All around the world, thousands of people are ditching the office and taking their working life on the road...
Freelancers are packing up their laptops and setting up shop in Thai cafes and Spanish coworking spaces, while entire companies are realising that they can slash their costs and have happier employees by allowing them to work from wherever they want.
Being able to see the world outside of a two-week vacation is pretty great, but it's not just about the travel. It's about doing away with all the constraints of office life – the commute, the cubicle, the bad coffee – and finding freedom in a more flexible way of working and living.
Travel While You Work is your guide to how you can make this transition too – whether you're a freelancer or the head of your own company.
Over the course of over 300 pages, you'll learn:
- The art of getting down to work fast in a new environment
- How to stay productive despite the hassles and distractions of travel
- Essential information about currencies and payments – including cross-currency payments
- Tips, tools and important principles for communicating with clients abroad
- A system for reliably hiring the best contractors and employees without meeting them in person
- How to manage a team when you're all in different locations
... And everything else you need to make "out of office" your permanent reality.
Travel While You Work also contains interviews with 13 very different business owners and freelancers – everyone from a management consultant to a circus school owner – sharing their tips for how they make their business work from anywhere in the world.
PLUS interviews with three travelling families who successfully balance entrepreneurship and education along with a life of travel.
This book won't teach you how to start a business, or what business you should start. But if you want to take an existing business mobile (whether as a solo freelancer or the head of your own company), Travel While You Work will give you all the inspiration, resources and practical guidance you need.
Mish Slade has spent three years as a “digital nomad” – running her businesses from 20 different countries with her husband, and blogging about the experience on makingitanywhere.com. She has travel down to the finest of arts, yet still can’t quite be trusted not to make jokes while going through security.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
By Language on the Loose
Travel While You Work is Mish Slade’s third guide for fellow and aspiring “digital nomads” (a title she claims somewhat grudgingly, for lack of a better term). The follow-up to Travel Like a Pro and Protect Your Tech is longer than its two predecessors at more than 300 pages, although highlights from both previous guides are revisited (and expanded upon) in Slade’s latest work. In addition to Chapter 3’s sobering advice on information security and the bonus chapter providing her best travel tips, Slade offers street-tested tips and resources for settling in quickly, dealing with financial matters, optimizing mobile productivity, freelancing on the go, hiring the best employees, and running a location-independent business. Particularly interesting for those considering this lifestyle may be the appendices featuring interviews of other digital nomads - including three who travel with their children.
Slade’s self-effacing, whimsical style belies her sophistication as a writer, traveler, and entrepreneur. From getting through airport security with minimal fuss and bother to conducting remote interviews from (almost) anywhere in the world, Slade uses her quirky sense of humor and light-hearted anecdotes to make the pages turn easily. Relevant and practical advice is reinforced with examples, links to resources, and recommendations for additional research.
Readers who will find this book most useful are those who are either considering or just beginning a lifestyle of truly location-independent work, whether self-employed or working remotely for someone else. It may be less relevant for more experienced digital nomads or those whose lifestyles don’t involve frequent international travel, since Slade devotes a good bit of attention to topics like air travel and dealing with multiple currencies. As an experienced freelancer with (children and) a strong preference for ground transportation, I found myself skimming through sections on productivity tools and finding the best airfares, but I devoured other sections relating to communication tools and interacting with contractors. I appreciate Slade’s willingness to research and share solutions from various resources (sparing her readers hours of tedious legwork to find the information she compiles so neatly for us), as well as her commitment to giving credit where credit’s due (links to sources and providers accompany every topic).
If you’re among the vanguard of professional nomads, or your mobile office only needs to function within a limited area (your home country), you may not find this book especially helpful (in fairness, it's still a fairly comprehensive clearinghouse of information and advice for work-related travel). However, I highly recommend it for newbie digital nomads and those who aspire to - in Slade’s words - “manage and communicate with [a] team of staff and contractors around the world,” learn “the best methods for dealing with clients as a freelancer,” and develop skills for “maintaining productivity while moving around the world.”
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
By Genius
First let me say, as someone with a desire to travel and work from anywhere, this book was fascinating. A behind the scenes (so to speak) look at how someone actually does it.
This is not a book about theory. It is the real "how-to" from someone who actually walks the walk and talks the talk.
The author has a very easy to read style of writing and I found the book to even be entertaining at times. (the author writes with wit and like that) I like books that are easy to read and are a "quick read" and this book does not disappoint.
I do not review many books but I felt I needed to make an exception because this book is on a topic that I am really interested in and studying currently. You will read this book and go back to it over and over again. You will be bookmarking so many links because you will want to remember them and find them when you need them and you WILL eventually need them. LOL
If you are a freelancer or internet entrepreneur, I suggest you grab this book. You will get tons of ideas as well as tools and resources that will make your life much easier as a digital nomad.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
By Strudeloo
Hands down one of the best resources for someone considering taking their show on the road. This book is absolutely full to the brim of important information. While you can hunt and peck for a lot of this information online, it really is worthwhile to have it all gathered in one place. This really is an indispensable resource.
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