How to actually get work done while travelling

The photo everyone has in their head is the laptop on the beach. My reality, the first time I tried it, was a hot cafe with slow wifi, a coffee going cold while a file refused to upload, and a beautiful street outside that I did not really see because I was too stressed about work. I got neither thing. Bad work and a half-seen city, plus a low hum of guilt running both ways. If you are trying to work out how to get work done while travelling, the honest starting point is that the fantasy and the job pull in opposite directions, and nobody warns you how hard that tug is.

I have been working remotely across Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and Indonesia for a few years now, mostly slow, mostly co-living, always checking the wifi before I book anything. I still get this wrong sometimes. But the setup that works for me now looks almost nothing like the productivity-hacks lists, so here is what actually changed things.

Why it's so hard to focus when you're travelling

It helps to name why this is hard, because it is not you being lazy. A new place grabs your attention by its nature. Everything is unfamiliar, so your brain treats all of it as worth noticing, which is lovely on a day off and ruinous when you are trying to concentrate for three hours. On top of that there is the guilt. You are in Chiang Mai or Lisbon or wherever you have landed, and every hour at the desk feels stolen from the reason you came. So you rush the work to get outside, do it badly, then feel worse. That pull is the quiet thing wrecking your focus, and it is real.

Then there is the lack of scaffolding. At home your routine does half the work for you. The same desk, the same coffee, the same walk. On the road every one of those is a fresh decision, and decisions are tiring. Every digital nomad guide tells you to just build a routine. The catch is that on the move, the routine is the exact thing that keeps getting knocked over.

The real fix is to slow down

The single biggest change for me was travelling slower. When I was moving every three or four days I never had a real workday, because I was always either arriving, orienting or packing. The work got squeezed into the cracks, and so did the travel. Staying somewhere for a few weeks instead of a few days fixed more than any app ever did.

Slow travel gives the work somewhere to live. You get a base, you learn where the good wifi is, you fall into a rhythm, and the city stops being a thing you have to consume before you leave on Friday. I gravitated to co-living and monthly stays for a plain reason. A place you can settle into for a month is the only way I have found to be both a worker and a traveller without doing both badly.

You cannot be a tourist and an employee in the same hour. Slowing down is what lets you be each of them properly.

Treat your first days as setup, not sightseeing

When I arrive somewhere new I now give the first day or two to admin, on purpose. Sort the wifi and a backup way online. Find a desk, or a cafe I can genuinely work in, or a co-working spot. Do a grocery run so meals stop being a daily decision. Work out the walk I will do each morning. It feels like wasting precious time in a new place. It is the opposite. Those boring first days buy me three weeks of a workday that mostly runs itself, instead of three weeks of friction.

There is an arrival tax you pay whether you like it or not, the plain disorientation of a new place. Paying it deliberately and up front is far cheaper than paying it in scattered little failures every single day.

Protect one real block, then actually stop

I stopped trying to work across the whole day. Smearing three hours of real work over twelve hours of half-attention is the worst of both, because you are never properly working and never properly off. Now I protect one solid block, usually the morning, phone in another room, one clear goal written down the night before. When that block is done, I am done, and I go and be in the place I travelled to.

Being properly off is what makes the work last. If the job bleeds into every hour, the resentment builds and the focus rots. A clean finish, even an early one, is worth more than a long fuzzy day where you were technically at your laptop the whole time and got a fraction of it done.

Pick a base you can work from, not just sleep in

The thing I check before booking, after the wifi, is whether there is anywhere to actually work. A real desk and a chair you can sit at for a few hours, not a bed and a bedside table. A surprising number of lovely-looking places have nowhere to work at all, which you discover once you are hunched over the kitchen bench with a sore back by day three. Ask the host for a photo of the workspace. Ask for a wifi speed screenshot. If neither exists, that tells you what the place is really built for.

• Wifi you have actually verified, plus a phone plan you can tether from when it drops.
• A proper desk and chair, not a sofa or the end of a bed.
• A door you can close, or a co-working space nearby you can escape to.
• Somewhere to get a coffee and a meal without it turning into a daily expedition.

None of this is glamorous, and it is the opposite of the laptop-on-the-beach picture. It is just the only way I have found to actually get work done while travelling and still enjoy the travelling. Slow down, pay the setup cost early, protect one honest block of work, then close the laptop and go outside. The city will still be there at lunchtime.

The trips I remember most fondly are not the ones where I saw the most. They are the ones where the work was calm enough that I could look up from it.

Benjamin

Founder & sole developer, Novaire Digital