Hello World! Welcome Friends! Please welcome Jessica Kane to the blog today. Running a business from your home base can prove challenging. The challenges increase when you must run your business while traveling. There are some strategies that you need to implement when it comes to running your business effectively while traveling.
Schedule Specific Work Hours
If you are like some business owners, you’re fairly good at demarcating specific works hours when you are on your home turf. If you are like a good percentage of business owners, you’ve yet to really master setting specific work hours and carving out time for yourself.
No matter the situation when you are at home the issue with specific work hours and time for yourself can become an even greater issue when you are on the road. For your own sake, and for the benefit of your business as well, you need to establish a specific work schedule on the days you travel.
The process of establishing work hours can start by setting a specific time period in which you will tend to day to day recurring or routine matters. You need to also set a specified time during which you will respond to emails and phone calls. In addition, you need to allot a time period during which you will take phone calls from clients, customers, colleagues, vendors, and others.
On top of scheduling these tasks, you need to make sure that meetings associated with your travel are written large on your schedule. Because these meetings may fall outside of the “regular workday,” you will want to consider giving time off for your own personal needs at some juncture during the traditional workday.
Take Advantage of Time En Route
Some portion of your travels will find you in transit, actually traveling. Transit time is a good opportunity to tend to certain tasks that may not require a great deal of contemplation. For example, you can tend to social media marketing issues while en route. You might be able to respond to some more mundane emails. There may some administrative tasks to tend to as well.
Making transit time as productive as possible will leave you feeling less stressed when you arrive at your destination, or go from one destination to another. You will not arrive somewhere with the feeling that you’ve wasted a bunch of time while in transit and now have a myriad of things to catch up on.
Get a Personal WiFi Hotspot
While it is true that WiFi connections can be found almost everywhere, depending on where you travel, that may not always be the case. You need to invest in your own personal WiFi hotspot. The device itself is not expensive. In addition, you may already have a smartphone that comes complete with this technology.
With a WiFi hotspot of your own, you will have far more consistent connectivity. This inexpensive device will work to enhance your overall productivity while traveling.
Respect Your Limitations
Running a business can be exhausting. Traveling can be exhausting. Combine the two, and you can end up truly war weary individual.
When running your business while traveling, you must pay attention to and fully respect your limitations. (Establishing specific work hours, as discussed previously, assists in respecting your limitations.
Respecting your limitations even extends to social activities. For example, if you are traveling with colleagues, and they want to take in the town after a day of hard work, you’ve every right to pass on such a jaunt. The only exception would be is if the proposed socializing has a direct relationship to business and requires your participation and involvement.
Use Face to Face Communication Resources
When traveling, you will need to be in contact with colleagues and others on the home front. In order to make the most out of these communications, consider using face to face communication resources like Skype. In the broader scheme of things, using Skype (or something like it) enhances the connection between you and others. Skype permits overall more effective communication that is otherwise possible via email or even traditional phone calls.
Automate Things
When traveling and running your business, automate as many things as you possibly can. This includes some very basic things like automated responses to emails.
If you are relatively diligent about responding to emails, setting up an automated response letting people know you are at out of town and may be slow in responding prevents you from getting follow up emails when you’ve not immediately responded to someone communicating with you.
On related note, you can even leave specialized greetings on your voicemail. You can advise that you are traveling and may not be available immediately to return a call.
Jessica Kane is a professional blogger who focuses on personal finance and other money matters. She currently writes for Checkworks.com, where you can get personal checks and business checks.
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