7 things that made running my business while travelling much easier

Traveling all over the world is a big part of what freedom means to me. I travel for business AND I travel for fun. And while my team keeps things running on the ground, there are still tasks I need to complete and calls I need to make for my business while I'm overseas. In today's episode, I'm sharing my whole swag of travel tips that I've learned over the years as an online business owner.

– Why establishing a routine when travelling is so important when it comes to having boundaries around your time.
– How dealing with different time zones doesn't need to be so difficult (and what you can do to help yourself stay on track).
– How maximising your travel time can turn boring long-haul flights into productive work time.
– The importance of having a dedicated workspace wherever you're staying.
– The e-sim card I use for instant data wherever I land.

 

7 things that made running my business while traveling a whole lot easier on my most recent trips.

 

So if you haven't been following along, I spent most of January and a little bit of February of this year in France skiing in the beautiful French Alps. ─
And while I was over there, I worked a little bit, but I also really enjoyed the skiing aspect, the travel aspect. And for the first time in a while, I really felt like I had the balance between working and enjoying where I was and enjoying the travel part. I felt like I actually had that down pat for the first time in a while, because I have done a lot of travel while working.
I've also done a lot of offline travel where I've been completely offline and in some cases haven't even had my laptop with me, for example, in 2022, when I went hiking through the outback for two weeks, obviously didn't have my laptop with me. And back in 2021, I took a whole month completely offline and travelled down the coast of Australia in a van.
So this was a bit more of a “run my business while travelling” kind of holiday. So a couple of little things that really helped.

 

1. Keep your laptop in your home time zone.

So first of all, I kept my laptop time zone set to my home time zone. This seems so basic but it was a tiny little thing that made a huge difference because it meant that I could see my calendar in Brisbane time in my home time not in France time, because mentally converting time zones can be exhausting.
So what I did was I had my phone set to the local time where I was and my laptop set to my home time zone, and then that way I could see my calendar in whichever time zone I needed to. So if I, for example, was booking a podcast interview on somebody else's show and they'd sent me a calendar link and I was going to book it for after I landed back home, I wanted to make sure that I was booking it in a time that was going to be appropriate for home.
I didn't want to accidentally book it in the middle of the night or 4am or on the wrong day. So it made it really easy to just be able to quickly refer to, oh what day and what time is that going to be when I'm back. And it also really helped because my team are mostly all in Australia, so at least then when I opened my laptop I could right away see, oh great it's 7am there, none of them are online yet.
And that just saved me a lot of mental arithmetic of minus 10 hours or plus 10 hours? And what day is it? And all of that conversion, which when you're in somewhere like America, for example, and you live in Australia, then there's even the factor of like, what day is it? Day ahead? Is it day behind? So I highly recommend making that small little tweak if you are going to be traveling and running your business.

 

2. Get into a routine.

The second thing that I found really helpful was getting into a routine. Now, I find even in normal everyday life, if I don't have a routine around work, then I struggle to get my brain into work mode.
This can be a lot harder if you are travelling in multiple cities and stopping over for short amounts of time. Which is why if I'm going to be working on a trip I also like to be travelling for a little bit longer in one place and I like to live a little bit more like a local so that it's not this quick dash from one city to the next and no “I've got to try and see all of the things in this one city and I've only got two days to do it.”
So I much prefer spending a longer period of time in one area. My most recent trip that I did to the French Alps, I was in the ski town for about 22 days or 23 days, and I had about 20 days of skiing, which was awesome. I woke up, I did a few hours of work, I skied for a few hours. Some days I skied longer, some days I didn't ski as much depending on the weather, depending on the snow, and then some days, I had friends there for a little while, some days I had lunch with them, we had a big lunch, and then after that I just wanted a nap.
Other days, after I finished skiing I found a comfy chair at the base of the mountain and I had a nice cold beer and I read my book with the beautiful view. On days when I knew that I had to stay up late because I had some calls inside my programs with students, I went back to my Airbnb. I did a little bit more work. I had some dinner, maybe did a bit more work after dinner just to keep my brain awake and stop me from falling asleep. There were some evenings where I had a nap and I woke up literally 15 minutes before the call because I just knew I needed that energy.
But the main thing was I got into a bit of a routine with each day around. So I would know when I needed to be working. And then there were times where I am going to be having fun and skiing or hanging out with friends or going out for meals or going for a walk and enjoying the area. I really also recommend something that I did this trip that I haven't done previously was trying to intentionally cluster my calls together.
So I did my best to make sure that most of my calls were scheduled for Thursday morning's Australian time, so then I was only having to stay up late on that Wednesday night. And that meant I had one call, my 8am calls in Australian time were 11pm in France, which is really late to stay up when you are an early morning person like I am, but at least I only had to stay up late that one night and I could back to back a few calls.

