or calls.
Try and stay out of the kitchen – we know it can be tempting to snack constantly when you work from home but try to have the discipline to resist, just as you’re being disciplined in everything else.
Plan some social interaction – this is an important one, it can be lonely working from home. Whether it’s evening exercises, standing lunch or coffee dates with friends, do something.
Change your environment – if you find yourself going a bit stir crazy, it can be a good idea to take your laptop, phone and work to a local coffee shop or a co-working space.
Take regular breaks – either by doing the above, getting up and making a cup of tea or coffee, doing some laundry, taking the dog for a walk etc. If you find it hard to do these, you could set a timer for yourself.
Work your way – if you like to listen to the radio or have the television on in the background or whatever it is, if that helps you work, do it. Whatever helps you work more productively, do it!
Make sure you have the tools you need – a decent WiFi connection capable of video conferencing and file sending/downloading, a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones and potentially a decent microphone with a mute button or a headset – even better.
Stay in touch with your co-workers and boss throughout the day – there are so many tools available to help you stay connected *cough* like Nowbridge *cough* and other productivity tools like Trello or Asana. Stay part of the team!
When your working day is finished, stop working – this is one of those easier said than done things…but it’s important. Whether you work 9-5 or you’ve found that you’re more productive working in the afternoon, you need to keep the boundaries between your work life and your home life.

We hope you found these useful! Have we missed anything? Let us know!

Nowbridge in action!

Are you part of a remote team? Have you tried Nowbridge yet?

If not, why not?

We all know the benefits of working remotely, but it can be lonely. We created Nowbridge so that all of your colleagues, wherever they are in the world, can stay a part of the team.

Our software unobtrusively sits on your desktop in the background while you work, but it’s there when you want to check whether a colleague is at their desk, or you need to quickly send a message that it’s not worth sending an email about. You can use it to call them on Skype or leave a voice message, which they can hear when they’re back at their desks.

The rest of the time, you might not even realise that it’s there, until you need it. There are lots of handy filters that you can apply to your live still images too, which gives you another level of control. It also gives you a clear way of switching off at the end of your day as your remote colleagues can see when you turn it off, your box goes white. This helps distinguish between your work time and your home time.

Why not introduce it to your remote teams and see how you get on?

The shift towards remote working

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. Remote working is on the up and up, and we can’t be happier. Being ‘self employed’ or ‘freelance’ no longer implies being between jobs or out of work. Instead, it’s becoming a sort of, badge of honor nowadays, with lots of people seeing the move as brave.

As more and more companies embrace remote working, there is more work available for people who decide to move away from the office. So really, it’s no wonder that with the increase in public transport costs and the stress of commuting, the pull to work remotely is getting stronger.

We created our software because as great as remote working can be, for productivity, for your stress levels and for the environment, it sure can be lonely sometimes. When you’re working in an office, you have ongoing micro-interactions with people without often even realising it. Even if you can just see the top of someone’s head from your desk or hear them answer the phone, you know that they’re there. Whereas when you’re working remotely, you really don’t have any way of knowing whether someone is available. Yes, you can login to Skype or Gmail chat, if your company use those, but those green “online” dots aren’t always accurate.

Nowbridge bridges the gap between staff working remotely and in the office. Live still images updating every few seconds all day long create the illusion of being together. You control who you connect with and when. You can only be seen by the people you can see. Use it throughout the day to send chat messages to colleagues or even quickly call them on Skype when you can see they’re at their desks. At the end of your working day, press pause or close Nowbridge down and it’s clear to everyone in your team that you have finished for the day.

Also, it’s free to download and easy to use! Have you tried it yet?

Improve your communication and productivity

Although a lot of companies strive to improve communication and productivity, a lot of the time, this can fall by the wayside when urgent projects and deadlines take priority. Add in staffing/recruitment issues and budget cuts and it’s understandable that focusing on the needs of your current staff can slip. But communication and productivity aren’t just important for the managers, directors, executives, CEOs, they are crucial for the rest of the staff too.

What you might not realise is that communication doesn’t necessarily improve by being in the same office as someone. In fact, often the communication quality improves dramatically when one or both parties work remotely. For one thing, you make time to speak to each other. Often in offices, there’s the temptation to give someone a quick call or pop over to their desks. Convenient yes, but it’s likely that the other person is working on something else and isn’t entirely focused on your particular query. Therefore, you might be able to speak to them quickly but how likely is it that you’ve got 100% of their attention and understanding?

The increase in productivity that comes from working remotely or having remote workers is the subject of many an article, blog post and tweet. But the facts are hard to deny. With the loss of office noise, interruptions, necessary or seemingly-unnecessary meetings, remote workers can focus more on their work and also work during their most productive hours – that is, if the company allow flexible working. We mentioned in an earlier blog that by hiring remote workers, you increase your talent pool. If, for example you are on a different timezone to your employees, this can also mean that while you sleep, they might also be working on the project and can advance it significantly before you even start your next working day.

