Photo was taken flying over Alaska on the way back from China.

Use Dopplr to Document Travel

I’ve been using Dopplr for a couple of years to document and share my travel itineraries. It’s nice to be able to see who will be where and when, and how our trips align. You can see my travel schedule in the widget on this blog and I do my best to keep that up to date.

Another feature of Dopplr that I love is the 6 month and year end reports of my travel. I got this chart (above) in my email last week showing me what I’ve done and where I’ve gone this year. Not a bad start to 2009, and it’s not done yet!

My Travel in 2009

In February this year I had the opportunity to travel for work to China and stay there for a month. I spent the first 5 days in Hong Kong which I found to be amazing. Hong Kong was a perfect mix of western and eastern culture, and the city is young enough that I would probably live there for a while if the opportunity presented itself.

The second half of my Asia trip was spend in downtown Shanghai. Here are some of my reactions to weird China stuff.

Posts from China:

• In Route to China
• Crazy China Stuff
• Tongli, Suzhou
• More Crazy China Stuff
• Shanhai World Financial Center
• My last day in China
• China pics on Flickr

Then, more recently, again for work, I had the opportunity to go to Sweden for a week. I was based in Uppsala during the week (about an hour outside of Stockholm) but stayed in the city during the weekend to take advantage of the perfect weather and epic nightlife.

Sweden blew me away due to the beauty of the cities layout with so many rivers & islands, and the people. A walk through certain areas of Stockholm is honestly like walking through a catalog (people are so preppy!), not to mention the fact that it was light for 20 hrs per day in the summer. I was out until 2am and it felt like happy hour the entire time because the lighting was like dusk all night.

Posts from Sweden:

• My First Day In Sweden
• How To Take A Vacation: A Lesson (Learned) From Europeans
• Investing Yourself and The Value of Strong Relationships
• Sweden pics on Flickr (update coming)

As most of you know I’m getting married in November (wedding site: RyanGotMolly.com) and I’m headed to Costa Rica for my honeymoon. I posted pictures of the hotel on my personal blog.

• Honeymoon hotel in Costa Rica

One thing I’d really like to start doing more often is exploring the ol’ US of A. So much travel is focused on getting outside of the US, but there are some phenomenal sites right in our own backyard. For my birthday I started getting camping gear. I’m preparing for trips (with my wife-to-be) to go around the US to check out National Parks, monuments, and other natural treasures.

I’ve been reading Backpacker magazine and there is an overwhelming amount of amazing hikes and camp sites to check out. Probably not far from you! In September, for my bachelor party, I’m headed to Boulder, CO to camp, white water raft, hike, and yes, probably drink a bit as we’re headed to the brewery tours in Ft. Collins. I’m excited to start checking out some great travel/get away opportunities right here in the US.

Blog posts to come!

Finding Opportunities to Travel Outside of Vacation

Not every job is going to provide opportunities to travel, I understand that. But, many do, and I highly advise you never miss the opportunity to travel for work. Not only is there huge value to getting out of the office to meet people face to face, there is no cheaper way to travel on your personal pocket book. If you’re traveling with work, bust your ass Monday to Friday and use the weekend to explore. Maximize your personal time so it feels like a mini vacation! You may be tired when you get back home but it’s absolutely worth it. Believe it or not, red-eyes are your friend.

Another way to get away is to volunteer. Last year a good friend of mine headed to Tanzania, Africa for 2 weeks on a solo trip with plans to volunteer. He ended up meeting people that that will be friends of his for years to come. You don’t always have to do the “it’s all about me” trek through Europe. Select a random destination and find a way to help people and I guarantee you’ll have a blast and make some lasting memories.

