When someone asks me where I live, the honest answer is: in three countries. The first is Cyprus, where I have lived since March 2018, in Limassol, with my family. The second is Romania, where my friends are, a good chunk of my business, and a Bucharest I visit often. The third country is the most interesting one, because it is never the same: it is wherever work or wanderlust takes me. Sometimes it is a conference, sometimes a meeting with a founder, sometimes a good dive site or a ski slope. In short, I have one fixed country, one country of the heart and one on rotation.
It sounds glamorous, but in reality it is more logistics than adventure. Without a system you end up living in airports, answering emails at two in the morning and no longer knowing which time zone your body is in. So over the past year or so I have built myself a few rules. They are not perfect, but they keep me in one piece.
Routines that travel with you
The first thing I learned is that the place changes, but my day has to look like itself. I wake up at the same time wherever I am. The first hour is mine: a bit of exercise, a coffee, a look at what I have to do, with no email open on my phone. Only then does the working day begin. When everything around you is new, a small routine is the anchor that keeps you steady.
I also have a kit that never changes: the same carry-on, the same chargers, the same checklist before I leave. It sounds trivial, but every decision you no longer have to make leaves energy for the ones that matter. And when you do forget something, it is usually the charger. It is always the charger.
Plan trips in blocks, not one at a time
The biggest mistake you can make when living between places is to travel “whenever it is needed”. That is how you end up flying three times a month for a single meeting each time. I try to batch things: when I go to Romania, I stay for a block of several days and fill it well, with business meetings, friends and everything that can only be done there. The rest of the time I spend at home in Cyprus, and I protect it.
The same principle applies to the third country. If I am going somewhere for work anyway, I look at what else I can get done in the same region. And the other way around: if I go on holiday, it stays a holiday. As I wrote about burnout and learning to stop, rest mixed with “just one quick call” is no longer rest.
What works remotely and what does not
In 2019 many companies still look at remote work with suspicion. For me it has been normal for a while, and I have written about leading a team in another country from a distance. After all the travelling, my conclusion is fairly simple:
- Works remotely: hands-on execution, tracking the numbers, writing, analysis, recurring meetings with people you already know, advice on concrete problems.
- Hard to do remotely: the first meeting with a partner or founder, serious negotiations, resolving a conflict, the moments when a team needs to see your face.
- Does not work remotely at all: building trust from zero. That you build over a shared table, a handshake and a conversation with no agenda.
That is also why I come to Romania so often. I work with startups for equity, which means my success depends on theirs. You cannot be someone’s partner through a screen alone.
Tools: few and simple
I do not have an arsenal of apps. I have a calendar shared with my family, where any trip goes in as soon as it is confirmed. I have shared documents I work on with the teams, so we never depend on “I emailed you the final version, final 2”. I have video calls for anything that can be solved by talking and messaging for anything short. And one rule: urgent things get a phone call, non-urgent things get written down. If everything is urgent, nothing is.
One practical detail: in my calendar I enter the time in the time zone of the place where I will be, not where I am now. I learned that after a few calls I joined either too early or, worse, too late.
Family is non-negotiable
All of the above has a single purpose: to have time for my wife and our children. One of the reasons we moved to Cyprus, as I explained in why I moved to Cyprus, was precisely a calmer life: the weather, the sea, the clean air. It would make no sense to keep running away from home now.
So there are a few things I never move: weekends at home as often as possible, family meals, the children’s moments that will not happen twice. If a trip clashes with something important to them, the trip moves. Business can almost always find another date. Children do not grow up twice.
Health and sleep on the road
Your body does not read boarding passes. When you change places often, sleep suffers first, then food, then mood. I try to stick to a few simple things: plenty of water on the plane, little alcohol, exercise on the first day after landing, natural light in the morning. Tennis, skiing and diving are not just hobbies, they are my way of remembering that I have a body, not just a laptop.
And I accept that sometimes it does not work. There are days when you are simply tired, and the only wise decision is to make no important decisions.
The cost nobody tells you about
I have to be honest: life between countries has a price. Fatigue builds up in layers. Sometimes you feel you are everywhere and nowhere, that you no longer fully belong to any place. In Bucharest you are “the guy from Cyprus”, in Limassol you are “the Romanian”. And the third country, the one that keeps changing, is beautiful, but nobody there knows you.
My antidote is a clear sense of home. Home is Limassol, with my family. Everything else is a place I visit, however often. Once that is settled in your head, travelling gets easier, because you always know where you are coming back to.
Keeping friendships in Romania alive
If you ask me what I miss about Romania, the answer is short and I gave it before in what I miss about Romania: my friends. Everything else I found in Cyprus, sometimes even better. So I look after my friendships like an important project: when I know I am coming to Bucharest, I write to them early and keep my evenings free for them instead of filling them with business meetings.
Between visits I do not wait for big occasions. A message, a short call, a joke sent at the right moment keep a friendship alive better than one grand reunion a year. Friendship, like any relationship, feeds on small things done often.
I do not know if my system works for everyone. For me, for now, it does. How do you split your time between places, people and work? Do you have a routine that keeps you whole when you are always on the move?