Travelling around the world, taking in the art galleries, ancient monuments, nightclubs, and tastiest local dishes, sounds pretty good, right? In fact, that’s probably an accurate summary of the life dreams and ambitions of at least a few million people around the world.
But what about if you’ve got the opportunity to travel, but still need to work at the same time? What’s the trick to making it as a “digital nomad”, working remotely from exotic locations?
Of course, there are certain logistical issues to take care of before heading off on your round-the-world adventure. For one thing, you should probably get in touch with a company like https://www.mybekins.com/ to store your belongings until you get back.
But then there’s also the basic question of “how can I be productive, while still enjoying the journey, and not end up hating my life?”
Here are some suggestions.
Set up a headquarters every day
Wherever you find yourself on a given day, you’ve got to identify and set up your working headquarters before doing anything else.
For the most part, trying to do complex assignments on the go, sitting on the beach, or at the top of a mountain, is a very bad idea. Your productivity will be shot, you will resent having to work instead of taking in the beautiful landscape around you, and nothing is going to go quite how you want it to.
To combat this, set aside a corner of your hotel room, or even a cafe, if needs be, and use it as your workstation. Once you’re done with the day’s work, go somewhere else and enjoy the sights.
Get the low-intensity errands done in those idle moments
As for the moments when you’re sitting in an airport waiting room (or on the plane itself), or are on a long bus or train journey, there’s no reason to let those moments slip by idly.
While it’s generally a bad idea to try to get any serious and mentally demanding work done during such occasions, these moments work great for organising your planner, copying data into spreadsheets, proofreading work, and drafting responses to emails.
The more you can attend to these low-intensity errands during the idle moments that will invariably crop up each day, the more you can dedicate your actual working time to knocking out the big tasks.
Become an early riser, and work first thing in the morning
When travelling — especially when travelling with other people — trying to work at night, after a full day out and about, is generally an awful idea.
Firstly, you will have the work hanging over you all day, darkening your experiences from dawn to dusk.
Secondly, you will be exhausted at the end of each day, and are likely to do your work poorly, and take longer to complete it than you would otherwise.
Thirdly, social activities — like trips to restaurants — typically happen at night when travelling.
Instead of making your life unnecessarily difficult, get in the habit of waking up early each morning
Personally, this writer finds that early mornings are indeed the best time to get work accomplished, especially when the other members of your party (or your family for that matter) are still sound asleep!
