Five Tips for Working While Worldschooling

Our office in Mindoro, Philippines

Worldschooling might sound like an endless vacation—and if you have the means to take a long hiatus from work, more power to you! We were not in that situation. Thousands of parents find creative and enterprising ways to make a living while roaming the world with their kids—sabbaticals, local tutoring in English, online gig work, and monetized YouTube channels and blogs, for instance. When we set out, my husband and I were in the enviable position of having already longstanding remote jobs (in programming and international development) that we could do from anywhere with an internet connection (plus occasional side travel for in-person events). The COVID-19 pandemic has since shown many employers the viability of remote workers, potentially opening the door to more location-independent nomads. Still, having the ability to earn income on the road is only the first step—doing the actual work so you can thrive at and keep your job is of course also essential.

As all digital nomads know, working while traveling is a balancing act that requires serious discipline; when you add kids and their hands-on education to the mix, it is like tossing six juggling balls into a highwire balancing act. I cannot count the times on our multi-year journey that we wrestled with the painful trade-offs of managing regular life responsibilities within four dreary walls while dreamy surroundings beckoned. In Costa Rica, we parents had to hunker down at our computers for entire weeks at a time as our kids played on the tile floor with their shared bag of Legos and went stir-crazy—while the monkeys and beaches waited for us just outside. In the Philippines, we scored a rustic second-floor porch overlooking a beach paradise with sparkling turquoise waters and tropical fish; but we then had to work from our lookout point for three full days before we had time to set one foot on that crystal sand. Sometimes my partner and I took turns working, with mixed results. In Quito, Ecuador, every time I had the kids for a day, our outings were a total bust, but when it was my husband’s turn, they landed on amazing adventures that I only got to hear about over dinner.

Other times, we managed to strike just the right balance. In Nepal, for example, we spent the first half of some days on rigorous hikes in the Annapurnas and the remainder at a trekking outpost with our computers. Satisfied with our morning adventures, we could savor the view of snowy peaks beyond our keyboards while our kids did a little schoolwork and then played make-believe games together in the mountain air. When glamping in Swaziland, I dragged a little table out of our tent to type away on a project proposal by a babbling brook animated by bathing baboons while my family members hiked to see prehistoric rock drawings. The places with the best internet sometimes took us by surprise (and vice versa). The fastest internet we found outside of Tokyo was high in the Nicaraguan cloud forest at an off-grid, solar-powered, organic coffee plantation. On that unexpected discovery, we promptly extended our stay beyond the weekend so we could get our work done by day and enjoy hikes to a secluded tropical waterfall on off-hours. Just like anywhere, when the balance works, it is bliss.

Our experience gave us five rules of thumb for working while worldschooling:

1. Internet, internet, internet. Though it may be obvious, take care to plan your destinations and accommodations around good internet connections and suitable workspaces. Sometimes it can be hard to know for sure if the internet will be reliable, and there are occasional surprises (both good and bad). Nevertheless, I am careful to read lodging descriptions closely, cross-check user reviews, ask directly if in doubt, and scout out an internet café or portable hotspot as a back-up plan. We are quite flexible when it comes to workspace and have been as happy with the common living room at a youth hostel or a cushion on the bed in a kichwa home in Ecuador, as we were with an actual desk in a quiet AirBnB apartment in Kyoto. This said, if we know we will be facilitating an important virtual meeting or have a high-pressure deadline, we plan ahead to optimize our internet speed and working environment to suit the situation.

2. Slow travel. We have to reign in our ambitions, choose fewer landing places and stay longer to allow time for both work and exploring. A slower pace has the added benefit of enabling everyone to get into the flow of local life, as opposed to breezing through on a breathless tour of popular sights. Besides, incessant sightseeing gets old, and everyone needs time to soak it all up and just be. We found two weeks to be the absolute minimum duration for our family in any given locale; if either parent is working during the week, then this gives us at least one full weekend together to play, (with every other weekend devoted to travel and settling into in a new place). We much prefer to spend a month or more in a given place, though, so that we can meet people, get involved in local activities and make weekend trips in the region while also achieving some workflow continuity. Slow travel can also reduce costs (thereby potentially reducing the work time needed to make ends meet), since longer-term rentals often come with discounts, and in-kind exchanges like woofing are more feasible.

3. Local kids’ activities. An important objective for us is getting to know a place, its culture and local people, and kids’ activities can help do this while also facilitating parents’ work life in several ways. There is the obvious benefit of activities that can serve as childcare, freeing you up to work while the kids are engaged, entertained and perhaps getting some cultural and linguistic immersion. But even when the parents are also participating, finding activities for your kids provides them (and you!) with social time that makes quiet downtime afterwards more welcome while you work. There is also the valuable relief of not having to research and generate all the ideas for daily activities. We make a point of finding local activities for our kids everywhere we go. This can be: temporary enrollment in local schools (as we did in Costa Rica and India for several months at a time); enrollment in extracurricular activities (like circus class, instrument lessons and cooking school in Peru, or capoeira lessons in Mozambique); language courses (semi-private lessons for a few hours a day, or a family-friendly, live-in language school); or even short-term activities (our kids did a history-based, French language, group scavenger hunt in Paris for half a day, and we joined a meet-up with a group of resident homeschoolers at a park in Prague, for example).

4. Work flexibility. Clearly the more flexible your jobs are, the more options you will have. My husband and I are lucky to have relatively flexible work schedules. We experimented with many formulas: trading off work time (mornings/evenings, alternating days or weekdays/weekends); reducing both our schedules to work simultaneously less than full-time and then spending a few hours adventuring all together as a family each day; cramming work time into extra-long days some weeks so that we could take time away from work the next; and even traveling with an au pair for a while). For jobs that require real time interaction, time zones are an important consideration. As a morning person, my partner found it harder to adjust to working from mid-afternoon until late night than to rise pre-dawn and work until noon—so we adjusted our geography to make the time difference more bearable. It is important to anticipate the substantial time involved in onward trip planning and overseeing an educational curriculum, and to make room for this in the schedule alongside the work and fun.

5. Manage your FOMO. The fear of missing out is real, especially when you find yourself chained to your computer in a place that you are yearning to discover and enjoy. We frequently have to remind ourselves that this is a lifestyle rather than a vacation, that we cannot have the one (travel adventures) without the other (focused work), and that the privilege of this kind of travel requires sacrificing the time to make it possible. As we research upcoming itineraries, we agree on the activities we want to make time to do together, identify which nice-to-dos can be done by only one parent or the other, plot out our blocks of work time and agree on a plan. Our choice of accommodations also plays an important role in managing FOMO—if I have to work long hours, then I want to be able to step outside in the heart of the place we are visiting, rather than spend additional time on public transport. I like to think that the quality of my work was better because of my views of the baboons and the beach. And as I worked from my overlook on the ancient ghats of Pushkar—the chimes, chanting and incense wafting their way up into the scalloped arches of our guesthouse terrace—I definitely felt no regrets.