Everyone at some point has to travel for work or work while traveling. This can be a wonderful, all-paid for, no hassle experience OR, the more common experience, a difficult and painful experience, but a necessity or convenience. For me it was the latter and though I pride myself of being a multitasking queen, I have no reign over the UK train system and thus had a terrible time trying to get anything done. So by learning from my mistakes, here are six gems of wisdom about what not to do while working on the go!
Working on the Go - Why it's a must for me:
Leisure travel is a foreign concept to me at the moment since I work part-time, have freelance gigs, and am completing a masters in journalism. I’m not actually complaining about the work; gahd no! I genuinely adore it! I get to write for an amazing company, film wolves and the landscapes of Scotland, and finish up some freelance jobs (wooo networking!). Though I won't deny this is a lot of work all within the span of two months! But fear not self, at the end of July all freelance gigs are complete and at the end of August my dissertation will be done. So for the next month and a half, I am channeling my spirit animal Leslie Knope allowing me to be a controlling, organization freak who can balance it all!
But sometimes you can't do it all:
However, this past week I admit I took way to big a bite and my gorgeous unicorn of a Knope morphed into Liz Lemon having a nervous breakdown. I was naïve, simple as that. I may have had all the right equipment (or so I thought), the motivation, and enough time but I did not factor in unforeseen and uncontrollable circumstances…like trains breaking down. A lot.
Don't do what I did:
Here’s a quick summary of my past week: From Thursday to Monday I was in Poland for a two-day wedding and filming for freelance work, came back Monday and got packing to immediately head down to London to film wolves for my dissertation then back up for Friday to film in Oban, all the while maintaining RookieOven’s social media and blog posts. Everything was going pretty darn well even with a few hiccups along the way, until Wednesday. It’s 5 AM, I’ve got my coffee, my laptop, and I'm on the train. I’m ready to go! I'm in the mindset of "going to be productive for this 6 hour journey" and within an hour…everything.goes.wrong.
I was supposed to arrive for noon to have some wiggle room for filming, then I could get to my aunt’s and finish up some work to have a much needed sleep in the next day. Instead, my train was delayed so badly that over 3 hours’ delay and 5 trains in total I made it to Reading.
You might be asking yourself, “But Morgan, train’s have wifi! Why didn’t you do work there?” Oh dear friends I tried but I have never in my entire life encountered such horrible, spotty wifi in my entire career as a travel journalist. I even had Skype credit as a backup which gives you a bit of a hotspot with weak lines but NO, no wifi for me.
So I missed my interview, got to my aunt’s tried to do work but her internet was cut out as well. I was shit out of luck the entire trip, even on the train back I had the exact same issues. Now I would say I could write all day Thursday and Friday, which I tried to get as much done as I could between the catch up filming but again I put all my eggs in one horrible train basket which had me standing for most of the way back.
Six Gems of Wisdom:
But now I’m in Oban, it’s pouring down rain and I can’t film so I'm taking advantage of the strong wifi, a good cup of coffee and the wisdom I learned from this past experience.
1 - Don’t take on too much: If you’re traveling, be realistic about what you take on in relation to where you’ll be traveling. Ask yourself if you can genuinely manage that with no glitches or will you run into problems like I did?
2 - Prioritize your workload: I should have made a database before I left with research completed well in advance, even though I had prepared the social media enough the blog was lacking. I naively thought I would get time between trips but forgot to factor that people might not respond in said time. This means you might need to work some overtime to spare you the hassle during your trip or work on projects that are non-wifi dependent. Use the down time to improve projects rather than start them, it’ll calm your nerves and help you in the end with deadlines.
3 - Have all the right Equipment: Be as prepped as you can be with your equipment. Charge them the night before, have portable chargers, get a dongle with strong connection so you don’t have to worry for wifi-dependent tasks. Make sure when you’re stuck in an unforeseen jam that your tools can help you still be productive.
4 - Assign your tasks to the appropriate transportation: You may have 100 emails, 20 phone calls, 50 million notifications, and more that you need to respond to and some places are better than others to complete these tasks. If you know you have 30 emails and are having a coffee break, take that time to read them. You have 20 phone calls? Save those for journeys with a time limit, this way you can justify short, sweet, and to the point, while checking those off your lists. However, don’t be that person who talks super load the whole train or bus ride. We hate you, shh your face, go home. (No seriously, please be considerate of your surroundings.)
5 - Let your boss and clients know: set up an “out of the office” email, give them a heads up that you might not be able to respond for a bit, and be honest. Sometimes you can’t control all the plans, so if you’re honest and have already given advance notice, people will be more understanding if things go wrong.
6 - Give yourself a break: You’ve tried everything, you done all of the above, yet still everything is wrong. Take a break, enjoy the travel (though it might be hard due to stress), and accept that it was out of your control. Sometimes you truly cannot do anything about it until later, so keep your chin up and work hard when you can! If you’re lucky, you can even use the experience to create something like this blog post.
