Four Stories About How to Get Work Done on a Trip

I’ve been 100% remote for the past 6 years. I entered the job market smack-dab in the middle of the COVID pandemic. When it ended, I’d already grown to like working in my pajamas! Sounds glamorous, doesn’t it?

Well, wait until you’re hunching over your laptop in an airport with no Wi-Fi. Seriously, ever since I landed a job, I’ve never been able to stay away from work on trips!

I do have a list of feats over the years: participating in a meeting at 1:40 AM in a remote cabin in the woods, finishing an article inside a taxi, doing serious brainstorms on a walk in the street, and the list goes on. You name a task and I’ve probably done while traveling.

I’ve also experimented with a lot of things to make it easier. So, here are four real-life stories about the things that work for me when I simply must work on a trip.

Story 1: Get Your Gear in Order

One day, when I was young and naïve, I decided to take my monster of a 16.7-inch laptop to college. I put it in its special backpack, didn’t let anybody else touch it, took excellent care of it, and somehow managed to damage the monitor.

That’s it, that’s the entire story! I bump into things when I’m on the move. Given the horrible prospect of taking that laptop on a trip, I decided to invest in a compact laptop. That is, without a doubt, one of my best purchases to this day!

It’s a refurbished, upgraded Lenovo ThinkPad X240. It easily fits in my backpack or even a big tote back, and gets everything done. Even the original X240s back in 2015 would still be up to light tasks like working with Microsoft Office, trading, and going on video calls.

If the idea of not having to lug around a heavy expensive laptop appeals to you, consider looking for deals like that on eBay or its alternatives. Also be sure to read up on the original models to identify basic bottlenecks. For example, this one’s internal modem kept disconnecting from the internet.

Speaking of the internet, a travel router isn’t the worst idea. I’ve seen terrible Wi-Fi connectivity even in five-star hotels, and I’ve always had to resort to my phone as a hotspot. That eats up battery. Sometimes permanently! I’ve also taken my home 5G router with me sometimes. It’s like taking a small trash can with you. No kidding. So, if you can get a reliable, small, SIM-compatible router that connects to your laptop, you’ll be sparing yourself a lot of trouble. Unreliable internet is simply bad for productivity!

Another thing that’s bad for productivity? Lack of power. A travel adapter is sometimes nonnegotiable when you’re going abroad. Here’s a list of plug types, voltages, and frequencies by country.

One more note. You might find a portable power bank to be a lifesaver at times. Get one that lives up to your country’s standards. It must also provide correct voltage with no fluctuations, or it’s bye bye, battery!

Now that you’re all set on the outside, let’s take a trip inwards.

Story 2: Help Your Body Acclimate

This story has happened to me a hundred times, so I’ll just give you the generalities. I took a trip somewhere, I was so exhausted that I didn’t get anything done for a while, I crunched for some time and didn’t take weekends off, then came back and (you guessed it) I was so exhausted that I didn’t get anything done yet again for a while!

Did I overexert myself at any of those times? No! It’s just that trips take a toll on your body. Even a one-hour flight leaves you with jetlag and possibly takes you to a place with different levels of pollution, humidity, and air pressure.

So, I have a number of generic but crucial tips for you here. Try any and all of these things to help your body regulate faster during trips.

1. Drink more water than usual: If there’s one thing that can get toxins out of you, it’s water!
2. Move: You’re usually sitting in between places, which locks up your muscles and reduces blood circulation. Don’t forget to walk or stretch or move more after sitting on your butt for long hours.
3. Respond to your environment: Make smart, small choices in accordance to how your new environment is different. If you’re in a polluted city, for example, add a saline wash once or twice a day.
4. Get more sensory deprivation: It’s easy to be always on when you’re on a trip. Your body won’t like that after a while, even if you’re not tired or sleepy. My favorite combo here is eyeshades + earbuds or earplugs.
5. Take crucial medication: It’s easy to forget pills. Don’t!
6. Add food normalcy: Your body wants to get back to a baseline, so why not feed it some familiar food? My favorite is cereal for breakfast!
7. Religiously stick to your sleep routine: The body heavily relies on its circadian rhythms to rest and recharge. Keep your sleep schedule and/or sleep amount when you can. Read more about sleep routines in my sleep tips.

All caught up with the body? Let’s move on to the mind!

Story 3: Avoid Fight-or-Flight

This one’s more recent! I had a medical procedure in another city and didn’t want to take time off, so I crammed the whole thing into a weekend. I hopped into a car on Saturday morning and made it to my friend’s house by around 9 PM. He decides to take a shower and I decide to meditate. I rolled out the mat, lay down, set the timer, closed my eyes… and it was all-out war! For a couple of minutes there, I felt like I’d utterly forgotten how to meditate.

