🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

For those who travel for work, one of the challenges they must grapple with is how to balance the work that they would normally be doing back at home, with the activities associated with the trip. Here I highlight some of the key concepts, tips and tricks to pull it off, and highlight some of the pitfalls to be careful of.

Check it out, in this page, on YouTube, or via podcast.

Please reshare if useful 🙏

🕒 Timestamps are as follows:

📌 (0:00) Introduction to Working Whilst Travelling
📌 (0:54) A Generally Compromised Experience
📌 (1:34) Travel-Associated Work is the Priority
📌 (2:19) Exceptions
📌 (2:33) Not Getting Sucked Back In
📌 (2:58) Being Deliberate In What You Do and When
📌 (3:09) Example: Internet Access as a Deciding Factor
📌 (3:47) Matching Activities to Travel Mode
📌 (4:39) What Not to Do With Poor Internet
📌 (5:13) eSims Are Great
📌 (5:28) Consider Best Security Practice
📌 (6:01) Minimize Work With Complex Workspace Requirements
📌 (6:27) Preparation and Out of Office Messaging
📌 (7:01) Prioritise Activities In The Lead Up to Travel
📌 (7:29) Emotional Energy Management
📌 (8:20) Picking the Best Time To Deal With An Issue
📌 (8:51) Over Compensate and Over Communicate
📌 (9:21) A Good Foundation With Your Team Is Vital
📌 (9:48) Leverage the Change of Routine
📌 (10:26) The Pros and Cons of Time Zone Differences
📌 (11:13) Minimizing Unnecessary Back and Forth
📌 (12:20) Peak Fatigue Can Occur After The Trip
📌 (13:06) Recap

