Posts Tagged ‘vacation’

Is Working From Anywhere Really All That Great?

// April 12th, 2009 // 10 Comments » // blogging

When I was fresh out of college, working in a cubicle at Time Warner Cable Media Sales, my 5-year goal was simple – I wanted a job I could do from anywhere. I wanted to be able to work from a boat, floating around the lake, or from the beach, or from any other fun exotic location I could imagine. Within 2 years, I had that, when I started working as an online journalist. I’ve been doing this work-from-home thing for over a year and a half, now, and I’ve noticed some things.

First off, I work far more now than I ever have in my life. When I had a 9-5er, it was just that – I clocked in at 9a, and left by 5p, nearly every day. I was very careful to not get overtime, as I saw a firmly drawn line between work and play. You work to live, I always said, you do not live to work. However, now that I completely love my job, and am my own boss, things are completely different. I start working at 7a, and typically don’t stop until shortly after 5p, sometimes going into 7p. I usually also put in at least an hour each night, after Mrs. Guru has gone to sleep.

Thus, I’m working far more actual hours, now that I can work from anywhere. I also went on my first working vacation last month – a week in Myrtle Beach with Mrs. Guru. It seemed like the perfect setup – I didn’t have to take time off, and I was able to get up early, work from 7a until 9-10a, and then have the rest of the day to spend with Mrs. Guru. Of course, I wasn’t *as* productive, but I got the important things done, and had email coming to my phone throughout the day, in case something came up.

Unfortunately, after a week at the beach, I got home and realized that I was not any more rested than I was before the trip. I’m also slightly behind the curve still, since I was on a limited productivity run through the week. The result is that my ‘vacation’ wasn’t really as relaxing as I’d hoped it would be. Is this how it always ends up being? Where’s the balance?

Are you a ‘digital nomad’? Have you noticed that you work more now than you ever have? How are you balancing that with a ‘real life’?

Checking In From Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

// March 22nd, 2009 // 4 Comments » // cool

This is my first personal vacation where I’m also working, and thus far, I can’t really complain. Check out the view:

Tools Of A Connected Traveler

// October 20th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // cool, Mobile

The Mrs. and I are headed out to California this week for some R&R, though obviously I’ll be connected most of the time, albeit less so than normal. This is the first personal trip that I’ve taken in a while, and it was booked, planned, mapped out, etc, all online this time around. While you would think that planning and booking a trip online would be a piece of cake in this day and age, the sad reality is that it’s really not. Sure, you can easily use a single site to do it all, but none are very comprehensive guides – there’s always something missing.

So then, what did I use for this trip? Mostly, a combination of three tools, all of which have thus far, proved to be a great solution. TravelMuse, Tripit, and SociaLight.

TravelMuse is something I found out about through Jonathan Greene, and it’s basically an online planning tool that allows you to pull content from anywhere on the net and organize it on your trip. What’s even better is that it’s collaborative – meaning I could invite the Mrs. to setup an account, and from there she was able to look at the trip thus far, add her thoughts, and we could do it online, at different times. Brilliant. There’s even a handy bookmarklet that allowed me to add things from other services – such as SociaLight.

Speaking of, SociaLight is one of a few LBS services that has MASSIVE potential – if only they could release a real mobile client for something other than the iPhone. Basically, with SociaLight, when you’re out and about, you can attach a geo-tagged ‘sticky’ note to a specific location, such as a bar or nightclub. Others can then browse these when they’re in the area.

I’ve gotten ahold of the private beta JAVA app, and it works great – for a java app. Unfortunately, it’s not publicly available, and even if it was, it hasn’t been updated since earlier this year, so it still has all kinds of alpha bugs. In any case, SociaLight allowed me to browse through the existing tags in San Francisco and other areas to find a few restaurants to check out, and even helped us pick a hotel.

Once we got everything booked, I ended up with 4 confirmation emails – one for the flights, two for the hotels, and one for the car rental place. What a mess these are, trying to figure out which is which in my inbox, and then trying to get the correct information out of the email, with all the various reservation numbers and dates and whatnot.

This is where Tripit helped out tremendously. After registering my email address, I simply forwarded those confirmation emails to the Tripit email address. The service pulls out all of the appropritate details – times, dates, reservation numbers, addresses, phone numbers, etc – and puts them in a nice easy timeline, available from any web browser. The best part, in my opinion, is that any web browser includes that of my Nokia S60-powered smartphones. I simply added ‘Tripit’ as a personal link on my Keytoss homepage and wa-la – instant access to my reservations in a nice, easy-to-read format with no muss, no fuss. You can even pull that into your Outlook, if you really wanted to.

Tripit also allows you to quickly get links to appropriate side-services. When viewing my airline confirmation in Tripit, I can easily click to check where our seats are, and if they’re bad (which they were) I can easily click through to American Airlines to change our seat reservations. Brilliant.

That’s just leading up to the trip – we actually depart on Wednesday, so I’ll be able to test out exactly how well these various services – specifically SociaLight and Tripit work when totally mobile.