Which is why WorkSnug, which helps mobile workers find the best available work spaces near them, launched their ‘Coffee Shop Code of Conduct.’ Holding out the prize of 10 new smartphones and headsets for the most popular ideas, WorkSnug solicited coffeehouse denizens to offer up their top coffee shop pet peeves and vote on others’ suggestions. More than 6,000 heeded the call to complain (and hopefully help shape up the behavior of the digital nomad community).

We encouraged you to gripe about your top annoyances, now we’re reporting the results, presented in a handy infographic by WorkSnug:

Which coffee house sin is the worst in your book? The most frequently committed?

Image courtesy of Flickr user LOLren.

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Luckily, when Cora Rodenbusch’s software coder husband caught a bad case of wanderlust, that’s just the situation she found herself in. A corporate communications and internal community manager with virtual meetings company PGi, Rodenbusch approached her bosses about becoming a traveling brand ambassador by taking a year to visit the company’s offices in 24 countries, working remotely and reporting backing about the realities of life as a global telecommuter.

“They jumped on it immediately,” she reports. Now, three months into her adventure, we talked to her from the Copenhagen office where she’s juggling time zones, battling connectivity issues and planning the next leg of her journey: a drive to Milan.

Talent

Rodenbusch describes her team as “flat,” and says they work together as colleagues, so she need only supervise one direct report: a writer helping her put together the company’s internal newsletter. But just because she isn’t engaged in hiring remote workers, doesn’t mean she doesn’t have strong opinions about what types of people thrive best working away from a structured office setting. Work ethic is paramount.

“It’s almost like you’re running your own business because when you work remotely,” she explains. “You have nothing to prove yourself other than the end result of your work and you really have to own that end result and make it a success. You don’t have coming into the office early, dressing professionally or water cooler talk to help yourself. “

Tools

It’s not surprising that as an employee of a global meetings and remote communication tools company, Rodenbusch would be passionate about choosing the best tech for her trip. “Finding the right tools is key,” she insists and so is video. “That’s the one thing, honestly, that’s made the distance fade the fastest,” she says. Equally unsurprisingly, she recommends her company’s product iMeet. (As I’m an iMeet newbie, Rodenbusch insisted we give it a try for the interview and it worked without a hitch.)

Even if Rodenbusch is armed with all the best tools, connectivity can still be a challenge. “Connectivity is huge,” she says “Each country you go into has a different way to connect to the wireless, or they have a different cell provider, so that’s been probably the biggest challenge.” But she has found ways to work around the difficulties.

“Honestly, McDonald’s is my home away from home. They have the best Internet and a delicious cappuccino,” she says.

Tips

So how do Rodenbusch’s clients and co-workers react to her itinerant lifestyle? Rodenbusch’s takes pride in the fact that many of them don’t even know about it. “My goal is that no one knows where I am,” she says. “It makes me feel really good that I am still able to keep up with all the different time zones we have.”

But keeping up with so many connections on so many continents is no picnic, Rodenbusch warns, and you should think carefully before deciding to take on the challenge.

“During the week, I work both India and U.S. hours because my team’s U.S. That’s where my stakeholders are, and so I think that’s something that’s really important,” she says. “The weeks are pretty grueling. It’s long hours, but the weekends, that’s the best, because I’m a tourist dropped in a brand new city for the weekend.”

So if you’re dreaming of the digital nomad lifestyle, how do you know that for you the benefits would outweigh the challenges? Rodenbusch offers advice for anyone considering giving remote work a try: “Have a reason that’s bigger than work for why you want to work outside the office. If it’s pursuing a personal dream like myself, you’re going to make it work. It’s worth it to you to do whatever it takes to make your stakeholders happy and make it a success. If it’s to catch Oprah at four o’clock, then it’s not going to work.”

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Behind Untemplater: Six Co-founders

The six co-founders of Untemplater — Jun Loayza, Adam Baker, Cody McKibben, Monica O’Brien, Carlos Miceli and Andrew Norcross — also come from a variety of backgrounds. What they all have in common is that they’ve built their careers along unconventional lines, following passion and making use of technology.

