Organized Chaos: Keeping Your Digital Nomad Life Together With Bublup
When it comes to living the digital nomad life, there’s a lot of moving pieces. Not only are you scouring the Internet for affordable Airbnbs, hostels and hotels, you’re also trying to find quality cafes and co-working spaces with good WiFi. On top of that, you want to enjoy wherever you are, so you’re researching things to do and places to eat, while also juggling recommendations from friends and family. It’s a lot of information to stay on top of.
To keep all of this information and ongoing research in one place, I’ve been using a new free app called Bublup. If you follow me on social media you have probably heard me talk a lot about this app…and it’s important to note that I’ll never share something that I don’t genuinely love and use! To put it simply, Bublup is best described as the love child of Pinterest and Dropbox. It’s aesthetically pleasing like the former with the functionality of the latter. Think beautiful, visual organization. You can create folders and save ANY kind of media type to them. Web links, Word docs, PDFs, photos, videos…you name it.
Before Bublup, I was junking up my bookmarks bar with links and endlessly scrolling trying to find whatever I’d saved again. Sometimes, I would even email myself links, “star” reservations within my email inbox, write down physical notes in a planner, or create itineraries in Word docs. No matter what I did or how organized I thought I was….my stuff was all over the place. This app has completely changed the way I keep my crazy lifestyle organized, and the best part is that it’s accessible from both my laptop and my phone.
So let’s say Lisbon is my next destination. I can create a folder, and within it, save my flight and Airbnb reservations, which are typically screenshots or PDFs. I also save links to sites and attractions, restaurants and good work spots. Sometimes I create notes in my folder, too- and all of these things live happily together in one organized place. A default image will typically appear when I save an item, which makes it easy to find later. If I don’t like the default, I can change it and upload my own. Another thing that will happen when I save a link is that suggestions will start to “bubble” up. The app is pretty smart, and will suggest similar links to the one I saved, often helping me find other important information or things to do in a destination. If I’m traveling with someone, I can easily invite them to the folder by email or Bublup username, and they can add items too. I made the video below in Lisbon with another nomad named Christa to help illustrate some of these features (….you can’t imagine the number of takes it took to get this right!)
My circle of friends includes a lot of digital nomads, and many of them are using the app to organize their crazy lives, too. When I asked my friend Emilia how Bublup plays into her nomad planning, she said, “I love how easy it is to research new locations, save all the useful information I find, and organize it however I want. Reactions are especially useful when making plans with other people! Hearts mean YES while thumbs down mean NO!” Way to shoot down my favorite Airbnb, Emilia.
Another unique feature of the app is its ability to create instant websites out of the content you save to folders. With one click, I can roll up the items I have saved and have them display beautifully within one customizable URL. So if a fellow nomad wants to know my top recommendations for places to work in Lisbon, I simply save all of the links to a folder, click “Roll an Instant Web Page”, and send them one link containing all of my favorite work spots. Here’s an example:
Half of the time, I decide my next destination only a few days before I go (or the day before!) I’m a planner, but a spontaneous one, and the last thing I need is to be scrambling around looking for bookmarks, reservations or notes. I never thought I’d actually enjoy planning, but, here we are! I’m about to sound real salesy, but as one of Bublup’s biggest cheerleaders, I have a limited amount of promo codes for Premium accounts to give out, and they come with 100 GB of FREE cloud storage. Just create an account by clicking here, and enter code GIRLGONEABROAD where it says “have a sign up code?” and 100 GB will be yours to use as you please. That’s enough space to hold 25,000 4 MB photos, in case you were wondering.
Not a digital nomad? It’s all good. There’s a million and one other reasons why you might use the app to save, organize and share…and you can check them all out on the website here.