Walk the line
How to sustain a healthy business while traveling abroad
Ever since I started holding up my own pants, I’ve been trying to find a way to do that in the way that least resembles working. Professional play seems like an appropriate term to sum up the combination of activities that make up my working life these days. Diversity, freedom and genuine interest are the foundation of this approach, delivering quality work above client expectations as an important added ingredient to pull it off in an economically viable way.
Though I really enjoy this work/play combination, I also greatly enjoy travelling. There’s something in seeing parts of nature and culture previously unseen that fuels creativity and ignites new insights. In the traditional notion, work and vacation share a strict division. Work hard / play hard seems like an adage to live by, and it’s generally true that a lot of people prefer to keep a strict separation between on and off time.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes.” —Marcel Proust
There are some practical reasons that make this separation the obvious choice. A working environment primarily means dealing with people. Clients, partners, employees, colleagues — they all regard you with certain expectations. And dropping off the grid without a heads up, that’s just totally not cool, bro.
As most of my work revolves around web-related stuff, the second reason is that it seems to require an omnipresent internet connection to GTD. When you stick to earth’s metropolitan areas, staying connected is not that hard, But as the urban soundscape dies out behind you, wifi will become a scarcity. And something as lightweight as sending a text-only email will prove quite the burden.
Balancing the switch between on- and offline
The main problem being connectivity, it’s a good idea to cut back on everything that requires too much bandwidth. Most media deliverables — be it hi-res design files, web, video, audio productions— tend to require a halfway decent upload speed. Imagine uploading a 12 mb PDF file on a 1k connection. Not fun. I’m way too impatient for that, so I tend to aim for a low-asset approach where possible. That said, of course for the producing part itself, a web connection is hardly a necessity. Make cool stuff, and throw a USB stick in an envelope. I tend to use trips off the grid (trekking, sailing) for the actual producing, so that when I return to civilisation, I have something physical to send the client. This makes them happy people.
Then there’s communication. An unreliable connection turns a simple Skype call into a rather sucky experience. But a large part of client contact is managing expectations. This includes managing communication expectations. By letting them know in advance when you’re going to fall off the grid, for how long, and what they can expect production-wise, you can keep your clients’ trust.
There’s a third solution, that bypasses a lot of these problems. It’s called (soft) outsourcing. By letting a colleague or even third party take care of media productions, your role turns into that of quality controller. Something that can be done fairly easily using just e-mail. Though the designer in me finds it hard to not have complete control over the end-product, it’s a good way to ensure a steady production in situations where you’re not readily available. Something your client might expect from you.
Before Proto, I used to produce a lot of websites. One of my best moves was to introduce my third party developers directly to my clients. I gave them a dev@ email address, and told my clients (mostly Dutch) that they should speak English in emails from now on. That saved me a ton of time translating their development requests. Even better, back home I got to maintain this construction, and focus on the part I wanted to focus on. Designing.
These days - being part of the Proto team - it all boils down to preparation and communication. Manage the expectations and create a contingency plan.
That said, connectivity and irregular communications don’t have to stand in the way of exploring the globe while maintaining the status quo of your business. I don’t believe that you necessarily should move mountains of work and close killer projects while traveling — nothing to prove here!— but it would be great to find a balance. A balance in which you ensure your business doesn’t dry out completely in your absence, your peers remain content, and you stay updated on the main developments in your area of expertise. Then, assuming you get back home in one piece, it’s not too much effort to get things rolling full speed again.
I still feel that working abroad is a puzzle that I haven’t completely solved yet. It feels good to pull off a couple months abroad each year without completely losing grip, but it’s still a bit like I’m running my business on life support. I’ll be looking for ways to improve on the above in years to come —but will never, ever give up travelling.