Learning About Yourself During Travel

Through my travels this year I’ve found that one of the best ways to learn about yourself is to travel solo. I’ll be the first to admit that I really don’t love being alone for a long time. I enjoy having someone there to share sights and experiences with. This has been one of the greatest things about getting engaged. My fiance and I love to travel together and it makes trips so much more fun! However, when you set out solo, you are in complete control of your itinerary and you learn what’s important to you. When I’m solo, I never go to museums or sight seeing, I find spots where locals hang and try my damnedest to get into conversations with them. It’s only through the people that you can truly learn about a city. Get out and go solo.

The other strategy I’ve employed to learn more about myself during travel is to go with the flow. I rarely have a plan and I’ve really never regretted it. I sort out my day about 2-3 hours in advance. If I miss an opportunity (which I have) then I guess it wasn’t meant to be. This way if I meet people I can turn on a dime and jump in another direction if needed. This no plan strategy can really piss some people off but I’ve found it’s the best way to relieve stress of commitment and enjoy my travels most.

Summary

The gist is that I feel incredibly lucky to have had as much opportunity to travel as I have. Travel is one of my favorite things in the world and this year, my job has allowed me to see quite a lot. As I write this blog post I’m sitting overlooking the ocean at home in San Diego. I realize that as much as I absolutely love travel, what’s really important is who you are with. So, take sometime to get away from work and see the world but keep the right priorities and focus on the people who you love.

I’m not a fan at all of this “staycation” trend. There are plenty of options for cheap travel out there, you just have to seek them out. Find a trip, even if it’s close to home where you’ll see something brand new. Look for experiences that will challenge you and do them. The money spent will be worth it! Best of luck in the second half of 2009 to find great places to travel.

Vacation is important because…

Vacation, as the Europeans have discovered, is critical to ones ability to contribute effectively in the workplace. As I’m in Sweden this week and our project time lines are surely impacted by month long (or more) vacation schedules, I figured there would be no more appropriate time to write about vacations and the value of them.

Note: This trip is for business and not a vacation, however, I am spending a free weekend in Stockholm. A mini vacation I guess.

Although the “American way” seems to criticize the European vacation mentality, I think that it may be important to consider the value of extended breaks for multiple reasons.

1. Taking a break allows one to recollect their focus and return to work with a laser focus on their work.
2. A vacation allows one to recharge their batteries, release the pressures that can build at work, and return energized and excited.
3. Taking a vacation, perhaps a luxurious one, gives you a sense of reward and helps you to feel really good about giving 110% to your work.

Don’t focus on refocusing.

It’s important that when taking a vacation you don’t think ‘to much’ about work. Recently, there has been a big push towards the “stay-cation” or taking your vacation time at home. This is being encouraged due to conditions in the economy and also the green aspects of reducing your travel when vacationing. I am strongly against this. I believe that vacation is for getting away, seeing something new, and putting yourself in a different environment so that you can remove your thoughts from the norm and focus on something new.

Focusing on something new is the key to getting ‘mentally’ away. Using this time to focus on refocusing is counter productive. If you do this, you’re really still focused on work. You’re essentially trying to find a way to work better. I am a huge fan of continuously finding improvements in behavior and maximizing productivity but your vacation is not the appropriate time for that.

Lastly, although your away from work, I believe it is important to stay productive on vacation. If you stay in bed until noon everyday during your break and never really accomplish anything then you may be well rested but you’re going to feel like you’ve wasted your time away from work. Make sure to keep a busy schedule even on vacation so that you can look back to your time off and feel that you’ve made the most of it. When I’m on vacation I like to get up as early as the night before will logically allow :) and maximize the time I have to see new and interesting things. That’s why I love abroad travel so much, there are always new experiences to be had.

Finally get some rest.

To combat the maximize your time sentiment, it is important to get much needed rest on a vacation. Although it may seem impossible to satisfy both of these ideas, here is a solution: Early in your vacation it’s all good to maximize your day. During the beginning of your vacation, do what you want. Get up early, stay up late, and do it all in between, it’s fine. However, towards the end of your break it’s important to be conscious of the amount of rest that you’re allowing yourself. You want to return to work fresh, sharp, and at the top of your game!

