Two weeks ago my family and I made the move to Austin, Texas. I purchased a coworking space in Austin we just launched called Duo Works. At present, I’m living in a sea of moving boxes. We have purged, packed and are now unpacking our lives. This is my third move in the last four years. One of my friends recently asked me if I enjoyed moving. The answer is absolutely no, but the feeling of moving and relocating is something you forget. I love to decorate and repurpose furniture so there’s a certain sense of fun that I associate with deal hunting and You forget all the stress that comes with packing, cleaning, and unpacking. You forget about the hurdles you deal with when you are setting up new utilities, registering your children for schools and finding a new hair salon or veterinarian.

The Secret to a Seamless Business or Work Relocation

Because of my frequent relocation, I seem to be the person that friends and family reach out to when making a move whether it be across town or across the country. Let me just say that I am officially insane. With this most recent move, we moved in less than three weeks. I don’t recommend moving your family, pets and house in that short of a time frame without corporate relocation assistance. Thankfully, I have a good network of friends and am more than willing to outsource the packing, loading and unloading to capable hands that I trust.

• • Treat Your Move Like a Project. With our most recent move, we built a project moving plan via a Google Doc assigning tasks and setting deadlines in which we needed to complete. I spent 15-20 minutes every evening making sure that the list was updated, notes added and we determined the next best steps and a plan of action to accomplish our goals.

• • Outsource Everything. As I mentioned, the key to our move was outsourcing as much as possible. We outsourced the cleaning, unloading and some of the unpacking although I would have preferred to have even more than I had planned. You never have as much time as you think you will. While you can anticipate obstacles like my unrealistic expectation of me painting two of our rooms in the home we have moved from. You need to quickly move to a secondary backup plan which for us meant hiring a painter to finish the two rooms I couldn’t get to.

• • Use Pods. My go to moving service is Pods. They are the packing and shipping containers that you can use to organize and plan your move on your own timeline. This go around we had multiple Pods delivered to our home at different time frames allowing us to divide up the move into smaller and hopefully manageable chunks. Because we aren’t fans of driving large moving trucks ourselves, the Pods allowed us to ship the container and unpack over a period of time.

• • Purge and Purge Often. I’m not certain how we acquired so much stuff. I thought we did a good job of purging on the front end of our move. On the flip side of our move, I am continuing to purge, sort and donate items we don’t need or don’t use while similtaneously committing to acquiring less stuff going forward.

What To Do Differently

Give yourself a break. I’m a Type A personality who has high expectations and has a tendency to overbook herself. Although I have tried very hard to push back appointments, say no to opportunities and set more realistic expectations, there is so much more I can and will continue to try to do. Most importantly, find support in others. Moving is one of the most stressful things to do in your life. While I’m thankful that I had and continue to have the support of friends and family members, moving is never easy.

And to those who are friends or family of someone who is relocating, your friend is probably like me. They don’t ask for help, but they need it and after some push by you will accept your assistance. And they will be grateful and relieved even if they never say anything. So, no I’m not a work and business relocation expert. I’m somebody who has grabbed an opportunity that I believe will benefit my business and my family. And we’re running with it. Our family is in the middle of massive change. It’s been hard. It’s been stressful, but we are pushing through it. Transformation is not easy and I remind myself that if everyone that the hardest and most scary things in life tend to offer the greatest gifts down the road.

The secret to a seamless relocation is that I’m of the mind it can never be truly seamless. Regardless of your project management skills, outsourcing or careful planning, there will always be bumps in the road. I’m doing my best to not sweat the small stuff and just get our family and my new business through this change.