If you have a nine to five job, then maybe your challenge is to not work while you travel. The hard part might be escaping the calls and emails. But when you’re independent, sometimes it’s difficult to harmoniously mix business with your traveling.
I offer advice on this not as a seasoned expert, but as someone who has had very productive times while traveling as well as times where I got next to nothing done. From those experiences I can share some ideas on what has and hasn’t worked.
Being productive on a trip actually begins before the trip starts. At home, in a controlled environment, you can manage several things at once: optimally one big project and then a few small things like email, errands, etc. While traveling I find that the minutiae are very difficult to manage. Things like paying bills and replying to email falls by the wayside very quickly.
So for the couple days before you go one a trip, allow yourself to take time from your main focus to get ahead on the small stuff. For me, currently on a 6 week trip through China and Europe, that means queuing up blog posts, catching up on all emails, paying any bills in advance, etc. Unfortunately I did not do that, so I spent a lot of today dealing with these things at the expense of enjoying China.
Once you go on your trip, you then allow those little things to fall by the wayside and just focus on one project to push forward. This eliminates the cost of decision making. Instead of thinking of what to do next, you immediately get to work whenever the opportunity presents itself. This is especially valuable when you have just fifteen or thirty minutes to spare.
It’s also important to be realistic about what can be done during a trip. I used to have the idea that I should have my standard routines while at home, and then a skeleton set of must-dos that I handle whenever I travel. However, I’ve found that my ability to get things done varies wildly with the type of trip I’m doing.
On a train trip through China, I just can’t seem to get much good work done. There are too many interruptions in each day, and internet is just sketchy enough to impede progress. On the other hand, I can actually get more done on cruise ships than in normal life because there’s less friction on daily life sort of stuff, and not having any internet at all means that I just work on stuff that doesn’t require it, and my distractions are reduced by 90%.
So plan out what you’ll try to do on your trip, and actually create the todo list ahead of time. Like cutting out the small stuff, this will help you make the best use of small chunks of time. It also prevents you from becoming overwhelmed with the amount of work you’re missing.
Last, when the trip is over, compensate for lost time. Getting behind doesn’t make me feel bad, as long as it’s planned for, but it does motivate me to catch up. Combining that motivation with the fact that my routine has been broken allows me to refocus and tighten up my routine to be even more productive. Sometimes I’ll even build this into my trip. After spending a week with friends in Japan and getting close to zero work done, Sebastian and I holed ourselves up in a Regus office and got through a great amount of work. When I’m done with the first week of my trip here in China, I’m going to get a cheap hotel in Beijing and just code all day for the second week.
Overall, traveling is going to reduce the total amount of hours you can work in any given period of time. The best strategy is to minimize that loss and make up for it, but also to make sure that your trip is the type of experience that gives you new perspective and insight, making it a net positive overall.
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Photo is Tianan’men square, across from the Maosoleum
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