For people who have trained themselves to operate on only a few 3-6 hours of sleep, you must be careful! I’m not going to tell you need to get 8 hours of sleep, I usually get about 6 until the weekend (then I binge sleep). However, you do need to be careful not to lose your ability to only sleep a few hours. If you take your 2 week or your 1 month vacation and sleep 10 hours a night, you will not be able to jump right back into your 4 hour plan without any affect. These habits are conditioned so you can potentially derail your sleep pattern during your vacation, so be careful.

The most fun, must energizing, and most rewarding aspect of my vacation is the time I get to spend with the people I care about. In August of 2007 my girlfriend, now fiance, and I went to Ireland for 2 weeks and drove the southern coast from Dublin to Galway and back. The trip put us in so many situations that challenged our relationship but made it so strong. One night we got to Cork and realized we did not have a hotel, B&B, or hostel booked. We ended up sleeping in a tiny Nissan Micra Sport all night…freezing. Yes, it sucked but the time we spent and laughs we shared together were priceless. If your spending time with the right people, it almost doesn’t matter what you do for your vacation time.

You earned it.

Finally, by taking a vacation, whether its 2 weeks or 8 (the French), you’ll be able to be proud of your time off. Knowing that I have a vacation coming up always helps me to drive towards it knowing that my hard work now will really make the off time sweet.

Because of the build up that comes with a vacation, I seriously recommend doing them big. Do something that you will remember. Don’t do the stay-cation at home, instead plan a trip to somewhere you’ve not been before that will create memories. It’s a big world out there so don’t do the same trip over and over. Explore!

When you come back to work you’ll be relaxed, re-focused, and rested. In short, you’ll be ready to kick ass. The time spent off will have a significant affect on your productivity and your contribution to your business. It will also have a profound affect on the relationships in your personal life. You’ll be able to relate with people from another part of the world and you’ll have common experiences shared with the people you traveled with.

Vacation is worth taking as an employee and it’s worth paying for as the employer. Vacations are all around valuable and necessary. I hope you enjoy yours!

I’ve been working in Uppsala, Sweden, about 45 minutes north of Stockholm, this week and have learned a few very valuable business lessons. I was lucky to have the opportunity to travel when most other travel opportunities have been cut, and I’ve really focused on making the most of the trip.

Coming into the week I wanted to focus on really investing myself fully into the deliverables that I’d committed to in order to justify the trip and also through building relationships that are critical in order to successfully execute on the project in the future. With those two focuses in mind, I’ve learned quite a lot and have, I think, succeeded in both.

Investing Yourself Emotionally

Many times, at home, I have so many different projects going that I struggle to focus on one thing at a time. With work priorities, project interests, family obligations, and finally lowest on the priority list, personal time, it becomes tough to balance and focus on any one of the tasks. This week, being away from home, I decided to completely remove myself and focus on work whole heatedly. The results have been phenomenal.

When you’re traveling for business you travel with people who you basically have one thing in common, work. This inevitably drives dinner conversation towards work topics and because of this I’ve been able to learn a lot. Being on the younger side of the group I’ve just listened and have been able to learn from others experiences. I’ve openly challenged ideas so that I can really get to the source of a particular issue and really extract the value from it. Without being pulled out of the normal flow of a day back home, and without being really focused on the work and issues at hand, I likely never would have had these conversations, nor learned so much from my colleagues. Sometimes it takes a bit of a shake up to create these situations.

By investing myself and focusing completely on work I’ve really maximized the the value of the trip. Both for the business and for myself. Now, with perfect weather in Sweden and the weekend approaching I plan to fully invest myself in the culture of Stockholm. I’m going mountain biking with a Swedish colleague on Saturday and hitting the Stockholm clubs on Saturday evening. If you’re not doing it all, your not doing enough!

