How To Take Your Work From Home Job On the Road... no matter where the road takes you.

by the Editorial Staff of Work-From-Home.org

To people who aren’t able to work from home and are still hopelessly trapped by the heartless alarm clock, the grueling daily commute and seemingly never-ending office politics, the sheer freedom of being able to work from home is already a dream vacation.

But those of us who work from home know that what we do is still work and can sometimes feel just as trapping as that old office job if we allow ourselves to get stuck in a rut.

Maybe it’s time for us to take our work from home jobs to the open highway!

Work at home case history: Caroline Sweenee, an Ohio-based graphic designer and writer, fell in love with a computer programmer by the name of Andy. The two began planning a life together. Carolina was fed up with the office politics of her current job and was dreaming about being able to work at home. It wasn’t long before one of them had the idea to convert her office job to a work from home job and take it on the road. Having an aptitude for computers and networks, Andy told Carolina that if they really wanted to, he could rig a system that would allow both of them to work at home… regardless of where “home” was. An RV. A hotel room. A condo on the beach. Home is where the heart is, right?

Andy didn’t have to tell Caroline twice!

Caroline made a presentation to her boss showing him how she could work at home and be more productive than she was currently having to commute. She showed him how converting her job to a work at home job would give them more room in the office to hire another artist and increase the department’s productivity without adding to its overhead. She offered to work as an independent contractor if the company preferred (even though they did agree to keep her on salary), and carefully and thoroughly explained to her manager how they would still be able to reach her anytime they needed to, how there would be virtually no interruption in her work and how she felt the quality of her work product could improve if she was able to work at home. She obtained a special cellular telephone to use just for her work at home job, an 800 number where anyone in the company and/or clients could reach her at no cost during office hours the same as if she were sitting in the old office, and she explained how she would email scanned images of her work product for approval and deliver finished art to the office herself, by service bureau or by courier or send the images by email for her office to finish.

After a respectable honeymoon period during which Caroline got the bugs were worked out of her new work at home job, Caroline and Andy took a trip. Their first trip was only for two work days and they didn’t go far. They bought special luggage for their work at home gear… battery charger, laser printer, fax machine, scanner, special suitcase for art supplies, reference materials and Andy’s tools. The 800 number was set up to ring on the cell phone which offered free voicemail and paging and she turned it off at 5:00 pm every work day. Hotel rooms with high speed internet access were chosen and Andy rigged up all the equipment so they could both correspond with their home bases any way they needed to. Andy and Carolina brought new meaning to the term “work at home”. They worked at home in Ohio and many other states, even Canada when they worked at home all the way to see Niagara Falls. They worked at home on the beach. They worked at home in the mountains of Colorado. Thanks to Andy’s ingenuity, all they needed to work at home was electricity and a phone line.

Now they talk about saving up money to work from an RV.

If you work from home you know that sometimes you’ve just got to get out. When getting out takes you on vacation, remember that there are ways you can take your work at home job with you. Once you learn how to work at home on the road, you can take longer vacations and in some cases, still be able to make money while you’re on vacation.

Here are some tools that may help you take your work at home career on the road:

1. Laptop computer with all your usual software loaded on, and a way to make backups.

2. Cellular phone and battery charger. Select a carrier with large calling areas and good rates on long distance.

3. If you have a broadband phone service like Vonage®, be sure to take your hardware with you.

4. Combo office machine that offers laser printer, fax machine, photocopier & scanner all in one, wonderful, compact machine. Select one that offers remote fax retrieval so you can retrieve faxes that are received when your machine isn’t on.

5. 800 number(s) that ring on your cellular telephone. When you work from home on the road, forward your calls to the cell phone. When you return to your regular work at home office, un-forward the calls to ring on your regular work at home phone.

6. Email service that can be downloaded from virtually anywhere

7. While you’re on the road, find hotels, cabins or other accommodations that offer an extra phone line and/or high speed internet access. Most hotel chains print directories you can carry along with you on your trip and thousands of hotels also accept pets if you want to travel with your pets.

8. Local dial-in numbers from your ISP so you can use local telephone numbers to dial in with instead of dialing long distance. If you have an ISP who does not provide this service, you may be faced with paying very expensive hotel long distance rates for every single minute you’re online. NOT GOOD. Find out if your ISP offers nationwide local phone numbers. Print out their list and keep it with you or save their URL. If your ISP doesn’t provide this service, consider a different ISP unless paying long distance while you’re online is not a problem.

9. You will need the standard work at home set of supplies: paper clips, mini stapler, pens, highlighter, notes, files, postage stamps and any tools related to your profession.

10. Reference materials, such as your rolodex or PDA so you can look up passwords, phone numbers, names, account numbers or anything else you may need in your work at home job. Remember, once you’re away from your normal work at home environment you don’t know what may come up that you’ll need to handle. The longer you can perform your work at home job on the road, the longer you can stay away if you wish.