The genesis of Untemplater was to help others do the same. “Each member of the Untemplater team has their own story about how they broke free from the template lifestyle,” explains Loayza. “I left the corporate world to start my own company; Cody McKibben left the U.S. to live the mobile lifestyle in Thailand; Adam Baker sold his business and now travels the world with his family. Each Untemplater member has a unique take on breaking the template lifestyle, providing a holistic view of possibilities and opportunities out there for any person in any situation.”

Loayza continues: “Untemplater defines the ‘template lifestyle’ as the following: Work hard in school, get good grades, get a corporate job, work the 9-5 cubicle, get your MBA, work up the corporate ladder, retire, die. Sounds a little harsh but that’s the template that we’ve been given ever since applying to universities from high school. Our goal is to show undergraduates and young professionals that they have the power to break free from this template lifestyle and live life on their own terms.”

Creating a Business Across Time Zones

Having team members in such a variety of time zones has offered some special challenges for the Untemplater team, says McKibben: “It has definitely been challenging to find time slots where we can all come together at the same time to get things done. Remote collaboration tools are indispensable, but when you need to get on the phone and you’ve got half the team on the West Coast and in South America and the other half in Asia/Australia, someone has to stay up really late or get up really early to make it happen.”

The opportunities that being able to work online provides have made the difference. There are certain tools that the team relies on. “For weekly conference calls among the Untemplater founders, we’ve put Skype to the test from the remotest jungle regions of Southeast Asia, and we’ve used the PBworks suite extensively, which gives us a place to keep all of our ideas, projects, to-do lists and accountability in a collaborative wiki format,” according to McKibben. “We’ve also made heavy use of Google Docs, especially when it comes to keeping track of contact lists, outreach efforts and other resource lists.”

Have you built a virtual business like the Untemplater team? Share your tips below.

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To try to answer these questions and more, Location Independent and Free Pursuits are currently running a Digital Nomad survey — if you consider yourself to be a digital nomad or aspiring digital nomad, please help them out by filling out the survey.

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So what can we do to make the most out of slow Internet connections?

Tune up your laptop before you leave. If you’ll be taking your laptop with you, make sure that it’s clean of spyware and adware. These programs tend to slow down your Internet connection since they use it to send data to third parties or load unwanted pop-up ads via your browser. I use Lavasoft Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy to make sute my laptop is clean of malware.

Also, it won’t hurt to de-clutter your hard drive and installed programs to ensure peak performance.

Make your Internet browser lean. Tweak your browser settings to automatically block ads, images, Flash, and JavaScript. In Firefox, you can do this by going to Tools > Options, then fiddling with the settings under Content. Uncheck Load images automatically and Enable JavaScript. As for blocking ads and flash, add-ons such as Adblock and Flashblock can handle that.

At this stage, you might be tempted to install speed enhancing add-on, such as Fasterfox. Remember that if you’re going to use such a third-party add-on or program to make your browsing speeds faster, make sure that you disable prefetching of web sites. Prefetching lets your browser automatically download and cache linked sites, unnecessarily consuming bandwidth.

Get rid of slow-loading add-ons. Browsers like Opera and Firefox allow you to use themes, extensions, and add-ons to customize your browsing experience. But these things can also consume memory and make your browser a little slower. Deactivate or disable any extensions that aren’t essential to your work.

Find a source of portable connectivity. One of the gadgets I bring with me on the road is a small 3G HSDPA modem with prepaid Internet access (which cost me around $40, including a prepaid card). This allows me to have access to 3G Internet where available or a much slower GPRS connection, which is available wherever there’s a cellphone signal.

Loading a WordPress Dashboard can take around 5 minutes on a GPRS connection, but as a blogger, the fact that I can access it at all is important. Most digital nomads (including myself) can sleep better at night knowing that they can access the web for basic work tasks, even if the connection is slow.

Know the rates you’ll be paying. Unless you’re only planning to take advantage of free Wi-Fi, you need to know if your Internet providers will charge you based on bandwidth or time, otherwise you can end up with a nasty surprise when you get the bill.

Divide your tasks into bandwidth-heavy and bandwidth-light. Evaluate your routine web tasks and see which ones you can do with a slow connection, and which ones require a faster, more reliable one. This is especially important if your mobile Internet provider charges based on bandwidth usage instead of time. Aliza Sherman did something similar in a previous post, to help her work around bandwidth limits.

