Vacation without the Laptop

Telecommuting and Virtual Presence

I’m going on vacation tomorrow - and I won’t be bringing my laptop!

That’s such a freeing thing to say. The problem with all this great technology that allows us to work from home so easily is that it allows us to work from home so easily. We duck into the office to check work emails right before we go to bed, or here and there on the weekend. And we see something important so we just “spend 5 minutes” taking care of it. Which becomes 10 minutes, etc.

If you’re really unlucky, your coworker in another part of the world will see your IM go active when you check your email and start to chat with you when you really want to go to bed. I got caught once by a local coworker who was on pager duty and there was a problem with my service. Of course, as soon as he saw me, he pounced on me and then I was on the phone for the next 1/2 hour.

Anyway, enough complaining. I sometimes fail to follow my own advice from my book (shameless plug here - sign up on the right side of this page to get on my mailing list and get access to my book) about shutting down my laptop when I’m done with my workday.

But the nice thing about going on vacation - an actual trip - is that I’m not going to schlep my laptop with me so I *won’t* be able to check email whether I want to or not.

Uh-oh. My teammate just signed me up to get a PDA for work that will allow me to check email, etc - as I have to test some compatibility for my own services on the PDA. Thank goodness it won’t arrive until after I leave for my trip!!!

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