Is It Possible to Work While Travelling?

Hey there, it’s Dale here, and in this video, I want to answer the question that has come up from one of our members. And they have asked, “Do you work while you travel?” And if so, what does work look like when you’re not in Australia? So I’m going to get to the answer to that question in just a moment. But in case you haven’t already guessed right now I’m in Venice, and I’m doing this video because I’ve been literally kicked out of our apartment by my wife wasn’t because we had an argument or a fight it’s because around this time, kids, our two boys need to get to bed. And if I stay, I like to talk they like to chat they like to find many different ways to not to go to sleep, so it’s actually better for me to disappear for an hour so grab a drink somewhere, explore the city, and then come back and then we can enjoy a few hours of, of peace and quiet.

But so we, in case you’re kind of not aware, for the last 10 years, we have been following this formula of two months work in Australia running our business and then one month traveling with our kids. So two months work one month travel for 10 years. Now, when I travel, do I still work? The short answer is yes, I still work but works obviously very different to work back in Australia. So I find that in order for me to kind of clear the decks on things, basic sort of like emails and social media messages, or talking to my my team via Teamwork or Voxer or the different tools that we use, I can pretty much clear the main things in about an hour to two hours. So that normally keeps me on kind of like an even keel, in terms of my work. I may not have time to crack into some some big projects or to get any real kind of like, work done. And that it’s enough for me to kind of make sure that things work really well. And I actually like it like that. I like being able to stay connected to the team.

And one of the one of the things I don’t want to do, I don’t want to return home and have like 5000 emails that I have to deal with. So I’d rather work just a little bit each day while I’m traveling, just to make sure I can get the bare essentials done. So an hour two hours kind of keeps everything working well now that won’t be every day some days I’m I do absolutely nothing. You know, if it was we’re flat out or I’ve got a tour booked or, you know, we’ve been… Yeah, going somewhere doing something, I might not able to be doing anything and that’s okay. And so I’ll just try to catch up, catch up tomorrow. But also the other thing is, sometimes what happens is there are some bigger things that start building up and so there’s things that people need a like a detailed reply on or there’s videos that I need to, to make with feedback and and so after about a week or so what sort of tends to happen is these kind of bigger things build up and I’ll say to my wife “Hey, honey, I need a favor. I need half a day and I just need to crack on and get a few things done, or sometimes I might have said said look I need a whole day because I really have some pressing deadlines and and I need to make some progress. And so what she’ll do is then she’ll say, “Okay, well on Thursday, I’ll take the kids to the museum or do this or do this.” And that will enable me to do if I need to half day or a full day’s worth of work, just depending on kind of what needs to get done.

So one to two hours a day is kind of typical. And then maybe half day, every week or a full day every week, and then that makes sure that everything stays moving forward. Now, when do I work? Well sort of depends when I first arrived here in Europe, I was kind of still suffering from a little bit of jet lag. So, first day, I was actually getting up at 3am in the morning, and couldn’t get back to bed. So I just basically got out of bed and started working. And so by six o’clock I’d done, you know, three hours worth of work, I was feeling pretty good. And so I was able to stay on that kind of like early morning for about a week. Now it did kind of creep up a little bit, they went to four o’clock and then four thirty, and then five and then six. And now I’m sort of getting around about seven o’clock so I’ve kind of lost that early morning. But that was super productive for me because I was able to get up nice and early and not have any distractions, but now I’m kind of back to that regular routine of, you know, waking up at about 6:30-7 not able to get as much work done in the mornings. But normally what I do is try to get some work done during this time. So at about sort of seven o’clock at night. That’s normally the time when my wife wants me to disappear for an hour or two, while the kids are going to bed. And that’s what I’ll take my laptop, either go down to the lobby, or go to an internet cafe if there’s one around, or maybe just a bar and just set up my laptop and make sure I can connect to Wi Fi. And I get some work done that way.

So, yeah, that’s normally when I do my work. Now, the other thing, which has made a massive difference is just being able to do a lot of my work now on my smartphone. And what I sometimes will do is find little gaps throughout a day, especially if we’re doing like a tour and we’re on the bus and, we’ve got some some time, then what I’ll do is I’ll just put my headphones in, and I will listen to some messages. So one of the apps that we use quite a lot is Voxer for communicating with my team. So that’s been really a good way for me being able to reply, sometimes I could do 20 or 30 messages in just an hour or so. And that means I can spend a lot less time on email and a lot more time just replying to messages via my voice. So I find that to be really effective, and a great way to be able to get back to people really quickly. So yeah, that it kind of answers the question about how much I work while I’m while I’m away.

Again, some days, I do nothing. But on average one to two hours. Sometimes though, I do kind of like working on special projects. And that’s actually one of the things that I’m doing right now. And that is that we are writing a whole brand new event, which is called Coach@Scale. So I’ve actually probably been doing a little bit more than I normally would, because I’m in content creation mode. And so another great place time to work is definitely on planes and also on trains as well. Which is really cool to be able to, to get work done, as well. Anyway, I’ve answered the question now. Hope that helps and gives you some ideas. If you have any further questions, then leave them for me in the comments below. I’d be happy to, to answer them. That’s it for me. Ciao.