Road Rules: Work Smart, Travel Light
Keep in touch without lugging an office's worth of gear in your carry-on bag.Contributing Editor Steve Bass is the author of PC Annoyances, published by O'Reilly. Contact him at homeoffice@pcworld.com.
Illustration by Zach Trenholm
E-Mail to Go
Whenever I travel, I check e-mail on several of my accounts and respond to critical messages. All the new e-mail I retrieve and send while on the road absolutely has to get back onto the desktop system in my office. Whether I'm gone for a day or a month, I rely on Mail2Web.com, a smart, free service that lets me check my POP3 and IMAP accounts. I can do everything with Mail2Web.com--read, reply to, forward, compose, and delete e-mail. The Web-based service checks mail at the server level, so I never clog a narrow dial-up line with 10MB attachments. I prefer Mail2Web.com over my ISP's Web mail because (and this is critical) by default Mail2Web.com leaves mail on the server indefinitely unless I delete it. When I return home, I simply download the messages on the server to my desktop PC.
For short trips, I choose a hotel with an Internet-connected PC available for rent in the room or in the business center. I don't bother taking my notebook. Instead I use the rental to check mail through Mail2Web.com (I always remember to clear the browser cache, history, and temporary Internet files before I leave). If you have a Wireless Access Protocol-enabled cell phone, you can use Mail2Web.com to read your e-mail from almost anywhere. Of course, if you've ever tried to read your e-mail on a cell phone display, you know that it works in a pinch--if the message is short and your in-box isn't overloaded. Otherwise, it's crazy-making.
If I'm out for more than a few days, I burn critical e-mail, Word, Excel, and other files onto one or two CDs, and then I copy the files from the discs to my notebook's hard drive. To grab my old Eudora messages, I use Aaron Sherber's free AasBackup. Backing up Outlook and Outlook Express messages is easy, too; browse to "Archive Outlook and OE Mail" for instructions. To get the mail I send from the road back to my desktop, I just cc: myself on everything outbound.
When I backpack, I lighten my load by drilling a hole in my toothbrush's handle; I do the equivalent when business traveling by toting APC's TravelPower case and its integrated universal charger ($80 street). It has plenty of room for my notebook, cell phone, PDA, and other rechargeable gadgets (even a USB toothbrush, if I had one), and I can use and recharge all of them at once--without their power-block adapters--when I plug the case's single cord into an airplane, auto, or AC power outlet.
Despite being weight-conscious (I'm working on that with my therapist), I still stick a 9-foot phone cord, a 12-foot ethernet cable, and an electrical extension cord (for rooms that hide the electrical outlet behind the bed or under the desk) into the TravelPower case. Because cables tangle so easily, I always wrap colored Velcro strips around each to keep them tightly bound for storage. The colored strips also help when I make one last scan of the room before I depart to ensure that I haven't left any cables--or anything else, for that matter--behind. To keep my USB and phone connections in line, I use retractable Zip-Linq cables ($13 to $15) because they can extend outward as far as 30 inches from a small, key chain-like device.
Keep Your Access Free
One more thing: To avoid toll charges, I never walk out the door without a list of my ISP's local dial-up numbers. If I know ahead of time that I'm going to need them, I play it safe and use Windows XP's built-in fax feature to send the list to the hotel's fax machine via e-mail fax.
I have tons more travel tips and products that I'll describe in my Home Office newsletter; be sure to sign up for it. And check out the "Road Tools" feature from last month's issue.