I just went on a two-week vacation and did many of the things you listed in this article. Most importantly I think was not leaving clients in the dark. When they know you are gone if gives you a little cushion in your reply-time. Then, just be ready to work a lot when you get back to make up for it.

My other suggestion would be to make sure you bring the things you personally need to work with you. For instance, I can’t work without my Wacom tablet, and though it took up a lot more space in the luggage, I wouldn’t have been able to do much without it.

Thanks for the great article!

@Andy, really good points! These are good even if you don’t take your laptop on the road too

1. Encrypt the disk! You likely have something on there that’s going to be damaging to a client if it got out there in the wild (like passwords to their web hosting account). Encrypting the disk — using software that now comes with most operating systems — is an easy way to keep a thief from examining your disk without booting and logging into your laptop.

2. Take it a step further and get a USB security key for your laptop. I use SecuriKey, but there are others out there and they keep people from booting/using your laptop without the key present. Even on client sites, I use this to protect me in case my laptop somehow walks away.

3. If your laptop is a bit underpowered and you need to access remote servers for your work, try to get a VPN set up so that your communications are secure between your laptop and your servers. If your servers are all remote-hosted anyway, make sure you have SSH and SFTP/FTP over SSL working to provide a way to communicate securely with your servers.

Good post, Jon.

on the other hand, free lancers (especially those using the blog as medium) seem to let themselves be confined in the four corners of their rooms in front of their computers and neglect the needs for some socialization or even going out for some fresh air once in a while.

for photobloggers, some of them forget to just let go of atleast a single picture-perfect opporunity to just let the wnderful moment pass by and be wowed by the magnificense of a scene or of nature.

sometimes, we all need to go out and smell the flowers.

@Tom: it’s always nice to have a little money coming in every month and not have to work too much for it (well it takes a lot of work and time to build passive streams of income, but once it’s done, sit back and enjoy :) )