Freelancing on the Road: Can it be Done?

I’ve been weighing attending an important conference later this year, a trip which will require that I leave my home office, get in my car, go to the airport and catch a flight. I don’t get out all that much, but when I do I’m likely to travel clear across the country, being away from home for several days to a week at the most.

Hitting The Road

Heading out of town for a conference can be very refreshing and professionally rewarding. Preparing well in advance can ease the stress while you're freelancing on the road.

Because I only make these kinds of trips 2-3 times each year, I look forward to getting away and doing something different. I like my home office, love my family, yet I usually come back from these types of conferences refreshed and bursting with creative flair. Importantly, I can thrive on those productive fumes for the next few months.

What I dread, however, is trying to maintain my other work while I skip town. Sure, planning in advance knocks out some projects, while others must still be managed while I’m gone. I’m a sole proprietor which means I have to do everything myself, but if I plan well in advance I can minimize my work while away from home so that I can enjoy the conference.

Getting Prepared Now

How do you handle road trips? I’ve come up with five tried and true methods to help me work better, faster and smarter while I’m away, including doing the following as I prepare to leave or while I’m on the road:

Write Ahead – My writing schedule requires that I write daily for some clients which means that I have to plan well in advance to have those jobs out of the way before I leave. On occasion, I’ll write on Saturday mornings which is generally a no-no for someone who values his work/family time separation. If my wife is on board with this plan, then I’m free to write, but if a family responsibility comes up I’ll have to double up my writing in the evening or in the early hours of the morning. I’ve written 7-10 days in advance before, successfully scheduling my blog posts to appear at designated times.

Bring the Laptop – Obviously, if you own a laptop you bring it with you wherever you go. The day before I leave I make sure that all of my files are backed up to my external drive (or off-site with Carbonite), complete my virus scanning, and place a battery back up and extension cord in my carrying case. I never check my laptop – I claim it as my carry on bag – and I don’t let it out of my site. Ever.

Carry a DVR – I own a tiny Olympus digital voice recorder (DVR) which I bring with me to conferences. With fresh batteries included and a back up set on hand just in case, my little DVR comes in handy when I’m listening to a long speech or needing to confirm a quote. Still, I routinely jot down notes on paper and compare everything in my hotel room or in the conference’s press room.

Plan for Emergencies – One trip I took two years ago nearly turned into a nightmare when my email connection fizzled in my hotel room. I had to pack up all of my stuff, head down to the hotel lobby and purchase wi-fi access for the evening. Even then, the connection wasn’t that fast which meant that surfacing the ‘net took longer than expected. I finally finished up my work around 3 a.m., which meant I had just four hours of sleep before the next big meeting at 8 a.m. Next time, I’ll stay in the press room to finish my work, where the internet connection is fast and reliable.

Email, Cell Phone, Contact Information – No, I don’t own a Blackberry nor do I own an iPhone. What’s wrong with me? Well, I have a family to support – luxuries can wait. Before I head out, I answer all of my email messages, but I don’t indicate that I’m away from the office. I do recharge my cell phone and I bring my recharging cord with me. I also update all of my phone contact information and, just in case I lose the phone, I jot down key numbers and keep them in my wallet.

Less Stress

If I keep these five things in mind, then I’m less stressed while away from home and I actually enjoy the conference. I may still have to handle a few client tasks while on the road, but I keep these to a minimum. My time away is usually on my dime which means that I don’t have the luxury of going on the road knowing my work is covered back in the office or my trip paid by a client.

Photo Credit: Ronald Schuster

See Also — Should You Schedule Your Blog Posts?

GMail Outage Underscores Hazards Of Freemail

It didn’t take long on Tuesday for most of the wide awake world to learn that GMail had crashed. I say wide awake because GMail went down in the wee hours of the morning, 0130 PST to be exact, when most of North America was still sleeping.

That was no consolation for people in Europe who were just starting out or in the middle of their day or for folks in Asia who were finishing up their work or checking email at home. For 2 1/2 hours the vaunted email system was down, causing more than a little bit of an inconvenience for many.

For some businesses, reliance on GMail is exclusive as they have replaced their in-house emailing system with an advanced, paid version of GMail. The way that the advanced version works is that companies can set up GMail accounts for $50 a year per user account which also gives users access to messaging, Google Docs, video and more. No longer the worry of an internal I.T. department, Google handles everything for the customer.

I use the freebie version of GMail because that is all that I need. Though I am a sole proprietor, I don’t rely on GMail exclusively nor do I use its advanced applications. Yes, I use GMail as my email gateway, but if it should go down, I can send many of my messages out via Yahoo or private accounts I have with my web hosts. But, like everyone else, I cannot access my email archives which houses mission critical data.

On the Official GMail Blog, Google offered the following explanation for their recent outage:

This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data center.

Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.

The bugs have been found and fixed, and we’re in the process of pushing out changes. We know how painful an outage like this is — we run Google on Gmail, so outages like this affect us the same way they affect you. We always investigate the root causes of rare outages like this one, so we can prevent similar problems in the future.

Quite honestly, I would be upset too if my reliance on GMail caused me to miss a critical deadline as some people have been reporting. These days we’re so well interconnected that any outage or glitch can adversely impact the way that we touch base with people perhaps losing business in a very short period of time.

I have no idea how many of my own clients communicate with me exclusively via GMail, but I think that number must be quite large. Still, I believe using GMail for business can be an attractive option, one that shouldn’t be avoided even with this recent outage. After all, how many of us have endured lengthy email outages that our company’s I.T. team took hours to fix and at what cost to the company?