Full Video Notes

• A reality of many modern careers, at least for those who have the privilege of doing so, is that you will spend quite a bit of your career travelling, and hence working whilst your travelling. The degree of travel can vary, from your daily commute to around-the-world work trips that last weeks or months. Typically whilst some allowances can be made for the fact that you’re out and about, you will still need to get a lot of work done “on-the-road” so to speak. In this video I’ll talk about some key concepts, tips and tricks for being as effective as possible when travelling and working, and some pitfalls to avoid. By working, I mean the so-called “back home” work you would have been doing had you not been travelling, rather than the work that is specifically associated with your trip, for example attending a conference.
• There are a few key concepts to go over to get started.
• Firstly, a reality check. Generally speaking, working whilst travelling is a sub-optimal experience to working from your home base. There are some positives – like being able to disconnect a bit more from being physically at your place of work – but a lot of downsides – working with limited portable technology like a laptop or in the worst case smartphone, limited or no internet, jetlag, fatigue, getting sick whilst on the road, and many more. You can work effectively whilst on the road, but it’s generally a compromise. OK, now onto some of the key concepts.
• The first is that when you are deliberately travelling for work, then you should, in general, prioritise the activities that are associated specifically with that travel. For example, if you’re an academic visiting a few labs on an international trip, your priority and focus should be on giving invited presentations, talking to the researchers and developing new professional relationships. Travelling is usually an expensive activity, both in terms of direct financial impact but also your time and energy, as well as your time away from family and loved ones – so the activity specifically associated with that travel should usually be prioritised. There will be exceptions – a last minute deadline like a grant submission where it was practically infeasible to have everything done before you embarked on the trip – but these should be minimized as much as possible ahead of time. If you must do some of this work, you need to be extra conscious of not getting sucked too far into it. You don’t want to find yourself sitting down with your e-mail and looking up five hours later to realize you should have been doing other things. Be especially conscious of only doing the absolutely critical thing, and ignoring the other things that need to be done but can wait.
• The second key concept is deliberately thinking about what activities you do at different stages of your travel, and picking activities that are minimally hindered by the fact you’re travelling. A universal example of this is considering the internet connectivity situation. Internet access when flying, riding on a train, or being in a remote area can often be spotty or non-existent. A lot of work involves needing internet access, for example in academia reading about new topics, submitting grants or papers to online submission systems, chatting or video calling with your team members and collaborators, and many other activities. Trying to do these activities with intermittent or unreliable internet can be incredibly frustrating and should be anticipated and avoided where possible.
• So, some examples of matching activities to travel modalities. On a plane with limited or no internet, reading a batch of papers that you have saved to your laptop, tablet or phone, is almost as efficient as doing it back home. Reviewing a PhD thesis, or academic papers, can also be done relatively effectively without internet access – although you may need to flag some things to look up when you regain internet access – such as prior work by the submitting authors to check for overlap. Submitting the review comments may or may not be feasible on the plane – depending on the nature of submission system and how tolerant it is of occasional drop outs – you don’t want to lose half your review! You may need to do it in multiple stages, recording comments offline, then uploading when you have reliable access.
• What most definitely isn’t efficient with limited internet is some sort of online interactive process – for example online administration activities – where you’re interacting with an online form that requires good internet access to confirm every stage of the process. There are few things more frustrating than losing information you’ve slowly and painstakingly entered into an online form over the course of an hour with poor internet, only to have it all wiped when the internet drops out momentarily. 
• Talking of internet, nowadays you can get travel eSims that give you relatively cheap data as long as your smartphone supports it – this enables you to not worry too much about rationing your data usage whilst travelling. Be sure to also check out the best security practice recommendations from your workplace – this may involve a preference between using local WiFi networks and roaming mobile data, and the use of tools like Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs for short. You may also in some cases need to take burner laptops or phones with minimal materials on them to certain countries to comply with security restrictions – these situations necessitate even more careful consideration of what work you can realistically do whilst travelling.
• Other activities that are best done at a home or office workstation should be avoided where possible – whilst travelling you will typically be working off a laptop, tablet, or perhaps even a smartphone. Complex graphical design or complex coding setups involving hardware like robotics or sensors can be done on the go when absolutely necessary, but are typically much slower to do than when at your home base.
• A third key concept is preparation. If you have a trip planned, you can take certain preparatory actions like saving papers, documents, videos to your media devices, so that your reliance on internet access is reduced or removed. There are also other standard actions you should consider taking, like putting an out-of-office auto-response on your e-mail explaining that responses may be slower than normal. If you’re travelling and have less time for your day-to-day activities that’s one thing, but if people don’t know to expect that, it can exacerbate matters.
• Preparation also takes the form of shaping how your prioritise activities at work before your travel. Knowing that you’re going to be travelling shortly, you can prioritise activities that require, or are much easier, with your physical presence at your normal place of work. Conversely, activities that are travel-friendly can be allowed to accumulate, like reading, because you know that you may have many hours on a plane or train to get them done.
• A fourth concept involves being deliberate from an emotional management perspective what activities you do or deliberately don’t do at various times. Travel, especially international travel, can be exhausting. You may have the better part of a day on planes, trains, or in a car, plus the debilitating effects of time zone changes causing jetlag. Dealing with sensitive work issues – for example anything to do with management of people issues, is something that is hard enough at the best of times. But try doing that when you’re tired, perhaps a little sick, and jetlagged – and it’s a recipe for disaster. Your normal emotional reserves may be exhausted much more quickly, and you risk snapping at someone, when a more tactful response would be more constructive. 
• In dealing with these sensitive situations, you have two main options. If you have any option for delaying, you should consider that, waiting until you’re in a better state of mind to deal with a problematic issue. Delaying doesn’t necessarily mean waiting until the end of your trip – but rather not trying to respond to an e-mail whilst you’re in the immigration queue after a 24 hour commute, instead choosing to do so after you’ve checked into your hotel and had a shower.
• But sometimes things are so urgent that you can’t delay. In those situations, it can be helpful to overcompensate for the fact you are tired and jetlagged, and also communicate these challenges clearly to the other parties involved so they know. Communication can make the difference between doing irreparable damage to a professional relationship, and having a constructive conversation with some over-compensation in place for the fact you’re travelling.
• Managing challenging situations remotely also depends on the groundwork you’ve laid before you start travelling. If you’ve developed strong, trusting relationships with your team, then you will be much more able to work through occasional miscommunications or perceived slights caused by working remotely. Without those strong relationships, even the smallest issue can potentially blow up.
• Working while travelling also offers some opportunities that aren’t available when you’re in the day to day grind of work back home. The very things that can make working while travelling difficult – like being tired, disconnected from the routine back home – can also sometimes lead to new perspectives, insights and epiphanies on your work. Sometimes these will be semi-delirious ideas generated on the back of getting little sleep over 2 days that don’t stand up to scrutiny, but occasionally they will be genuine breakthroughs. Make sure you capture them so you can revisit them when you get back home!
• Time zone differences represent both an opportunity and a challenge. One of the key benefits of being on the far side of the world to your team is that you can hand over work so that someone is always working, 24 hours a day. In academia an example of this would be writing an academic paper – time zones enable the paper to be worked on by someone on the team, scattered throughout the world, continuously, without any down time for sleeping.
• The downside of time zones is they inhibit live communication. If you’re on the opposite side of the world and maintaining at least a somewhat locally consistent day schedule, there will be very little overlap when parties in two opposite sides of the world can meet or chat online. One of the implications of this is that more of your communication will need to be done by non time-critical mechanisms like e-mail. A key concept to keep in mind here is that you want to minimize the amount of unnecessary back and forth iteration where possible. So, rather than saying, “did you mean A or B” when sending an e-mail to a colleague, instead consider saying something like, “did you mean A or B? If you meant A, then let’s do X, or if you meant B, let’s do Y”. That way you minimize the amount of time people spend waiting on that reply e-mail (which can take another half day to come through) to keep progressing whatever the activity is. This is especially important when you’re working in a collaboration where most of the advising / suggestions are going in one direction – such as a professor with a new PhD student working on their first paper. Also make sure the people you’re working with are aware of where you are at different dates and the likely hours you’ll be responsive.
• Finally, when you get back home after a trip, remember that not only have you been away from family and friends, but that you’ve been doing double time in terms of continuing your normal full time work commitments whilst also doing all the trip-associated activities. You will, typically, be extra exhausted, and should where possible put in place measures, like a short break, to help recover. Sometimes the nadir of emotional energy will occur not during but rather shortly after returning from the trip, especially as all the things you deferred all come at you at once when you step into your workplace. A little bit of planning here can go a long way.
• Whilst working whilst travelling can often be a challenge, it’s also a privilege that many people don’t get the chance to do and should always be remembered in that context. With a little planning, preparation and a deliberate choice of what you do and don’t do and when, you can ensure a productive and enjoyable trip whilst staying, at least mostly, on top of things back home.