With the holidays mostly, but not completely over, many of you may be struggling with the tension between desire and reality. You’ve packed up the whole family, survived hauling the kids through airports, making them sit still on long flights, dealt with layovers and flight delays (or maybe you’ve suffered an equally challenging road trip with all the usual potty breaks and are-we-there-yets) to get the family to grandma and grandpa’s house on the other side of the country or further. Everyone is there - your parents or in-laws, your siblings and their kids, and a great time is had by all. You’d love to stay longer - through New Years Eve.

But the reality is that you don’t have enough vacation days to stay as long as you’d like. In the US, our vacation time is meager, and every day is guarded preciously. There’s a few days between Christmas and New Years that you’d be quite happy to work - but you don’t want to leave where you are to do it.

Enter occasional telecommuting! Even people who normally prefer to work in the office and never telecommute can take advantage of this opportunity. For one or two days during the annual family trip you can leave your spouse to take care of the kids, and find a quiet room somewhere to sit down with your laptop and get some work done. You can work for a solid day (or spread it out over 2 half-days) and that’s one less vacation day you have to burn through. It may make the difference between being able to stay where you are for New Years or not.

The nice thing about this arrangement is you can really get a lot of work done. Chances are not many of you coworkers are working. So you can sit down, get focused, and plow through some projects you’ve been unable to get to because of all the usual interruptions. And after the holidays, when all your coworkers are struggling to get through their inbox, yours will be nice and empty already from the hour you spent going through it during the holidays! You don’t even need to worry if your in-laws don’t have high-speed internet access. Since this will be a day of mostly working on that Word doc or spreadsheet you’ve been needing to roll up your sleeves and deal with, you can dial-in over a slow modem line, let all your email download to your inbox, work offline for most of the day, and just dial-in once or twice more to let the emails you’ve written get sent and synch your inbox.

What a perfect arrangement! Just be sure to get the ok from your boss so he knows and approves of what’s going on.

Technorati Tags: telecommute, work from home, remote work, virtual presence