Laura Szabó and Gyula Bajkai are a married couple from Hungary, traveling the world while working and experiencing new cultures doe the last 2 years. They’re in it for the new people, places and learning a lot about their surroundings and themselves.
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Interview with remote workers Laura Szabó and Gyula Bajkai
What’s your name and where are you from? Where do you live currently?
We are 35 years old, originally from Hungary. We have been together for the last 15 years, and started this lifestyle almost 2 years ago. We are moving around a lot, right now sitting in a Starbucks in Bahrain at the Middle East and catching up with work. Next week we are off to India, New Delhi and later on Mumbai and Goa.
We combine our work with traveling, by having international clients and a long list of places we want to see. Time to time we also go home.
What is it you do?
We do strategy, consultancy and product design for marketplaces and listing portals – right now mainly property portals and job portals. Our name is carangid.net, if you are interested in such services you can find a more comprehensive description on our website. We both have a background in digital product development.
How long have you been working remotely?
Laura started 2 years ago, Gyula joined a year ago. This was after 11-12 years of corporate and office environment. We both started out our carriers in digital agencies, and then switched to product development. Gyula was working as a UX- and product designer, Laura was in product management.
Are you employed or a freelancer? If employed, what is your arrangement and how did you convince your boss?
The first year, Gyula was an employee, Laura was a freelancer, but now we both switched to freelancing in order to be able to move around together.
If there is such a thing, how does a normal workday look for you?
Not really 🙂 It depends on where we are, if we have onsite days with our clients, or a research phase or anything else. We need to be careful though to take time off, go swimming, fishing and so on!
Today we are putting a workshop together, so doing the pre-work. We will facilitate this workshop next week, so after a workout session in the morning we came to this cafe to make progress. Later today we will go swimming.
Yesterday we took the day off and celebrated a birthday of friend’s kid in a waterpark. Not every day is pink and shiny though. We also struggle sometimes with finding the routine and meeting the deadlines. We are kind of strict to ourselves by setting the deadlines.
Can you think of a time you were really happy to be working remotely?
We are constantly enjoying this lifestyle. Of course it brings us different challenges, a lot of planning our travels and our daily routines. We are living as digital nomads, discovering new places and also going back to our favorite ones. We really enjoyed the Maldives and the Algarve in Portugal in our free time and always want to go back there!
What’s your biggest achievement/ milestone regarding remote work?
We recently got recognized as digital nomads, and got into the finals for the Central European Startup Awards in Hungary. Vote for us until the 15th September 🙂 Our name is carangid.net, and you can vote here:
https://competition.globalstartupawards.com/public-voting/5cd2f833a6a6fd790844f1d7
We would like to show that having the traveling lifestyle and being a digital nomad is not just a hype. We believe in the productivity of remote work and the power of knowledge sharing when working with different companies – and this is also a good opportunity for our partners. They could hire the best talent by having freelancers and digital nomads on board. We are really thankful to all our partners for the trust and the good cooperation we are having.
What is your biggest struggle with working remotely?
The planning part can be tough. We don’t want to just run around the world constantly, so we need to adjust our schedule and clients carefully.
Last year we had projects in Portugal, India, Hungary, Germany, Romania and Poland. We need to choose the places to stay, the way of traveling, the most important fishing gear as well clothes that fit the weather and the climate. 🙂
Like I mentioned above, planning the daily routine is also a task and it can be different in every place we go. It is also different when we are spending our time with the clients onsite. Sometimes we fail to plan to have enough time for some exercise or just a walk in a park or on the seaside, and then we can feel the consequences on the stress levels.
What do you do to deal with it?
We learned to say no after a while for projects we knew we could not do on our maximum level, either because of timing or workload. We learned to take our time in each country, and are not doing “quick” visits for 2-3 days any more.
How does working remotely affect your stress levels?
In these last 2 years, our life changed a lot both on the professional and the personal level. Stress and frustration definitely went down, and now the excitement of new challenges drives both of us.
It does not mean that we are completely stress free all the time, and have no days with a bad mood. It is just different, and we can adjust our working time more freely than we used to.
Was there a specific reason why you wanted to work remotely?
We wanted to see the world, and life is just to short to make it, if you are working in an office 9/5. But we did not make a big decision once, it kind of just happened, that we shifted out from the office life.
After Laura quit her job in 2017, we started to look around more and more for opportunities. When Gyula quit also a year later, there was no question that we want to move around.
What’s the most important skill that helped you make it?
We are problem solvers and open for challenges. We have both different skill sets, so our small team can reach the best results!
Are there any essential apps or tools you use daily?
Revolut, Transferwise – these help a lot to make our finances right with the different currencies.
Apart from your computer, what’s the most important item in your office?
Let’s see, what are the most important thing that always travel with us: ChromeCast, wireless router, adapters for multiple countries and fishing gear.
What’s your favorite 90s jam?
Smash Mouth – Walking on the sun – we both agreed on this one!