11. We recommend running a backup of your entire system before you leave. Run another back up when you return and then copy everything back to your main system.

12. Backups of your most needed software and drivers can be very helpful.

13. Take everything you need to be able to cash your paychecks and/or do your banking when you’re not at home.

14. If you use snail mail in the performance of your work from home job you should already use a rented mailbox to protect your personal privacy. If you don’t already have a rented mail box at a private mail center (not a P.O. box) get one. These types of services can hold your mail while you’re away and forward your mail to you when you’re on vacation.

15. Phone line splitter so you can run various machines (such as your fax machine up to phone lines.

16. Telephone extension wires and adapters so you can adapt to virtually any hotel room. Some hotel rooms locate the desk far away from the telephone jack; you may need extra wire to run across the room.

17. Surge protector with several outlets so you can hook up your equipment to one electrical plug.

18. Category 5 crossover wire (network wire) to connect your laptop to high speed internet access if the hotel offers it.

19. Paper for your fax machine. Toner you can buy on the road if you need to.

TIP: If your calls are rarely urgent, let your cell phone’s voicemail feature take messages most of the time so you can feel free to be in noisy places without fear that your boss or an important client will call at an inopportune time. That way you can return all the calls when you’re in a quiet place with pen and paper if necessary. Warning: Don’t overuse this strategy. It won’t be good for your work at home career if you get a reputation for being unavailable when your company needs you!

Taking your work from home job on the road with pets

• Remember that for safety, if your pets are not in a cage they should wear shoulder harnesses and be plugged in to the seat belts so they are not thrown from the car in case of an accident.
  
• With cats be absolutely sure your cat doesn’t ever get away from you; the odds are very, very bad that you’ll ever catch your cat again if she gets away on vacation.
  
• Train your pets to travel. Dogs can be trained not to bark at every noise in hotels by creating a new command just for barking on vacation. (Try “no barking on vacation!”). Dogs also need extra help getting over feeling abandoned by you when you leave them in the car or in a hotel room. Their instincts will tell them that you took them to a new place to die or be abandoned. Your actions will signal to them that you’re leaving the pack and this will be very painful for your dog. You can help them learn the traveling routine by taking short trips at a time and simply repeating the travel routine over and over. Over time they will learn that you always come back and then the pack picks up and goes somewhere else together. When you leave them in the hotel room for any reason, listen outside the door for a few minutes. If they start mourning your departure (howling or whining), rush back inside the room and tell them “no”. Then leave for a short time. Come back and give them lots of attention. Even when they’re well trained, they may still be sensitive the first day of traveling so it’s best to plan lots of ‘together time’ when you travel with your dogs.
  
• Leave the TV on when you’re not in your hotel room. Pets will feel less lonely and it will drown out some exterior noise.
  
• Always train your dogs by lavishing them with lots of love and using very, very consistent, firm commands.
  
• If traveling with your pets, try to get hotel rooms away from noisy areas of the hotel such as the pool, lobby or noisy side entrances. Even if your pets are trained to travel there’s no point in subjecting them to provoking noises and making them stay on guard duty necessarily.
  
• When you travel with pets never, never never leave your pets in the car with windows cracked while you’re away from the car unless the outside temperature is below 60 degrees AND you have NO SUN shining on your car. Cars heat up remarkably fast in the sun, with or without windows cracked, and your dog will die unnecessarily or suffer permanent kidney failure from heat stroke very rapidly. Dogs are far more susceptible to heat stroke than we are.
  
• Always carry food and water for your pets. Let them drink water and stretch their legs every few hours, more often if it’s warm.
  
• Don’t forget to take doggie comforts (blankets, toys and biscuits) on the road. They’ll help doggie feel more at home and help you train your pets to travel well.
  

TIP: If you’re driving with a companion, you can save time by drafting your emails off-line in the car using the ‘send later’ feature of your browser. When you arrive to a phone jack and go online, just send out all your emails at once.

If your family has a vacation home you won’t need to restrict your time there to only vacation time if you work at home.

Remember to be professional when you take your work at home job on the road. Just because you’re writing emails in your swimsuit on the beach doesn’t mean your emails should be any less professional. And don’t make business calls with your cell phone from a night club, just because you can. Even if you’re unprofessional with just one colleague from your company or just one client with whom you feel you can be casual, you should never-never-never be anything less than totally professional when you perform your work at home job on the road.

Having said that, we hope you have a great time turning your work from home job into an on-the-road-work-at-home-job-opportunity. Maybe you’ll send us an email or a picture of you performing your work at home responsibilities from a convertible on Route 66 with your hair blowing in the wind.

Happy working from home, on the road.