Our names are Namrata B. and Mitali M., and we are the co-founders of the eco-travel site Ecophiles. We’re travel writers and love sharing inspiring travel ideas based in nature, culture, food and adventure.

Ecophiles Our work specializes in coming up with fabulous ideas for eco-friendly travel. We also work with other travel bloggers and conservationists who are passionate about the environment and wildlife and want to help make a difference in how others perceive green travel. We use Flipboard because it brings the best of all that’s happening around the world. We are also very fond of quirky stories like “A Robotic Home That Knows When You’re Hungover.” Makes for a cheerful start to a morning! The first few sites we read in the morning are The Guardian, Wired, National Geographic, Grist. We also read Inhabitat, Mashable, Rolling Stone, IFLS, and Elite Daily. The purpose of our work is to spread the word about a better way to travel. We attract readers with quirky travel stories, and keep them coming back with serious environmental and conservation pieces. We also get loads of contributors sharing local knowledge—one brilliant find was a contributor on Instagram who shared photos of the Tarot Garden in Tuscany. Our approach to work is different because we don’t revel in gloom-and-doom stories, but actually offer positive travel inspiration and tips to discover all that is wonderful and surreal in a responsible way. We also invest a lot of time and energy in collaborations, which has helped us create a terrific, organic support system. The best article we read all week was “Pigeons Wearing Tiny Backpacks Are Tweeting About London’s Air Pollution.” What a fab idea! Our favorite topics on Flipboard are design, tech, travel. Someone we admire from a different discipline is sculptor/ conservationist Jason DeCaires Taylor, who created the world’s first underwater museum in the Atlantic. We’ve featured his repertoire of gorgeous works on Ecophiles. A unique productivity tip of ours is work to your strengths. For us, that means divvying up tech, SEO, marketing, content, creative calls to Mitali, and schmoozing, working with contributors and collaborators, social media and content to Namrata. An effective trick we use is the Pomodoro Technique—work for 25 minutes, take a five minute break. Each 25-minute work period is called a “pomodoro” (Italian for “tomato”). Frequent breaks keep your mind refreshed, and we are all for any technique that rewards us with little breaks! One issue that needs more attention is the question of how ecotourism helps conservation, which has never been a focus of mainstream discussion. This is a critical time for conservation and a change in the way we travel is imminent. We recently featured safaris as a way to help conservation in Africa. For things to turn, it’s critical for our tourism money to outweigh poaching and trophy hunting. If we could offer one piece of advice to our younger selves, it would be life is less about planning for the future, and more about traveling in the present. ~ShonaS is curating Out & About GET FLIPBOARD ON: iOS / ANDROID / WINDOWS / WEB FOLLOW US ON: FLIPBOARD / TWITTER / INSTAGRAM / FACEBOOK / GOOGLE+ / SOUNDCLOUD / MEDIUM