Stephanie Barry-Woods on her techy travel essentials

WHATSAPP IS ALWAYS THE FIRST APP I OPEN in the morning. I’m around seven hours ahead of Ireland, so lots of messages from family and friends come in overnight.

I USE INSTAGRAM FOR ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING, from finding new places to go to keeping up with my family, and even checking the weather by looking at pictures that were just taken. I find loads of people through it, and have met up with lots of them. I find it a much more creative place than Twitter and Facebook.

ALL I NEED TO WORK IS MY LAPTOP AND AN INTERNET CONNECTION. My husband Tim and I are both computer programmers and we freelance for remote IT websites like Upwork and Codementor. We go through the projects that have been posted every morning and take it from there – sometimes it’s a two-hour job, sometimes it’s two weeks – and then we know what we’re doing for the week and plan our travelling around that.

I TEND TO WRITE THINGS AS I GO BY JUST SPEAKING INTO MY PHONE. I have the iPhone 8 Plus because the camera is really good (I use it to take about half of my pictures for Instagram), but I also use the Notes app and voice control to compose my blog posts. All of the original posts on my blog started as voice notes.

MY FAVOURITE TECH GADGET IS MY OLYMPUS PEN CAMERA – I’m obsessed with it. Another must-have is a portable charger. The one we use comes with international adapters and plugs into the wall to charge your devices while it also charges itself – it’s brilliant.

I TRY TO PRACTISE NOT BEING SO CONNECTED, as I got myself into a place where it felt like it was getting overwhelming. I get a lot of messages and requests and
felt a lot of pressure to reply. Now I try to simply put my phone away whenever I’m out with people. I also unfollowed anything on Instagram that didn’t make me feel inspired or creative. Whenever I need to chill out, I put my phone online and just listen to a podcast.

Follow Stephanie at @stephmylife or check out her blog at stephmylifetravel.com. Featured image via Instagram