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Remote work may seem easy after a few successful trips, but unexpected challenges can quickly disrupt productivity. Imagine a remote worker in Lisbon, just ten minutes before an important client call, when the hotel Wi-Fi suddenly stops working. With limited time, they rush to the nearest café, hoping to find a reliable internet connection.
On Instagram, working remotely while travelling often looks like a dream, with breathtaking Norwegian mountains or beautiful Dominican beaches just outside the window. However, the reality can be quite different. Small inconveniences and unexpected disruptions can quickly add up, taking valuable time away from actual work.
Maintaining remote work productivity requires careful planning and practical habits that help minimise distractions and disruptions. This guide explores essential tips for remote work while travelling, including effective time and energy management, organising a comfortable workspace, choosing the right tools, and maintaining focus throughout the workday.
When you work remotely while travelling, you do your regular job hours from a place that is not your home. This can last a few days or several months. Usually, it happens in one of two ways.
|
Format |
How long it lasts |
What it looks like |
|
Workation |
A few days to a couple of weeks |
Work mornings, explore afternoons, usually tacked onto a vacation |
|
Digital nomad lifestyle |
Ongoing |
Move between cities regularly, treating travel as the default |
An ADP Research Institute survey of Australian workers found that 30% believe they could relocate overseas and keep working for their current employer, joining the ranks of digital nomads. Workations are a shorter commitment, and even there, most people haven't tried one: a 2023-2024 survey of 964 people by the Fraunhofer IAO found that most respondents knew what a workation was, but only about one in four had taken one.
At home, your routine runs on autopilot. Somewhere new, you need a place to sleep, Wi-Fi that works, a way to get around, and a flight connection to sort out. Building a routine from nothing takes your energy and time.
A long to‑do list makes more sense when you’re in the office and the day mostly goes as planned. Travel days rarely do, so it's not worth loading one up with a long list. Each morning, pick one to three must‑do tasks. If you manage more, great — that’s a bonus. And if you only get those three done, that still counts as a good day.
It’s basically a lighter take on the classic 1‑3‑5 rule:
1 Big Task: your main goal for the day. This major item takes the most time and energy.
3 Medium Tasks: important duties that matter, but take less focus and time than your big project.
5 Small Tasks: quick wins or routine chores.
On busier travel days, even one task is enough.
Your energy isn't the same all day, it's higher at some hours and lower at others, and jet lag makes those ups and downs stronger. Healthdirect, Australia's government health service, lists difficulty concentrating and reduced alertness among the symptoms.
So instead of tackling your hardest task whenever a gap opens up, notice the hour or two where your focus is naturally sharpest, that’s your peak energy window.
Use lower-energy hours for things like:
Save your best hours for the work that needs your full attention.
Every time a small task distracts you, a Slack message or a quick revision, it costs more focus than it would at home, since your surroundings are unfamiliar and demanding attention. And when you switch, you lose time getting your head back into what you were doing.
So what do you do with all this? You group similar tasks and handle them, for example, twice a day, rather than jumping the second your manager assigns something in Asana.
When you work in an office, you always have your usual setup and everything you need. But when you travel, you can’t count on that, so it helps to plan your space and tools ahead of time.
On my first work trip, I thought I could save space by leaving my external mouse and keyboard at home. After two days on the touchpad, my wrist hurt. Typing on the laptop keyboard forced me to hunch over and sit too close to the screen. I ended up buying a mouse and keyboard from a local shop just to finish the week comfortably.
Of course, those are not the only equipment gaps you can run into on the road:
Most of these gaps are easy to prevent if you plan ahead and make a checklist: laptop, chargers, a universal power adapter, and some way to handle basic office tasks without office hardware. A phone camera covers scanning. When something needs a signature, you can sign documents online instead of searching for a printer.
A digital signature online carries real legal weight in Australia, not just convenience: under the Electronic Transactions Act 1999, it's valid as long as it identifies the signer, shows clear intent, and both parties agree to sign electronically.
A place can look perfect for a workday and still have unreliable Wi-Fi; it's better to know that before your sync than to discover it mid-call. Run a quick check with free online tools like Speedtest or Fast.com; anything above 5 Mbps up and down handles a video call.
Have a backup ready:
If the main connection fails, you know where to go and don’t have to search for a location five minutes before a meeting.
When you work in an office, you get structure handed to you. You have a set start time, a commute that helps you shift into work mode, and maybe a morning coffee with your team. But once you’re on the road, all those routines disappear.
You can set up a few anchor habits for yourself. A fixed start time gives the day a shape, which is most of what an office does for you.
It can be simple:
When you’re working remotely, you’re the one in charge of your remote work productivity. Nobody else is setting the pace for you, so you’ll want to get good at protecting your attention.
Your project manager asks you to review a contract while you're mid-call. You can't do anything about it right away, but you keep thinking about it anyway, through the rest of the call and through lunch too.
A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that unfinished tasks kept nagging at people's attention until they wrote down a specific plan for dealing with them, at which point the intrusive thoughts just stopped.
Write it down when something like that comes up:
Once it's out of your head and onto paper, you can let it go until you are ready to handle it.
You settle into a quiet café, find a comfortable chair, and get fifteen minutes deep into your task. Around ten o’clock, the regulars walk in. They greet the owner and exchange the latest news, and then set up a noisy game of chess just as you’re trying to concentrate.
Unfamiliar surroundings create more small interruptions than your home or office:
You can’t plan for every real emergency, but for these small things, it helps to decide ahead of time how you’ll handle them. This way, you protect your focus and get your work done well.
At home or in an office, something usually tells you the day is over. You leave the building, someone else packs up, or the commute creates a natural break. On a trip, work can just keep stretching into the evening. This lines up with Corporate Keys' guide to balancing work and leisure on corporate trips: set clear start and finish times, or the whole trip turns into one long workday. Switching off from work is important as people who do it sleep better and burn out less than those who keep thinking about work into the evening.
When you’re done, close the laptop and put it away. You can add a short walk after that. It gives the day a clear finish and stops work from taking over the rest of the trip.
Interest in remote work lifestyle keeps growing, especially among younger workers: 39% of those aged 18 to 24 think relocating overseas while keeping their job is realistic, compared to just 9% of those over 55. But people still face familiar challenges: staying productive and being distracted by small issues.
Everyone who works this way eventually builds their own tips for remote work. If even one idea from this article makes your next trip a little smoother or more focused, then it’s done its job.
A workation is a short, defined stretch of working somewhere else, often attached to a vacation. The digital nomad lifestyle is the way of life: working remotely while travelling or living in different countries and cities.
Yes, inform your employer before the trip. Your destination may affect:
Standard tourist entry usually doesn't permit work, even remote work for an employer back home, though it's rarely enforced on short stays. Matt Graham's guide lists more than 40 countries that offer digital nomad visas to Australian citizens. Before you plan anything, though, check the official government resources for the country you're headed to, since requirements can change. The list of eligible countries is also constantly growing as more countries introduce digital nomad visas.
