I hate 2am phone calls don’t you? No good news comes at that hour but you are going to get them. And we did very recently. While everything ended up well (thankfully!) it still left me with 3 days of lost hours that I had not planned on. Having it all happen at a time I was right in the middle of development something new doesn’t help either.

Why would you ever want to work at such a time? Personal emergencies mean you have to spend time with your family, take care of them, do the important things in life. This is no time to work!

That is true. However, here’s what I found out in our recent adventure. Not all emergencies are created equal. There are some where you truly have to drop everything and just be with the family. Then there are those that are full of uncertainties. There’s nothing you should or can do. Everything is up in the air. The only thing for you is to sit and wait.

We spent several hours traveling and then several hours more simply spending time with family. And then… sitting and waiting for news. I had a lot of things that are already web accessible. I built my work flow to be mobile. But the one thing I wanted – needed – to do, I did not make mobile. My development center.

This was intentional. The logic when I set things up that way – I didn’t want to be working while on vacation. Developing products and programming are serious work that just doesn’t fit with planned time off. In a situation like ours, having to sit around for 20 something hours doing nothing really bothered me. Especially when we had all the resources at hand like:

• Capable laptops
• Mobile Internet access
• All my logins at my finger tips  via RoboForm

In light of this, here’s what I have done:

• Set up a development center on the laptop. Because my laptop is a Mac, I used MAMP. This allows me to run WordPress and other PHP files on the laptop. Then, I installed TextWrangler. This is a text editor that lets me edit theme or plugin files in plain text with all the geeky line numbers and stuff like that.
• Ensure Firefox has the same add-on tools as on my desktop. This includes stuff like Colorzilla, Firebug, S3Fox, Evernote and Boomerang to name a few.
• Ensure OpenOffice is installed and up to date for times when I may not want to do development but perhaps write a report or something.

What I still have to decide:

Whether to store my working files on a small portable hard drive or on the cloud on DropBox and go premium. There are pros and cons to each because on a day to day basis, having it on a portable drive makes more sense. Plus, a portable drive is useful when you have no Internet access. Internet is not a problem for us. However we have to be realistic, we won’t be able to use that abroad or in certain places.

Using DropBox means we will have one less thing to carry. Yet, at this point we are not storing that much so I question another monthly fee even though it is $10 a month. Chances are, I will go with the drive.

You may not need all these tools. Most business owners I know only effectively need email. I went on many trips over 2 years with no other gadgets but a cell phone. I plan to continue that and leave the laptop at home during planned vacations. However, now I know I will also be ready when I am faced with unplanned situations.

I have to credit this to my husband though. For a long time, he’s been pushing me to do just that. Saying that all the computers and laptops we have should have the same or comparable tools installed so it doesn’t matter where you are in the house or outside. Perhaps this due to his training and experience with quick deployments in the Marine Corps. I resisted because I wanted to protect our down time. More importantly I let others persuade me that I “should not” be working when ___ fill in the blanks.

Yet… isn’t having the freedom to work when and where I want what I signed up for? Why would I kiss my boss goodbye only to follow what others think I should or shouldn’t do? It’s my business and I’ll work when I want to.