 

3. Set strict boundaries

The third big thing that made a massive difference was setting strict boundaries with my time. So the idea here is that if you have boundaries between your travel time or relaxation time, whatever you want to call it, and your work time, then you can make the most of both of them.
Rather than making the mistake that I made when I went travelling for the first time after starting my business back in 2017, where when I wasn't setting boundaries. I would be out enjoying myself. I felt really guilty because I knew how much work I still needed to do. And when I was working, I felt really guilty because I was in Lisbon or Paris or beautiful places and I wasn't enjoying where I was.
So at least if you know, if you have those boundaries around what hours you're going to work and what days you're going to work, then if you stick to those, then that removes that element of guilt. And it really ties in with your routine. So what hours will you work? What hours will you not work? If you are travelling with friends or partner or family, communicate this to anyone else that you are travelling with as well.
Tell them I'm going to be working from seven till 10 each morning, and then I'm free to do any travel activities so that there's that expectation ahead of time. They know, okay, great. So if I want to go for breakfast before 10 AM, I'm going to be having breakfast by myself. Communicate this. If you have a team, communicate this with your team, so they know what hours to expect you online and offline.
And also put in your calendar what city you're going to be in. I know that this has been a bit confusing for my team in the past. They're like you're in America, but which time zone are you in? Because I have no idea what time it is for you. So communicate all of those things with your team so they know exactly when they can expect you online and offline.
My friend Anita said that one of her tips for travel is that she has half an hour or an hour every day when she's travelling, where her main operations team member is online at the same time and they use that one hour to just get through anything that they need to both get through.
So if you can do that with the time zones that you're working in and your team are working in then you can potentially do that as well. I also find that booking a longer period of travel can be a great way to start setting your boundaries. So, it's a way for your business and your team to rely on you a lot less.
Because it relies on you less because it's forcing you to figure out exactly what tasks you have to do every single day. And it forces you to either do these tasks before you go, do them while you are there, which a lot of the time you might not want to do those while you're traveling. In which case you then need to maybe delegate them to your team, or you need to find a way to automate or systemize them.
Or, in some cases, maybe you'll realize that the tasks you were doing weren't that important and you can delete them from your to do list. The little admin things that don't need to be done. Great. We can delete those. And when I'm travelling, I find that because I'm usually wanting to only work like two or three hours in a day, if that, then I find that I'm very selective about what I work on and I've become a lot better at prioritizing.
So I delete the tasks that don't need to be done or aren't as important. And then the other thing to consider is what do you want to work on? What do you not want to work on while you are travelling? So for example, I don't want to be recording podcast episodes while I'm travelling. There's just too many variables around sound quality, around the lighting, like I don't know if the Airbnb I'm going to go to, so the one that I was in France, it was not soundproof.
So I wouldn't want to be recording podcast episodes in that environment where I can't control that kind of sound quality. I also then can't record video, which I prefer to record video with my episodes if I can, so instead what I did was I batched those podcast episodes ahead of time before I went and I didn't have to worry about it for an entire month, which was awesome. ─
I also find having a list prepared of things that I want to work on on the business can be quite nice. I like to use my travel time as much as possible to work on the business rather than in it, and I find that being in a different environment, being out of my normal office and desk space, I find that that helps me to shift out of the day to day habit of sitting down and working in the business like I usually would.
So I made a list of things that had been on my,  “I want to do these someday.” I made that list. And I started chipping away at some of those tasks, which was really fun, actually. And it, because I was in that new, new environment, my brain was able to be a little bit more creative than it usually is in its everyday environment, which is my home office.

 

4. Having a dedicated workspace.

 

So in other words, not working in the same place that you relax. I find it so challenging to switch from relaxing mode to working mode when I'm travelling.
So having a desk at my Airbnb or even just like, I don't know, a chair at the kitchen table where I can sit down and activate work mode. That makes such a difference. It makes it so much easier to switch from relaxing to working. Your brain creates these associations with particular places. So for example, if you're staying in one town for a while and you find a cafe you always like, and you always sit down in the window seat, and as soon as you sit down, you do an hour of deep focused work.
Guess what? Your brain is going to associate that window seat in that cafe as where you do deep focused work. So when you sit down, it's going to naturally be a lot easier to start those kinds of tasks there. On the flip side, your brain is also probably going to associate your bed with sleep and your couch with relaxing.
So you're going to find it a lot harder to motivate yourself and find that energy to do work. When you are sitting on the couch with your feet up, it also having a dedicated workspace also helps to create that boundary between work and travel, fun, relaxing mode, right? Because otherwise you can very easily find yourself in that gray area where you're half working, you're replying to emails while you're chilling on the couch, and it's not really productive work, but it's not relaxing either.
And then you don't feel like you've even had a holiday. And when you're on the couch on your laptop, your family doesn't know that you're necessarily in work mode or your travel companions, your friends, whoever you're with, they don't know that you're in work mode. So they don't know not to disturb you.
Whereas you can create that boundary of, Hey, when I'm sitting at this desk or I'm sitting at this table or when I physically remove myself and go and sit at the cafe across the road, that is when I'm in work mode, please don't disturb me.

