How to Maintain Your Work-Life Balance on Business Journeys

While closing business deals with international partners and taking in local sights afterward can be exhilarating, frequent work travel tends to lose its glamour with time. Given long enough, it can take its toll on your personal relationships, mental health, and professional performance.

Maintaining a work-life balance in such unique circumstances is challenging, but not impossible. Here are some proven, highly effective tips for remaining healthy, happy, and productive while on business travels.

Plan Ahead

Anticipating common hang-ups can mitigate many of the stresses and discomforts of frequent business travel. For example, booking a flight that arrives a day before your work obligations start lets you get your bearings and deal with the worst of your jet lag.

Establish an itinerary and prepare as many work-related materials as you can beforehand. Pack smart, focusing on essentials that will fit inside your laptop bag and a carry-on to avoid excessive luggage and decrease the likelihood of theft. Lastly, scout out your accommodations and local transport arrangements to get wherever you need to go quickly.

Try to Stick to a Schedule

Travel uproots us, which can have all kinds of negative consequences on physical and mental health alike. A proven way of combating this is to stick to your normal routines as much as you’re able.

Maintaining a healthy sleep schedule tops the list since it ensures you’ll have enough energy to tackle your obligations. Also, try to eat meals as you normally would, prioritizing healthy options and fresh ingredients to account for heightened nutritional requirements.

Bring your favorite toiletries and maintain personal hygiene to feel clean and refreshed. It's also important to start the day right and wind down. Practice mindfulness techniques or write down your thoughts, and be sure to stop using your digital devices at least 30 minutes before bed so you can fall asleep more easily. 

Block Out Your Day 

If you structure your day for maximum productivity, you can get a lot done even while traveling. Prioritize getting the most complicated work tasks out of the way first while your mind is still fresh. Block your working hours out, making sure to consider periods of deep work that require concentration while also accounting for meetings, check-ins with the team back home, and other necessary but less demanding tasks.

Crucially, make time in the day to contact family, relax, and take in the sights of the place you’re visiting. These aren't frivolous! If anything, de-stressing in a healthy way will help keep burnout away and give you more energy to maintain productivity. 

Employ Efficiency Hacks

The faster you accomplish all your tasks, the more time you’ll have to make the most of the business trip. Luckily, there are many ways to boost your efficiency. Time management techniques like Pomodoro are a proven way of optimizing one's focus. However, you'll get even more done if you delegate and automate as many rote tasks as possible.

A slew of digital services makes this a breeze. It’s now possible to streamline everything from itinerary planning and calendar syncing to project tracking, automatic progress updates, and expense tracking.

Assemble and get acquainted with a digital productivity toolkit at home so that using it while traveling becomes second nature. Don't forget to make use of the best password managers as a fundamental part of it. All other tools will need an account, so ensuring their passwords are unique and complex will go a long way towards maintaining your digital safety. Plus, using autofill to gain access to them quickly and safely is an efficiency hack in and of itself.

Create a Functional Workspace

While you might not know where you’ll be working next, you can take steps to make that space as functional and comfortable as possible. Doing so will help you maintain focus and boost productivity, letting you get more done faster.

Always try to find a place with ample natural light and comfortable seating. Bring a notebook instead of a larger laptop to make better use of limited desk space. Don't forget portable peripherals for faster typing and navigation.

Connectivity is necessary for effective work, but safe and reliable options aren't always available. Use a VPN if you plan on accessing the internet via Wi-Fi, especially from public places like an airport or your hotel. The VPN will create a tunnel around the connection, encrypting it and ensuring the sensitive data you access or exchange remains private and secure.

Alternatively, you may want to look into eSIM services. They take advantage of the local mobile network, sparing you from having to hunt down Wi-Fi hotspots. Say you’re having a week-long multi-country trip from Italy to France and to Spain. Grabbing an eSIM for Europe is a smart idea. eSIM plans are often much cheaper than your carrier’s roaming charges. Best of all, you can switch plans without giving up your number.

Set Boundaries 

Being on a work trip does not mean you should be on call 24/7. Coordinating across time zones can be tricky. Still, you’ll be happier and more productive if you inform clients and coworkers about working hours while you’re away and stick to them.

Conclusion 

At worst, work travel can feel like the everyday slog you’re used to, just with extra steps. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Take our work-life balance tips to heart and make the best out of a challenging yet potentially rewarding situation.