Working Vacation

Posted by Laurie on May 13, 2009 in Family, work life balance | Comments Off

Mostly this is just a note to let you know that I’ll be taking a quick vacation at the end of this month, just for a week! It should be a wonderful time, we’re travelling as a family to California! It’s the first time on a plane for two of my boys, and the first plane trip my oldest will remember. He went to Mexico when he was 13 mos old, but of course doesn’t recall anything!

This will also be a first for me – the first time I test working while being so far from my home base. I think it should go well, I’ll have internet access at the hotel and plan to be in early most nights so the kids can keep to their general sleep routine. This should give me a couple of solid hours of worktime at night, and I can definitely squeeze in a bit of time in the morning to check on email etc. I don’t really spend more billable time than that yet, so mostly I’m reducing (or oh my goodness eliminating) my networking/socializing/blogging time. Yes, that’s right, I’ll barely be seen on Twitter those days! Normally I could easily twitter from my phone, but unfortunately Canadian cell phone rate plans don’t carry over to the US, so while I will of course have my phone with me I won’t be using it for fun activities like Twitter!

While considering my options for work/vacation, I was reading blog posts and saw this one about answering emails on vacation over at BlogHer. I actually am happy to keep up with my work while on my vacation, I would definitely find it a little stressful to think about being completely unconnected while away! The ability to work anywhere was something I was excited about when first starting my virtual legal assistant business up after all!

I also read this post about going on vacation in a wired world. It has some great tips and I’m trying to follow many of them! For example, I’ve already let my clients know that I’ll be away, shared what I could handle and suggested that I won’t be able to do “extra” work that week above what has been agreed. I wanted to give them plenty of warning so that I could do any work needed ahead of time.

I’ll be taking a couple of other mini-vacations this summer, but only for 3 to 4 days at a time, hopefully this longer first time goes well and doesn’t leave me anxious about the other short trips!