Obviously, the bandwidth-light tasks are the ones you can do on your slow connection. For the bandwidth-heavy tasks, you’ll have to wait until you get to an Internet cafe or an area with a reliable connection. Separating your tasks into these two lists will allow you to schedule and batch them according to what kind of connection you can access.

Have backup plans. Even if you think you’ve covered all the bases, it helps to have a backup plan in case you really can’t get a decent connection. Some tips include:

• Having a friend or a virtual assistant do some web tasks for you (uploading and formatting blog posts, research, checking your email,etc.)
• Doing as much work as you can in advance.
• Researching your connectivity options (net cafes, Wi-Fi hotspots, etc.) before you arrive at your destination.

Slow Internet speeds might be a traveling web worker’s nightmare, but with a bit of research and planning, you can make it easier on yourself and the people who work with you.

Do you have any connectivity tips or techniques to share with traveling web workers?

Image by runrunrun from sxc.hu

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Well it took long enough! Your favorite blog has finally got its act together and jumped on the social bandwagon!

You can now follow TheAppleBlog on Twitter!

We won’t be doing anything lame like just streaming our articles directly to our Twitter account…there’s a real, live human being handling this.

So, delay no more and give TheAppleBlog a follow!

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• How do developers ride the Siri wave?
• Connectivity means making the machine disappear
• Access vs. ownership: Why UltraViolet has already lost

Here’s the truth so far: web working on the road is harder than it looks. Even with all the research and planning, some things are bound to be different from what you’re expecting.

Internet Access

In a previous post, I mentioned how internet access should be one of the things you look into when researching travel destinations. This is especially important for us web workers, since it’s hard to anticipate what client queries or work emergencies you’ll need to attend to.

One option is to travel in areas that are known to have reliable internet connections. But doing this limits your number of possible destinations. Since I prefer to stay in remote provincial areas, it was logical for me to buy a 3G USB modem. This. device comes in handy for traveling web workers, and even if there’s no 3G access in some areas, you can still manage to use a GPRS connection (even if it’s rather slow).

Scheduling

Although you don’t need to plan every hour of your trip, it’s important to have a vague idea of what you’ll be doing each day. This will allow you to schedule some time for work. Just make sure you don’t spend most of your time on your laptop. If you spend 90% of your trip getting some work done, then it’s almost as if you stayed in your home office. Doing this would be missing the point. The key is to know which important work tasks you absolutely have to do within the same time frame as your trip. You can even try outsourcing some of your most basic tasks while you’re away.

Remember that traveling always involves waiting. You could be in the pier for three hours, waiting for the late ferry. You could be in the airport waiting to board your plane. Since waiting time is expected, know how to be productive when this happens. I spent most of my waiting time making notes on the articles I had to write, and jotting down the work tasks I have to do when I return. You can also use this time to recharge your gadgets.

I also strongly recommend doing even a bit of your work in advance – this is something I didn’t do very well for this trip (I got sick the week before I left). But if I were able to do that, I would’ve had the benefit of worrying less about work while I’m traveling.

Equipment

The general rule of traveling with gadgets is that you shouldn’t take more than what you need. Right now I have my small MSI Wind notebook, my cellphone, and the modem I mentioned earlier. This allows me to pack for a 2-week trip in a single backpack. In the future, I might opt to bring an extension cord or outlet multiplier with me, as some rooms have only one or two power outlets.

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t take less than what you need either. While a netbook with a 10-inch monitor suits me well, graphic designers will no doubt have a much harder time with it. If it’s relevant to your work, and it’s hard for you to get things done without it, extra gadgets or a bigger laptop should be on your packing list.

Know how others have done it

The most comforting thing, for me at least, was that many people have worked on the road before. Here at WWD, Anne Zelenka interviewed Lea Woodward about her location-independent lifestyle. Imran Ali wrote about the traveling web working family of Tumblewagon. Tim Ferriss also discussed a similar concept in his book, “The 4-Hour Workweek”.

As internet connectivity becomes more prevalent, and as smaller devices become more affordable, it’s also no surprise that the number of traveling web workers is growing. It’s certain that you’ll find an experienced digital nomad who can give you all the advice and information you need. Hopefully, in a couple of years, I can be as wise and experienced as they are now.

Have you ever tried working on the road? What tips can you share based on your experience?

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