Building Relationships to Get Things Done

Early in the week it was clear that there were major “perspective” differences in how to approach our project. We were unaligned and working towards similar goals without any collaboration. It was clear that a recalibration of focus was critical and the team needed to be rejuvenated. Working in IT it is often easy to become the claimed cause of a “business problem” when in reality we are here to help solve and avoid problems.

Instead of taking the defensive stand, I told the team, “we’ve got to align goals and make these relationships work for the good of the project and of the underlying business needs”. After significant back-and-forth sessions exchanging fairly opposing views, solutions were landed upon and I believe (only time will tell) that we, as a whole, came out on top. There was not a sense of win-or-lose, but more a feeling of joint progress and accomplishment. With stronger relationships now in place, we’ll be able to collaborate better when working over the phone and divide and concur tasks that would be fought over in the past.

Often times it seems that a solution may never be reached but usually people will come around. All it takes is the ability to bring similar goals to the surface. If you can create a similar goal and/or direction you can begin to move and work together in ways that you never could have in the past! You will surely enjoy the people you are working with more and in turn you will start to love your work. So often, it’s not the work that makes the process enjoyable, it’s the people that you interact with and the people that challenge you that make it fun!

Arrival

I arrived on the red-eye from Newark, NJ at 7:40am local time. My driver (it’s not as fancy as it sounds) was waiting and when I jumped in the cab the first thing he did was blow into a breathalyzer. I was thrown off by this but I appreciated the confidence I felt from his sobriety. The driver either spoke minimal English or he just didn’t like the looks of me, either is quite possible after getting about 3 hours of sleep on the flight. I won’t hold it against him.

During my 30-40 minute drive from Arlanda Airport out to Uppsala my initial reactions to Sweden are clean & green. It’s a beautiful country and everything seems brand new. From their automobiles, to their infrastructure, it’s seems “refreshed”. I expected the opposite. There is a lot of history here but it seems their has been a large investment in the country in recent years.

The People

Stockholm, in my observations, is a very affectionate city. There are couples everywhere and they sure don’t mind showing off their love for each other. My fiance calls it PDA (public display of affection) and the Swede’s love it! It makes traveling alone that much tougher and I really wish I could share these experiences with Mollstar.

Climate

I don’t think the weather could get any better than it was today. It was about 21c and the sun was shining. I was sitting in King’s Garden, in Norrmalm, people watching and I saw a baby waddle away from his parents by at least 100 meters. Then a group of random women grabbed the baby and walked him back to his parents, there was a real strong sense of community in what I saw. Very comforting.

Stockholm is absolutely packed with children and young families. What stood out to me is how involved the young fathers are. Coffee is part of the culture in Sweden, just as much as tea is part of the Chinese culture, and every coffee shop is packed with young fathers and their babies in stroller. Apparently, Sweden is one of the best places to be a women because of extremely balanced women’s rights and opportunities and the fact that the government instates what’s called, ‘The Daddy Quota”. This says that couples who have a baby must take a combined 450 days of paternity/maternity leave. Wow! Try that in The States :)

Style

In Stockholm, the fashion is loud, the jeans are tight, tattoos are extremely common, but the attitudes of the people are as calm and relaxed as any conservative city. This may change when the night clubs get going, I haven’t yet had that opportunity.

Grub

For dinner I ate at Bistro Berns in the Berzelii Park and had a phenomenal Fish & Shrimp Ragout w/ a table Rose. The seafood is what Stockholm is known for due to it’s proximity to the Baltic Sea and it didn’t disappoint.

First Day Summary

Overall, the first impressions of this city were great. It seems that it never gets crowded in Stockholm. It can be busy which usually adds to the atmosphere but I never saw bad crowds that would take away from an experience. The young family thing makes it a very appealing city. It’s hip because of the fact that it’s a very young city and the relaxed culture and focus on the quality of life is very obvious. Something Americans could definitely learn from.