Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve spent this week get­ting increas­ingly wor­ried and agi­tated about tak­ing this trip to Kansas and then on to Ohio for World Fantasy Convention. In fact, by the time you read this, I should be past Denver and on my way east on I-​​70.

The idea of vaca­tion and travel is some­thing I’ve strug­gled with how to man­age since start­ing my own busi­ness as a web designer for authors and pub­lish­ers.  I have to admit that one of the aspects about the lifestyle that appealed to me most was the abil­ity to set my own sched­ule, not just on a daily basis, but also on a weekly or monthly one.  If I want to take some time to go spend with my fam­ily in Kansas, I can. Theoretically.

The truth is, though, that travel costs money, which means I need to work more to pay for the trip, but by tak­ing the trip, I’ll be work­ing less.  So I end up with this sit­u­a­tion where I’m try­ing to jug­gle projects and travel, and I haven’t even talked about how the graphic design work isn’t done very eas­ily on a lap­top (writ­ing and writ­ing code, how­ever, goes very smoothly).

So while it seems from the out­side that you can have a lot more free­dom in this area, the truth is, when you have a day job, you may have strictly lim­ited time off, but at least then there’s some­one to cover for you.  When you’re a one man show, you have to either make sure you have some­one in on your project with you, or you have to be pre­pared to drop the daiquiri, pull out the lap­top, log in, and fix the problem.

I’m hop­ing that this trip has a min­i­mum amount of dis­rup­tion of my work. I’ll be dri­ving on Friday/​Saturday, and will be ready to work hard Sunday. I’ll work a reg­u­lar sched­ule Monday through Wednesday, but then Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I will be at World Fantasy Convention and not really work­ing a reg­u­lar set of hours. I’ll drive back early Sunday morn­ing to Kansas, mak­ing the 12 hour trip hope­fully in record time, col­lapse, and get up Monday and work a full day.  Then I will either spend all of Tuesday dri­ving back to Colorado, or I’ll work a half day, drive and stop halfway at a motel, then be home Wednesday mid-​​afternoon to put in some work Wednesday afternoon.

So that’s a lit­tle exam­ple of the plan­ning I have to make for myself.  I try to keep it flex­i­ble, in case I’m in the mid­dle of Kansas and someone’s server explodes, or if Monday morn­ing, there’s a ton of stuff hit­ting the fan, so I need to stay over a cou­ple of days to get things in order.  The key here, as in most things, is main­tain­ing flexibility.

Really?  That flex­i­bil­ity that seems so appeal­ing cuts both ways.  You have to be ready for it.

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Tags: business, conventions, travel, Web Design