It turns out that being in various cars for nigh on 10 hours and walking in the scorching sun between changing cars had automatically triggered my fight-or-flight mechanism. Plus, I was too busy to notice it!

So, the lesson here is that your brain (like the body) relies on routines to keep its cool. Some of these routines are more obvious, like sleep times or how much you meditate. Others are more subtle, like being able to lie down in a quiet place and do nothing for two minutes! Here are three of my favorite tasks to bring some normalcy to my brain.

1. Mini-Meditations: I went for 30 minutes that night, but even 2 minutes of meditation will help you regulate the nervous system. Here are my favorite meditation apps, if you don’t have any!
2. Soothing Playlist: Do you have that one playlist that you instantly associate with calm or focus? If you don’t, make one! It’s Skyrim music for me.
3. Doing nothing: Sit down, put your phone on Do Not Disturb, and close your eyes. You don’t need to do anything, not even meditate, if that’s another thing to do! Your brain instinctively knows how to stop.

Now that you have the gear, the body, and the mind in order, it’s time to make use of them!

Story 4: Plan Extra & Work in Uninterrupted Bursts

I was once in this city and I had a lot of work to do. “At least 5 hours”, I thought! Then I decide to go try a shared workspace just to see how it is. I went there, got it all done in two hours, and got out to enjoy the rest of the day!

Trips are fun, but they also bring a lot of chaos into your life. You have a lot of things to get done at work, but you also want to enjoy the scenery and hit that museum, too. Here’s the deal: when everything gets mixed up, you’re prone to multitasking. And multitasking messes with your brain in a number of ways, like lowering your overall productivity.

How do you avoid the productivity slump? I have a two-step plan!

Plan Extra for Everything

Let me level with you: I’m not overly obsessed with plans. Most days, I only have a to-do and all the freedom in the world to get through it. Not on trips though! They bring a lot of unknowns into the equation, which makes planning all the more necessary.

The bottom line here is to get organized and clear, especially for your available time slots. For example, when to work, when to go sightseeing, when to be between places, and when to do nothing for the sake of your mental calm.

You choose how crazy you want to go with planning, because that highly depends on the nature and length of your trip.

For example, if you’re taking a road trip for three weeks with a lot of places to stay and little reception in between, it pays to have a general overview of when you’re gonna do what in those three weeks. On the other hand, if it’s a two-day trip and you’re not driving, you can survive on a day-to-day basis.

When you have a general idea of these time slots and tasks, go to the next step and revise if you need to.

Work in Uninterrupted Bursts

Let’s examine what happens when you scatter long hours of work across your day, as we all have sometime.

On one hand, we have studies showing that when you get distracted from a task, it takes a certain amount of time and effort to go back to it. As the paper No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work puts it:

The user requires cognitive effort not only to reconstruct the state of the activity that was interrupted, but also to do so in a work setting that often has changed.

On the other hand, we have Parkinson’s Law. As the original paper says, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” For example, allocate 1 hour to a 20-minute task and the task will take exactly 1 hour!

With these two concepts, you might conclude (like myself) that it’s better to:

1. Lump tasks together as much as possible,
2. Allocate slightly less time than you think you need, and
3. Give the tasks your uninterrupted attention in those allocated times.

You’ll be surprised how much you get done!

This is good advice for anyone, but especially so on trips because of the scarcity of time and energy. So, adjust your plans in the previous step to let yourself work in bursts, give it a try, and let me know how it was!

TL; DR

Here are my four tried-and-tested tips to get work done when you’re on a trip:

1. Gear up for work. A compact laptop is an obvious choice, but you might also want to add a portable router, a travel adapter, a power bank, etc.
2. Help your body get used to it. Trips aren’t easy on the body! Whether it’s jetlag, humidity, air pollution, or anything else, you’ll need to do all the good things to help your body acclimate. Drink plenty of water, have some sensory deprivation, keep your sleep schedule as much as you can, etc.
3. Help your brain cope. The thrill (or exhaustion) of a trip might have you neglect your mental state. Don’t do that, even temporarily! Use meditation, calming music, sleep, and anything else you can think of to help your brain avoid fight-or-flight mode.
4. Plan more and work less, but make it uninterrupted. There’s a lot you want to do on a trip. (It’s a trip, for crying out loud!) So, plan extra for everything so traffic or unexpected events don’t throw you off balance. In addition, lump work intervals together, switch off distractions in those intervals, and use Parkinson’s Law to get things done in the least time possible. You’ll get a lot done in less time!