Productivity Tips When Traveling

Managing your time when you have a yearly calendar loaded with travel is not a simple thing to do. Based from my own experience of a busy travel laptop lifestyle running my digital business and attending events around the world, here are some tips to keep you on schedule despite being away from home (even if you are working off your laptop):

1. Hire Well

Before you go away there are a number of tasks that must be done or prioritized before you can focus on your a trip or vacation, you must entrust work to someone that can efficiently do it. Here are several points to consider in hiring someone that may continue your work while you are away (or utilising an outsourcing team):

1. Write down a list of tasks so you know what type of candidate your after, you may need more than one person to do your tasks – its rare that the one person would have all the skills you need to complete all task required of your business.
2. Interview candidates extensively and check references
3. It’s essential to test the skills your hiring for, set example exercises to filter candidates. What you are looking for is that the task completed is accurate and more importantly returned in a timely manner.
4. Can the candidate work un-supervised?

It’s hard to delegate tasks to a new staff member but like any new staff there will need to be training involved first. Use free software like Jing to show the staff member what they need to do to complete the task this is handy if they are lost they can easily replay your video. Reporting to you daily showing that they have completed your task will result in trusting them with more work until you are at a stage where you can build up to a weeks work at a time. When you are traveling ensure that you login in daily just to check progress and give feedback.

2. Trust Others

Trust is something that is built over time. Always praise on a job that is well done and encourage them to give you feedback on a task if they have other ideas they would like to input which sometimes you may not of thought of. Start building trust slowly and you will be rewarded with a loyal staff member.

3. Use Travel Time Wisely

For the times that you can’t hand over a job to individuals in the workplace while you travel, here are suggestions on what you could do to remain on top of things:

1. When standing in line at the airport, you could take out a notepad and think of new business suggestions or take notes about essential company issues.
2. Instead of viewing the in-flight entertainment, you may use this time to work on your laptop. The good idea about flights is that you won’t be disrupted by the workplace telephone or any of your associates.
3. Utilize any travel commute to perfect larger presentations.
4. Recreate an Office Environment whenever possible.

When you’re staying in a hotel, arranging your laptop and documents similar to your office setup may help. Instead of treating the hotel as an area of recreation, consider it as an area of “work-away-from-work.” Replicating an office setup will help you participate in work much better.

Final Thoughts;

Working on many tasks is still possible while traveling. Nevertheless, it’s best to do the less important ones to raise productivity. For instance, you can leave tasks like non-urgent emails for flights and so that your office time will be focused on critical business matters.

Life hack reports that keeping e-mail programs open is disruptive to efficiency. Instead, checking e-mails five or six times a day will help you deal with them appropriately. So, either save those tiring e-mails for your travels or examine them occasionally throughout a typical working day. Better still have staff set up email folders so that you will have emails sorted and to look at when you are ready.

Source: the Online Alliance