After five years of working remotely from different countries, my packing list has finally stopped changing. Everything I carry fits into one suitcase and one bag. The suitcase holds a week of clothes. The bag is my office. Here is exactly what is inside it, why each item earned its place, and what I quietly stopped carrying along the way.
The suitcase is the easy part. One week of clothes, a few toiletries, nothing I would cry over if it got lost. After the first year I stopped trying to pack for every possible situation. You can buy almost anything almost anywhere, and laundry exists in every city.
The mistake most people make early on is treating the suitcase like it has to last the whole trip. It does not. It has to last until the next laundromat. The bag is where the real thinking went.
I use a Nomatic travel bag and I genuinely love it. It is the one piece of gear I would replace immediately if it broke. Everything I need to actually earn money lives in here, organized so I can pull it out and start working in a cafe, an airport, or a stranger's kitchen table within two minutes. That speed matters more than it sounds. The faster the setup, the more often you actually work instead of finding excuses to put it off.
The center of everything is a 16 inch MacBook Pro. It is heavier than the laptops most nomads recommend, and I do not care. I build complex web apps for clients, and a small screen with a weak chip costs me more in daily frustration than the extra weight ever will. Buy the tool that fits the work, not the one that fits the Instagram photo.
Around it sits the boring infrastructure that nobody posts about but everybody needs. A UGREEN power bank, a UGREEN 100W USB charger with three USB C ports and one USB A, and a set of cables I have slowly trimmed down to only the ones I actually use. One charger that powers the laptop and the phone at the same time replaced three separate bricks, and that single swap freed up more space than anything else.
Then there is a 13 inch iPad Air. For a long time I thought it was a luxury. Now it is my second screen, my reading device, and my notepad for client calls when I do not want a laptop sitting between me and the person talking.
I still carry a paper notebook too. Not for productivity reasons. Sometimes a screen is just the wrong place to think.
A few things look optional right up until the moment they save you. A Skross multi country adapter means I never stand in an airport hunting for the right plug. A backup iPhone sounds paranoid until your main phone dies in a country where your banking app is the only thing standing between you and being properly stranded. And a small amount of emergency cash in US dollars has bailed me out more than once when cards simply refused to work.
I also carry a DJI Pocket 2 and a small DJI Nano. These are the only items not strictly tied to work. After five years I have learned that documenting the life is part of staying sane in it. The footage is for me, not for an audience.
Physical documents live in their own pouch. Passport, copies, the things you do not want to dig around for at a border. Digital backups are great until you need the paper version at the worst possible moment.
The real lesson of five years is not what made it into the bag. It is what left it. Spare gadgets I used twice. A second pair of headphones. Adapters for cables I no longer own. Books I kept telling myself I would read. Every trip the bag got a little lighter, and the work got a little easier.
The setup you end up with is never the one you plan. It is the one that survives. Mine took five years to settle, and the version above is the first one I have genuinely not wanted to change.
