The busiest time of the year has come. You may juggle holiday decorations, shopping, and childcare while working from home. But if you are traveling and working remotely for the holidays, you’ll need to plan and take extra precautions to avoid rookie blunders.
Furthermore, working remotely may be a learning curve if you’ve never worked remotely before. These tips and suggestions will serve as helpful reminders for newcomers and veterans during the holiday rush.
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Remote Work Holiday Travel Tips
1. Before you go, make sure your devices are fully charged.
During the holidays, there are only a few outlets in airports and on trains, and you may be too far away from one to charge your phone or laptop comfortably.
2. Bring Your On-the-go Chargers (that are charged).
If you want to be productive on a plane or train excursion, even with trusted devices, your battery may lose a full charge depending on the length of your trip. To be prepared, bring backups or powerbanks, and keep your phone, laptop, Kindle, iPad, or other device loaded until you arrive.
3. Save files to your computer for offline use.
Although most planes, trains, and buses now have WiFi, some still do not. When they do have WiFi, it’s usually spotty or slow, so downloading presentations or files to work on offline can be more productive than working in a WiFi-only environment.
4. Take a MiFi device with you.
While waiting in the airport, WiFi can be spotty and expensive for faster service. Bring a MiFi device with you so you can create a personal hotspot wherever you go. This way, you’ll only have to pay for data for as long as needed.
5. Organize your affairs.
If you plan to be gone for an extended period, it’s a must to ensure you have everything you’ll need from an administrative standpoint and get everything in order at home.
Make sure you have multiple debit cards if one is lost or broken so you don’t end up in a foreign country without access to cash. Due to cancellation policies, a credit card is also helpful in booking flights and housing.
Another essential thing to have is insurance.
Long-term travel insurance can be prohibitively expensive, so consider getting international health insurance instead. While this does not cover things like stolen property or canceled flights, ensuring you have access to healthcare in the event of an accident is far more critical.
6. Meet with other digital nomads to find out where they’re going.
When you’re traveling, most of the people you meet will most likely come and go quickly because they’re on a short-term trip or vacation. Finding digital nomad hotspots, such as co-working spaces, is a good idea, as it allows you to form longer-term relationships and a sense of community with other remote workers who aren’t pressed for time.
7. Create a healthy work routine.
When you arrive at a new destination, it’s easy to get caught up in all the exciting new things to see and do, so establishing a healthy work routine — and sticking to it — is critical to ensuring you maintain a healthy balance between travel and work. Even if your job does not require it, maintaining a regular workweek and weekend schedule is one way to achieve this.
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Tips for Working Remotely Over the Holiday
1. Discover your flexibility.
Working remotely usually entails a certain amount of schedule freedom. Take advantage of not having to go to work and hunt for extra time during the day to complete your tasks.
You can choose to get up an hour or so before the kids to prepare your day, prioritize your to-dos, and begin working on one major project. You’ll be able to attend your child’s school holiday party while also meeting your deadlines.
2. Choose a location that is free of distractions.
Sitting in the center of the commotion won’t help you get work done while you’re at home with your family or friends. You may think you’re working, but if you’d only chosen a peaceful spot, you could have completed your assignment in a fourth of the time, allowing you to spend more time with your loved ones.
3. Ensure you have most of the tools needed.
Don’t forget to bring your laptop charger, headphones, wireless mouse, video conferencing camera, and necessary files. If you travel great distances, ignoring something could mean being without it for 2-4 weeks, so double-check everything before you depart and plan.
4. Be sure your calendar is up to date with your schedule.
When some teammates are online the week of Christmas but not the week of New Year’s Day, when some are online and offline every other day, and when others are not available at all (maybe they’ve been saving their vacation days for a nice, long getaway), team planning can get problematic. Everyone has the right to their schedule, but it’s crucial to communicate when you’ll be accessible and unavailable to your team, clients, or anybody else with whom you operate.
5. Create suitable Slack/email away messages.
Ensure that your team is aware of your activities throughout the day. Remember that while you’re working remotely at different hours than usual, your coworkers may not be taking time off and may be working at full pace without having modified their hours.
When your Slack profile shows you as accessible one minute and gone the next, teammates may become annoyed trying to track you down. Let folks know where you are at any given moment using your instant messaging and email vacation responder.
It’s OK to be wholly and away disconnected during the holidays. Just remember that if you claim you’re working, you must be active and accountable.
Read More: Comprehensive Guide to Remote Work
6. Seek Assistance.
If the pressures of the season are becoming too much for you, seek Assistance. Friends and family can assist you in watching children while you work.
Older children can also help with specific projects. Elementary school-aged children, for example, can assist in sorting mail, filing papers, and even shredding documents. Your high schooler can do post office runs and other errands for you, making your workday run more smoothly.
So, take a look at your job responsibilities and see which ones you can delegate during this time to improve your work-life balance.
7. Always remember to take breaks.
Some people who work from home become so engrossed in their work that they forget to take a lunch break or even stretch their legs. With no cues from coworkers leaving for a holiday, it’s easy to see how this could happen. However, taking breaks from the computer from time to time is necessary to recharge, refuel, and refocus.
Set the alarm to remind you when it’s time to take a break if necessary. Make sure to leave your workspace at those times. When you return to work, you’ll notice that you’re much more productive than you would have been if you hadn’t taken the break.
Takeaway
The holidays are a splendid time to relax and unwind from work, but thanks to the flexibility of remote work, more extended and more blended vacations are now possible. Set boundaries for yourself and your team, and schedule time away from your laptop, phone, or tablet to spend with family and friends.
We hope that remote work allows you to spend more time with your family this holiday season because the holidays are a time to spend real Facetime with loved ones.