 

5. Not relying on hotel or Airbnb Wi Fi for calls.

This has nearly got me into trouble a few times, and now when I land in another country, I download an eSIM as soon as I can. So if you have a new iPhone, I'm not sure about other, I'm not sure about Android, but I know with iPhones, the new ones, you can download an eSIM, so you don't have to even get the physical SIM card anymore.
It's like a little digital SIM. And I make sure that it's one that allows me to hotspot my phone because some of them will only give you internet that you can use on your phone, but you can't hotspot it to your laptop. And then I have a backup internet connection for my laptop. And this really saved me in France, where the second Airbnb that I stayed at, so I spent half the trip in one place and half the trip in another place, the second Airbnb that I was at didn't have wifi.
Now, I'm so accustomed to Airbnbs having Wi Fi that I almost, like, I actually don't even check anymore that they include Wi Fi because I just assume that they're going to have Wi Fi. It's so readily available and so cheap in most places now, but this one didn't have Wi-Fi. So I had to hotspot my phone to be able to do all of my calls.
I went through like, I don't know, I think it was like a hundred gigabytes of data just doing the calls for my programs that I had to run while I was over there and recording and uploading a couple of things. This has saved me a few other times when the hotel or Airbnb Wi Fi is being a bit slow and patchy.
You know those times when it's good enough to maybe scroll through social media, but it's not good enough to do a zoom call. This is when having an eSIM has saved me a lot. So I have an app called Airalo, A I R A L O, and it just has all of the eSIMs for different countries, and you can search the country, and then when I land in that country I download a new SIM card on the free airport Wi Fi.
It's usually only a couple of dollars, um, depending how long you're staying and how many gigs of data you want. So I'll download the new SIM card when I land, and then I have data that I can use on my phone and I don't have to pay roaming fees and I can hotspot my phone to my laptop. Save me money, and it's generally going to be a reliable source of internet.
That said, I do, if I'm going to a new place I've never been before that is not a major city, I will look up the coverage maps to see what phone networks have coverage and make sure that they at least have 4g like decent 4g coverage so that if the wi fi and the airbnb is no good, then I can get a sim card for that particular phone network if the e sim isn't connected to that phone network and I at least have 4g signal Which is kind of the bare minimum that I need to be able to run zoom calls for my courses and programs.

 

6. I like to use travel time to do the things that I don't usually have time for.

This is something that I have always, always stuck to. I love it because, we have so much downtime on the planes. And yes, sometimes I will climb onto a plane and if it's evening, I will just have A glass or two of wine and watch a movie and go to sleep.
I'm not one of those people who is always productive on a plane. But if it's a daytime plane flight and I have in flight Wi Fi, then I will use that time to catch up on an online course that I've bought and haven't got around to finishing yet. Or if the plane doesn't have Wi Fi and there's some kind of particular focused work that I need to chip away at, then I'll make sure I have the document downloaded and I'll work offline on it.
I remember actually once on a daytime flight from Australia to the States. It was it was like a 10am flight or something, so I wasn't going to sleep. And I spent that flight writing our entire affiliate guide and swipe copy for a Launch Magic launch. Which was more than 20 pages of words, basically on a 13 hour flight. And it made it go so much quicker than if I'd just been sitting there watching movies or binge watching a series and trying to maybe sleep during the day, which there was no chance that was going to happen. On my way back from Europe in this most recent trip, I had a six hour layover in Dubai and I used that as a chance to catch up on a coding course.
So I'm learning how to code in Python and I used that as a chance to catch up on that course because it kept my brain more awake. I'd just come off a long flight, I was feeling a little bit jet lagged, a little bit tired, and I knew that if I sat there and tried to read, or if I was scrolling through social media, I would probably get really sleepy. so I thought how can I do something to keep my brain awake? So I caught up on that course. So, find the things that you don't usually have time to do, and use your travel downtime as a way to catch up on those.

 

7. Pack a good pair of noise cancelling headphones.

This is probably the biggest tip I can probably give you. I don't think this just applies to running your business while travelling, this applies to any kind of travel, like noise cancelling headphones make travel in general just so much nicer, so much more pleasant. If I'm on a plane and I want to focus on some work, I put my headphones on, I have a good little focus playlist and then even the loudest screaming baby becomes white noise.
If you are travelling with other people and you need to focus on work, noise cancelling headphones can block out their noise. Like for example, if you are in a small hotel room or a small Airbnb and your kids are in the same room as you, and they are watching TV and you need to focus, put the headphones on.
They can also be like a nice way of signalling to your family, hey when my headphones are on, don't disturb me. I don't typically travel with a lot of tech, I just take my headphones. Like, that is my main piece of tech that I cannot travel without, even on short trips. Like, even if I'm just flying down to Sydney, I will take my noise cancelling headphones with me so that I can have a pleasant one hour flight. Some people I know take a lot of tech with them. Some people I know will take portable ring lights so that they look good in their calls. They'll take microphones to record things, etc, etc. I don't take any of that. I batch my podcasts before I go and I rely on my built in webcam on my Mac. I rely on my built in microphone on my Mac because it's pretty good quality.
Actually, this episode you are listening to right now is recorded on the built in microphone on my computer. Would you believe it? Because I did not get ahead on my episodes before I headed over to New Zealand, so I'm recording this one from a Mac microphone. It's not terrible. It's not as great as my normal microphone, but it's not terrible either.
So there you have it. Those are a couple of things that made running my business while travelling a whole lot safer.

 

Pin this?