Flexibility for the Road
Featured Guest Blogger April 20th, 2009
Thursday Bram is the author of the forthcoming book, Working Your Way Around the World. She has also written extensively about productivity and entrepreneurship at such sites as Stepcase, Lifehack, and her own Thursday Bram.com. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.
Balancing work and a home life is enough for some of us to meet our ambitions at life. But when your goals don’t look like a classic climb up the company ladder, flexibility can make all the difference in how well you’re able to balance everything. When your plans include different geographic locations, flexibility become the only option.
The idea of a location independent lifestyle — the ability to take your work with you and head wherever you want — is becoming increasingly popular. With it, though, comes new questions about work-life balance. If your entire office is your laptop, how do you leave it behind at the end of the day? If you’re exploring a whole new city, or even a country, every few months, how can you guarantee that your work gets done?
One answer to these questions is simple flexibility. If you can be flexible about your current schedule, your ability to handle both your work commitments and your ‘home’ life won’t vary from a French bistro to a Thai internet cafe.
Hand in hand with that flexibility, though, you’ll need certain other skills. The ability to make a schedule (and stick to it) takes on an added level of importance when your biggest client is located in Eastern Standard Time and you’re ten hours ahead. Even with the amazing communications that technology has made possible, no one will be willing to get out of bed to get you the numbers you need.
The ability to follow through on your commitments is equally crucial. More and more families are going on extended trips for months at a time; if you’ve promised your son or daughter that you’re going to go explore the local castle or historical ruins, it’s time to put the laptop away. Choosing to take your loved ones on the adventure of a lifetime may be expensive enough that you need to work along the way, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t experience the thrills of exploration just the same.
It’s worth noting that depending on what parts of the world are on your itinerary, you may find yourself in a culture with very different ideas of work-life balance than your own. It’s rare to find a place where people work as many hours as the U.S. — and you may not need to work quite so many hours to still successfully travel.
In the end, even the ability to consider making your career mobile takes a certain level of mental flexibility. We all tend to start out thinking that the way we have been working is the only option. Even when we actually get on the road, it’s hard to shake the idea that we have to be at our desks from 9 to 5. But that flexibility is worth it. Thinking up new ways in which you can get the most out of your work and your life, in balance, only helps you reach other goals, like packing up and heading to South America.