There are obviously other ways to improve communication and productivity in companies than by having a remote working policy but with all the benefits to both employee and employer that come from remote working, it shouldn’t be ignored.

Don’t forget to try Nowbridge, it’s free, easy and can make remote workers feel like they’re still a part of the team. Try it today!

Work to live or live to work?

There has been a noticeable shift in the past few years with more people wanting a better work/life balance and subsequently opting for digitally-focused careers, which allow them more flexibility with how much they work and also, where they work.

“Any businessman, any executive, could live almost anywhere on Earth and still do his business through a device like this.” – Arthur C. Clarke

As predicted by infamous science fiction author and futurist, Arthur C. Clarke, we are now able to work from anywhere. Technology really is incredible. In fact, here’s another quote from Arthur C. Clarke which seems pretty apt.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke

Obviously there are some industries that can’t utilize remote working, but for those who can, it opens up a whole world full of talented potential employees. Rather than being limited to hiring from within a location-based pool of candidates, if your company is pro-remote working, you could hire the best people from around the world rather than the best people in your immediate location.

There seem to be endless articles about the rise of the digital nomad and this all links into the quest for the perfect balance. More and more people are drawn to the nomadic lifestyle, travelling the globe and working as and when they need to. We spend around a third of our lives working. A third! Even if you aren’t travelling the world while working freelance, by working remotely you can take back some control of your working life. Although the stability of working 9-5 works for some people, others might find that they work more productively in the afternoons and cannot focus properly for much of the day.

What do you do, live to work or work to live? Are you tempted to move to remote working?

Work from home – help save the planet

In an earlier post we mentioned that:

“…an employee who works just two days a week from home can save up to 390kgs of carbon emissions annually”

With Earth Day coming up on the 22 April, we thought we’d do a bit more research.

According to various sources including NASA, global temperatures will continue to rise for decades to come. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast a temperature rise of 2.5-10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century! Climate change will affect agriculture, built environment, transport, health, business and finance, water resources, flooding and more, so it is something that we all need to take more seriously.

80% of people living in urban areas that monitor air pollution are exposed to air quality levels that exceed WHO limits. This is worrying because “As urban air quality declines, the risk of stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and chronic and acute respiratory diseases, including asthma, increases for the people who live in them.”

The emissions reduction we mentioned for one employee would be amplified if entire work forces started telecommuting.

Even if you can’t work remotely, by using public transport, walking or cycling instead of driving to work, you can make a huge difference. Reducing commuter traffic cuts back on air pollution, water pollution and oil consumption.

We already knew that remote working could help to save the planet but it seems that it can also help save us.

Be more productive when you work from home

Make yourself a home office or at least separate off an area for yourself and tell yourself that is where you work from home. If you don’t have any separation, you’ll always feel like you’re trapped in limbo between working and not working. Another way to counter this is by using Nowbridge but we’ll talk more about that later…

Decide what your hours will be and stick to them (as far as possible). If your company are flexible with the hours you do, work out when you work best in the day. A lot of people find that they work best outside of the 9-5 constraints, i.e. if you’re more productive after lunch, do your hours then. Of course, depending on your job, some companies might prefer you to stick to the normal 9-5 hours. It really depends on the company, the industry and your role.

Make sure you take a lunch break and get away from your computer during that time. Try to avoid eating lunch at your desk, this blurs the boundaries between work and non-work.

Take breaks. Remember that if you were in the office, you’d likely be going to get cups of tea or coffee or walking to fetch work from the printer. It’s important to take breaks from the screen and by doing little jobs like hanging your laundry out to dry or emptying the dishwasher, you don’t have to do these things later and can enjoy your home time more.

Work like you’re at the office. As in, try not to schedule appointments for the middle of the day or take a long lunch with a friend – don’t slack off!

Schedule time to check in with the office. This can help with any collaborative projects and remind you that you’re part of a team. A lot of companies have taken to using online chat software – again, Nowbridge does this and also has Skype integrated.

Get some background noise. We don’t know about you but we find it hard to work in silence. If you like it then – job done! If not, why not try Spotify or the radio?

Get dressed every day. As tempting as it might be to stay in your pijamas, getting dressed helps you get into the right mindset for the day and again, gives you a small amount of separation between your home time and your working day. NB: This is also a good idea if your company like spontaneous conference/Skype calls.

A little bit about Nowbridge

As we mentioned earlier, Nowbridge can help bridge the gap (see what we did there?) between working from home and the office. Live still images updating every few seconds all day long create the illusion of being together. You control who you connect with and when. You can only be seen by the people you can see. Did we mention it’s free and easy to use?

So you can turn your laptop on, open Nowbridge and see who else is working. When it comes to lunchtime, you can either leave it running while you are away from your desk or press pause – flagging the fact that you’ve stopped working. Use it throughout the day to send chat messages to colleagues or even quickly call them on Skype when you can see they’re at their desks. At the end of your working day, press pause or close Nowbridge down and it’s clear to everyone in your team that you have finished for the day.

Try it today!