When working whilst you’re travelling, above all else you need to be organised. It’s all very well spending all your time sightseeing and enjoying yourself, but if you’ve made commitments, you need to stick with them. And the best way to do that is to be as well-prepared and as organised as possible. One thing, above all else, will help a travelling professional in this regard. And that is the many, many online tools that will help with working and keeping your schedule loose enough to have fun with. Here’s our guide to the best tools out there that will be a lot of help.

Google have this kind of thing worked out beautifully. As well as offering a practical and easy email account, they have a load more tools that will be a lot of help when working, sharing, and moving about the place. Google Drive is the best example of this – they offer enough accessible free space for most professionals to work with for a long, long time, and this can be assessed with ease from any computer with just your email address and password. On top of this, their Drive app means you don’t even have to mess around uploading stuff – all you need to do is save your work in the Drive folder and it’ll do it for you. Easy stuff.

Google’s calendar is also a great resource – particularly because it can remind you of what you need to do that day and will pick up dates and times from your emails and will add them at a click when prompted. The combination of Gmail, Drive and Calendar (which, disappointingly, don’t have quirky little G-names) make working whilst traveling much, much easier than it would be otherwise, and anyone who plans to work and travel should sign themselves up to a Google account immediately. And yes, there are alternatives to all of these services, but Google is the only one that can connect them all so seamlessly in one account.

Skype, of course, is the other program that is more or less essential to many people who work whilst travelling – it allows people to be where they need to be and say exactly what they need to say without any of the confusion or ambiguity of email. Skype is essential to most, and make sure to get your account up and running before going anywhere – at some point, you’ll need it, and you won’t want to be messing around downloading when you’ve got deadlines to meet.

Another service that is well worth considering if you’re hoping to save some money on your smartphone’s bill when travelling is AwayFind, which will alert you via SMS when you receive an important email. The downside of this is that is does charge a little bit of cash every month, but not enough to really worry about if you’re travelling anyway. The cost for text alerts for 5 accounts is only $15 a month, which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t worth worrying about too much. Just one account, if you can get your other accounts to forward into it, only costs $5 a month. Even better!

Working whilst travelling can be very, very difficult if you don’t set yourself up beforehand and make sure you’re organised and know what to do with yourself. In this aim, online tools like the ones above are invaluable. Use these, and find some of your own, and set up a system that works for you. There’s a lot out there. Embrace it.