Working while traveling – one of the best working setups in the world? For many people, yes! But for some, it can be a complicated, messy, and awkward thing to try and manage.
Even for those who prefer to work remotely in this manner, coordinating your two sides of life into this kind of arrangement can take a long time to get used to. Many mistakes can be made along the way, and you can lose a few clients and miss a few deadlines as you go, and for some that’s already too high a price to pay.
However, we believe that the more you know about the issues involved right now, the better your experience incorporating work into your travel. So let’s go through a few key problems below; if you’re intrigued by this side of remote work, and you’d love to travel more often throughout the year, these are the points you need to consider.
You’ll Need to Dedicate Some Time to Work, Even if There’s Something Exciting Going on
Traveling can make it hard to focus. There’s so much going on around you, and a lot to try and keep track of when you’re in a foreign destination, so it’s best to keep your head turning fast. You need to keep an eye on where you’re going, as well as who’s around you, and who knows how many other tourists you’re going to end up bumping into?
But even though there’s so much going on, and a lot of it is exciting – such as carnivals, markets, festivals, and nightlife – you’re going to need to dedicate at least an hour or two to your work. You’re going to need to find a place to settle down and get your laptop out, and the more private this space is, the better.
Because of these conditions, it’s going to be hard to get to work once you’re in the thick of your trip. Many people can become forgetful as a result, or even neglectful towards the length of their to-do list, and that’s no good for a modern business owner!
Your Customers Need a Response ASAP
In the same way it’s hard to stay in touch with your friends and family, traveling can make it very hard to stay in touch with your customers as well. Imagine if someone has been trying to call you for over two hours and you’ve been unreachable because you’ve been on a plane – that won’t net you any goodwill with that customer at all!
That’s one of the main problems with working and traveling at the same time. If you’re unreachable, people are going to move on and find a company to shop with that seemingly has more time for them. The customer experience matters above all else, and if you want to build your customer base and your repeat custom at the same time, you need to come across as reliable.
For some business owners this means leaving an ‘out of office’ notification for anyone who sends a message, for others it means installing chatbot software with ChatGPT on their website, and for a few it means taking a wifi source everywhere they go to make sure they can answer messages as soon as they come in.
If you’re going to be away from your phone or away from an internet source for a good while, think about this before you head away. How are you going to stay in touch with the people who have made you a success? Plan for this right now to prevent it from becoming an issue when it really matters.
You’ll Need to Learn to Be as Flexible as Possible
Traveling while working means thinking on your feet and making sure you’ve always got a minute or two to get back to someone, or send out an enquiry email, or check on your website traffic to see where your customers are coming from. That means being as flexible as possible, and that takes some practice to get to grips with.
If you can’t open up your laptop on the plane, when are you going to be able to do so? When will you next get the chance to make sure your business is doing OK? This is something to keep in mind, as this time is going to vary from day to day.
On day one of your trip you could get everything down in the airport before you get on the plane. On day two, however, you may need to split your working time between the half hour after your hotel breakfast and the half hour before you head out to check out the local nightlife scene. If you’re someone who works better in the morning than they do in the evening, this need for flexibility may even be the hardest thing to master in the world!
You’ll Be Surrounded By Unsecure Wifi Connections
If the wifi you’re logged onto doesn’t have that little lock symbol next to it, you’re on an unsecured wifi! But even if it does, the wifi itself is a public one that people just need to ask for the password for, meaning your work could still be at risk. And we all know just how dangerous unsecured and/or public wifi can be!
You need to take this risk into account when traveling. Anything you do that requires handling sensitive data – such as customer names and addresses – should be done when you can hook up to a private, properly protected source. This is why a lot of business owners either leave an important task like this until they’re home again (or get a trusted employee to handle it), or they take their own wifi source with them.
It might seem like an unnecessary expense when there’s plenty of wifi to go round, but having the latter on your side may make working while traveling more comfortably flexible for you.
You May Still Have Employees Back Home
If you do, this can complicate proceedings even further, even if having employees to do work for you means you get to spend more time traveling. After all, it’s hard to chair a Zoom meeting when you’re wide awake and it’s the middle of the afternoon, but every employee you have is going to be tucked up in bed fast asleep!
Of course, you can leave messages for them to get to when they wake up and head to work, but this could cause a delay in proceedings on your end. If you want things done as soon as possible, sometimes you have to wait simply because that’s how time works! And even being the most flexible person in the world, you may find it difficult to keep your patience about you when there are tasks that need to be completed within the next hour or two.
This is why you should never try to tweak anything IT related when your team is in bed, and you should never make a deal without consulting the people who support you first. Work in tandem, even when you’re on the other side of the world, and this difficult element of working while traveling will become much easier.
You May Need to Travel for Longer to Fit Everything in
Traveling is supposed to be a pleasure. You’re supposed to be able to relax and take in the world around you when you travel. However, when you’re running a business and trying to see the world at the same time, you’re going to miss out on things on either side of the equation. And unfortunately, if you’re running a company that not only has customers to serve but employees to look out for, your business is going to have to come first.
That often means waving goodbye to that afternoon of sailing a lake or going island hopping, and instead staying in the hotel to talk things through with an angry investor. It sometimes means missing a dinner reservation to crack down on website content and make sure your SEO stands out amongst the crowd, especially if your site is WordPress based and there’s been a sudden update.
Because of this, you may have to extend your travel trip for a day or so, to try and get some more enjoyment out of it. You still need to take breaks and find time for yourself, but if the business is coming first, you might have to rebook that flight, and hope beyond hope that you remembered to get cancelation insurance on it!
Working and traveling at the same time can be a difficult arrangement. You’re going to need to learn to roll with the punches, let go of the mistakes, and become the kind of adaptable person that remote work needs. And if you can do this from a swanky hotel in the middle of Dubai, or from a hostel in India that’s filled with multicultural travellers, you’re going to have fun as you learn too!
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