Good news for me – I’m having a vacation in a week! Bad news for me – I still need to work. And it’s great, actually. That’s why I do love my job.
And what’s even more cool about it, I can be really mobile. I’m not that type of guy who is alone and can do pretty much about the work after the sun goes down. I have a beautiful wife and pretty little girl so I do have a lot of things to do on vacation, I’m not heading to room and starting to open my laptop because I’m bored to party or watch TV already. So if you have a pretty tight free time room and the business cannot live without you, here are my instructions.
- You definitely need to have at least one mobile device always connected to web. Always. Not when you use it only. As for me, I’ve got (trying not to promote as hard as I can) a smartphone with big screen and stylus running Android OS which is always connected via local carrier with unlimited internet access (almost) everywhere in Russia plus I have to use roaming feature in other countries before I get a local sim. I also have a small tablet with case-keyboard running iOS… dammit okay, it’s iPad mini with Logitech keyboard in a form of a case for the time periods when it’s really faster to type using small bluetooth keyboard instead of tapping the screen of my Galaxy Note out. Both of devices are really small and easy to have by hand anywhere in the world. Even Air or Surface require more space and courage. I do need full desktop OS in the normal business life but I can manage almost all of my tasks using mobile OS due to various cloud based apps and services.
- You need to be super-organized. You need to have an ability to get and share the info very fast. I use Evernote and Slack for this purpose. For each project I have created a shared document for (minimum) daily reports from my development team and I put everything else to notes. This way I keep everything on shelf while being offline too and know where to get what. And of course I use Jira and Trello as primary management tools for my projects when it comes to detailed tasks and descriptions/wireframes/mockups.
- You need to be able to talk in case of an urgent situation. That’s easy, I simply run Skype (w call-forwarding feature enabled) plus Hangouts plus Telegram plus Slack anywhere it can be installed. It’s too much to have but it’s the only way not to miss anything indeed. I also hope that the time of united tool will finally come to our digital world (of course it’s not going to happen), I know all of you all have to get Whatsapp plus other IM app (Viber, Telegram, Line, etc) installed because some people don’t like Whatsapp. The businessmen has the same mental problem in regards of management software, no lie.
- Nice to have: someone who can cover you. You can delegate some of your responsibilities to your team leads for a short period of time. And even longer if the lead is working great at that position, promote this guy and take another project in that situation. Don’t try to carry on yourself when it’s a nice staff to help you.
And it’s needless to say that you need to plan you trip and vacation, to schedule the calls to the time when it’s convenient for everybody (yes, including you) to talk, to prepare the milestone which is clear for everybody, to clarify each feature to be developed, everyone should be notified on period when you are really offline on plane or just offline (it’s still a vacation for God’s sake!).
In short – get ready. You must be all set up min a week before you leave with a robust risk management analysis for the time of your day off, to avoid any surprises. And don’t forget to relax a bit, they say it helps a lot.