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If you’re more of an audio person, you can listen to me talk about this topic on episode 84 of the Smart Habits for Translators podcast. Madalena and Veronika are no longer releasing new episodes, but we discussed my 2023 workcation a few months back, and they asked great questions! I’ve also thought about workcations in more detail lately, as my husband and I are in the “thinking about thinking about” stage of doing a longer digital nomad experience (six months, maybe a year?) within the next three to five years.
What is a workcation, and why might you want to take one?
As the name suggestions, a workcation is a combination of work and a vacation. Case in point: in July of 2023, my husband and I loaded our mountain bikes, hiking gear, and work stuff into the car and drove approximately 20 hours north of our home (Boulder, Colorado) to the small town of Fernie, British Columbia, where we rented a house for a month, worked full time, and spent the evenings and weekends mountain biking and hiking. That’s a workcation.
Why? Why do this, when you could just go on vacation? As a huge proponent of vacation, that’s definitely a valid question! I think workcations are a good option to consider, if:
- Your spouse or partner isn’t a freelancer and doesn’t have unlimited vacation time or flexibility. This is our situation; my husband works remotely, but for a government research lab where he can work outside the US only 20 work days per calendar year, plus he wanted to save his actual vacation time for other things.
- You’d like to travel for a longer period than you can afford to go without income.
- You’d like to visit family or friends in another location, but work while you’re there (I wish remote work had been more of a thing when my daughter was little and my parents were in the Foreign Service).
- You’d like to immerse your kid(s) in another culture (maybe your home culture, maybe something else) while you’re working. Madalena and Veronika and I talked about this a lot on the podcast; both of them have young kids and also have family in other countries, which I think is a great basis for a workcation.
Choosing a location
We had our eye on Fernie since going there on a non-working vacation in 2022. One of us, now I can’t remember who, observed that it’s light outside until almost 10 PM in the summer, which prompted the realization that we could work a full day, then go mountain biking for two to four hours, and still get home before dark. An idea was born! We also liked the fact that we could drive to Fernie (opening up the possibility of bringing work stuff plus recreational stuff), and that it’s in the same time zone as our home, meaning that my husband (whose job involves a fair number of meetings) wouldn’t have to rearrange his work schedule.
Your criteria may be different. Maybe you’ve always wanted to learn Italian at a language school in Rome. Maybe you’ve always wanted your kids to experience Argentinian winter during American summer vacation. Maybe your best friend moved to New Zealand and you’d like to spend a month there, but you can’t afford to take a month off. Think about what adventures you could take, while continuing to generate income, and see what ideas you come up with!
How to work effectively during a workcation
If part of your goal is to continue working more or less full time, you need to think about the physical setup that you need to be productive. This was particularly important now that my work is about 60% interpreting, which requires fast and stable internet and a silent environment. I really wanted a location where I could bring my own ethernet cable and plug in to the modem, and I needed a very quiet space.
In our case, this meant that we rented a two bedroom house so that I had a separate room to work in (my husband is totally happy working on the couch or the kitchen table, which I’m not). This actually worked out well because we had friends and family visiting us for about half the time we were in Fernie, so they slept in the second bedroom and I then kicked them out when I needed to work. It’s important to be self-aware about what kind of work space you need: if you’re workcationing alone, maybe you want to look at co-working offices where you’re going. If you’re workcationing with someone else, be honest about whether you need a separate workspace.
Technology setups in general have gotten much more portable in the last decade. We took a proto-workcation in 2012, when my husband did a summer consulting job in Switzerland (we’re all dual Swiss/US citizens), and we put my daughter, then nine years old, in summer camp. At that time, international cell phone service wasn’t much of a thing, so we had to buy a Swiss burner phone, to which no one had the number (kind of a plus/minus situation!). This time, our Verizon phones worked in Canada exactly like in the US, at no extra charge.
My secret mobile office weapon is my Dell 14 portable monitor, which is the size of a regular laptop screen, weighs less than half a pound, is less than a quarter-inch thick, and runs power and data through one cable, so you plug it only into the computer (no separate electrical plug). I love this thing! It fits in my laptop backpack alongside my computer, and it’s large enough to use as a true second monitor.
You also want to make sure that none of your clients have location restrictions. I have one client that requires me to be physically located in the US, and I just didn’t work for them for that month. With my Canadian clients, I made sure to let them know I was there. Even though I don’t typically work on site for them, I thought they would find it interesting that I was in Canada! Use your judgment on whether your clients need to know where you are.
Keeping the “cation” in workcation
To allow ourselves to enjoy the reasons we went to Fernie, we put some pretty strict parameters around work while we were there. Mainly, we tried to get up relatively early, start working by around 8, and wrap up by 4:00-4:30 so that we could have the late afternoon and evening free for outdoor activities. Personally, I liked this. It helped me avoid having work “bleed” over into the evening, and it honestly felt like I was kinda/sorta on vacation while still earning a full-time income.
Here again, time zone is a surprisingly major factor. At the outset of this workcation idea, I kind of assumed we would go to Switzerland. I got my dual Swiss citizenship in 2022 and I was excited to use it, we have friends and family there, and we just love the country. However, logistical factors dissuaded us. We’ve traveled to Europe with bikes before, but it’s a pain and can be expensive, and Central Europe is eight hours ahead of US Mountain Time, meaning that my husband would have been working approximately 4:00 PM – midnight, which didn’t seem that appealing.
Overall, I think that workcations can be a really good way to travel for an extended period of time without a huge loss of income. We’re in the early stages of planning this year’s workcation 2.0 (probably to the Vancouver area), and actually thinking about a 6-12 month workcation for after my daughter finishes college. If you try this, let me know how it goes!
Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!
Yes, bien sûr, as we say in French. Been doing workcations at my parents house in France in summer (I live in California) since 2005, just had to stay up late for my US clients, which is easy to do since there is daylight until almost 23h00 there. Absolutely seemless for my clients and a great way for me to stay up to date on my French. The possibilities are endless! Now with Starlink, you can work anywhere in the world! The moon?
Great concept!
Didn’t even know there was a name for this, but I did it in October 2023, when I travelled to Molyvos on the Greek island of Lesvos and spent a month in an inexpensive but cosy hotel doing a mixture of freelance translation (I was translating a humungous book on ballistics at the time!), brushing up my Greek with the BBC Greek course my wife had given me several years previously and enjoying life in an end-of-season Greek village (food, drink, hiking, beach …)
The technical side was facilitated by my having a phone contract with 200 GB of data per month, and no roaming charges within Europe (I live in France), so I used WiFi where it was good, and mobile data otherwise. I didn’t take a monitor, but as I was travelling with hold luggage anyway, I did take my beloved old IBM keyboard from the 1980s and the docking station to connect it to a USB port, plus a “real” mouse and mousepad.
Much of my work was done sitting outside cafés a few metres from the sea. It was end of season, so the café owners were glad of any custom, especially when I got to the point where I could just about order in Greek!
After a week in a rather expensive hotel with a swimming pool and bar that I wasn’t using, I moved to a place that cost less than half (EUR 35 a night) but still had a balcony with a view of the Aegean and a communal kitchen where I could make myself a coffee. I could have cooked my own meals, but eating out is so cheap in Greece, and Greek food is one of my main reasons for going there, so I didn’t.
Oh, and there was also a cat who came and sat next to me when I was sitting in front of the hotel drinking my breakfast coffee and eating my Greek pastry in the sunshine. A fully-equipped hotel, in other words!