Don’t give up the day job: work remotely and travel the world

Many of us dream of travelling the world. We scroll through Instagram and are presented with a plethora of influencers who’re living it up, seeing the most amazing sights in the world, eating incredible food, enjoying life’s luxuries without a care in the world. But, how do they do it?

Surely to experience all of this you must have to give up your day job? But, then how do you pay your bills, or buy those all-important flights or afford accommodation?

The answer is much simpler than you may think. The job world has become much simpler over the last few years, with many employers bringing in flexi-hours and enabling employees to work remotely.

First of all, you need to decide whether travelling and working abroad is a part-time or life-time thing. If you want to travel the world for a period of time, it’s best to speak with your employer and be completely honest. Tackle it head on and explore the options together. If, however, you want to have a complete life change, you may want to consider other freelance options.

If you want to continue working at the same company whilst on your travels, there are so many tools you can utilise to ensure you’re up to date with your tasks and your team. You may even find that your internal communications improve. Here are some of the tools you should check out:

Slack – This is a great tool to remain on top of projects and remain part of the internal communications. It can be set up to include “channels” where you can separate different areas of your work, or the different clients you work with. Other’s in your team can contribute to channels you invite them in on and you can also message them privately. Documents can be shared and automatically added to a connected GDrive account and you can also make calls through the app too.

Google Apps – There are various applications that are part of the Google Suite. They enable you to view each other’s calendars, work collaboratively on documents you and your team upload and share files with clients. You can also sync it with your other devices, so no matter where you are, you’ll get that email reminder come through about an upcoming call or be able to edit a word document whilst kicking back on the beach.

Speechnotes – Rather than having to take your computer with you everywhere you go or typing out large amounts of text on a mobile device, why not just speak into your phone and let it do the typing for you? That’s exactly what this app does. You can literally talk to your phone and it will type it up. You can then save this file and copy it into an email or word doc later on.

While these tools are great, it’s important to consider your security. If you’re moving around quite a lot and even using public computers, ensure all of your devices are password protected. It’s also recommended that you only use encrypted USBs for storing data. More than 20 million USBs are lost or stolen each year! This can cause major issues if the device isn’t protected and contains sensitive information. With the recent GDPR, it can also lead to fines of up to 4% annual turnover or 20 million euros (whichever is greater) if data is not encrypted properly. Find out more about encrypted USBs from USBMakers.com here >

Not only are your devices at risk, but also the data held within them if you’re not secure online. The Secure VPN app will ensure you can browse the public internet without the worry of someone stealing your information, so you can get back to sipping those pina coladas.

Hopefully you can see from the technology available today, along with employers’ attitudes to working, that travelling whilst continuing to work is realistic. The world really is your oyster!