Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.
- Malcolm X

A key component to The 4-Hour Workweek lifestyle is liberation from the office. The main idea is that once you are working remotely, you are not beholden to the clock but rather to your productivity. Once liberated from your cubicle, you can freely outsource and automate as much of your work as possible. Taken to the extreme, you provide all of the deliverables required of your job as you sip margaritas on the beach while some guy in India does all the work.

Up until now, I have been treading very safely on my 4-hour workweek quest. Too safely. On Friday I decided to do a simple, but meaningful experiment in liberation. I had arranged with my employer to work from home on Friday. However, I had a slightly different plan. Instead of working from home, I would work from another country! I wanted to see if my employer would know any better. I figured by limiting the experiment to a single day I could mitigate any real risks, for example, if it all went to hell I could call in and feign sickness or something like that.

Preparations For The Great Escape

Of course, in order to pull this off, I needed a plan!

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.
- Napoleon Hill

My preparations:

1. A Laptop with all the software I would need to access my email and office files. I have covered these before in my post on Tools For The Mobile Office.
2. A cell phone with a decent voice plan to take and make calls from Canada. I set up my home phone to forward all calls to my cell phone.
3. A Blackberry so I could respond to email if I was not in the vicinity of a wi-fi network.
4. A hotel reservation in Montreal.
5. A full tank of gas.

Escape

On Thursday evening after work, unbeknownst to my employer, I left Boston and headed north to Montreal, Canada under the cover of darkness. It’s about a 5 hour drive and I got into Montreal just before midnight. It was all very clandestine. I used the hotel’s complimentary Internet access to check email. I did a little bit of the work I would have started in the morning had I worked from home. Crucially, I staged all my email in my drafts folder. I waited until after breakfast the next day to send these out, making it look as if I was already knee deep in work from my desk at home. The stealth!

Next, I spent the day exploring the city. It’s a nice place, and if you have never been, I highly recommend a visit - it’s a like a little bit of Europe in North America. I made sure to stop every hour or so to put in 30 to 60 minutes of work at a coffee shop with wi-fi. If I had to respond to an email outside of these working periods, I had the Blackberry. Of course to make and take any calls I had my cell phone.

At the end of the day, I had a great evening in Montreal and headed back to Boston Saturday afternoon.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

In the end, it was a smashing success. For all my employer knew, I was at home the whole day. In hindsight, there was no real reason why I would not have been able to pull this off, which of course I did. I think the biggest outcome of this little foray was breaking down the psychological barriers that I had. It takes some time to get the idea that a specific location is often inconsequential to one’s work. I am already planning my next great experiment in liberation, where I will try to work for a few days at a time away from the office. I’ll up the ante by working from a different time zone or something like that.

Thanks

To Oliver Mallich for the photo of Montreal (I know, I should have taken my own while I was there! It’s just that Flickr is so convenient…)

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• Lack of access to traditional paper based “snail” mail.
• The ability to access “the office” while jet setting about the region on any number of short trips.
• Mitigate the risk to business continuation in a worse case scenario such as his laptop being stolen.

The resulting post: Online Tools for Working Abroad, is a description of his planned mobile office setup which consists of several online tools. Mike Elgin of The World Is My Office blog over at Computerworld has already weighed in, and since I have been on a quest to get as much as possible online lately (particularly my email, calendar and contacts), I thought I would add my own two cents.

Photo Storage

Mike Elgin correctly points out that for most, photo organizing and storage is probably not a key component to a mobile office, but since Danny Outlaw mentions it…

• Danny: Flickr.
• Mike: Flickr.
• Me: I have just starting using Flickr and it is a great tool. What I have been using for a long while is Picasa Web Albums. The main reason I have used Picasa is that I get all the benefits of online storage, organization and access while at the same time tight integration with an incredible desktop photo organizer. Just because you want everything online doesn’t mean you can’t have a great desktop application at the same time!

Data Storage

• Danny: Media Max - 25 GB of free online storage.
• Mike: Jungle Disk - not free, but uses Amazon’s S3 service and therefore ultra safe and secure.
• Me: For my office documents I actually use Google Docs and for other files I just back them up by sending them as an attachment in an email to myself (my email is hosted by Google). I know this is not necessarily an ideal backup strategy so I will probably investigate Jungle Disk and the like. I have heard good things about Mozy and how it can perform a seamless backup in the background.

Snail Mail

• Danny: Earth Class Mail - They give you and address to which you redirect all your mail. The service scans the front and back of each envelop which you review online and instruct them the open and scan the contents or trash it. Sounds very very cool and Ferriss-esque!
• Mike: Earth Class Mail.
• Me: I have been trying to get as many of my bills and statements sent to me as “e-Bills”, but Earth Class Mail is a rather complete solution.

Office Software

• Danny: Zoho.
• Mike: Google Docs - although he points out that Zoho also offers a Wiki, a project management application and CRM.
• Me: Google Docs. I don’t use wikis or project management software. I use SugarCRM which is hosted online.

Meetings

• Danny: MyQuire
• Mike: AIM for chat.
• Me: I think of MyQuire as being more of a groupware application than an online meeting application. For purely online meetings, real time collaboration and application sharing I use LiveMeeting which is not cheap, but a good product. For groupware type features, I use shared Google Calendars (which I synch to my nice desktop client), email and instant messaging as the case may be.

Personal Finance

• Danny: Mint.
• Mike: Desktop application (e.g. Quicken) plus an online backup.
• Me: Is a personal finance application really a must for running a mobile office? I would think that access to Internet banking is probably the more fundamental requirement. Internet banking comes with most decent banks these days. The only online personal finance manager I have tried is Wesabe which is like an online, social networked version of Quicken. It is very cool, but not essential in my own humble opinion.

To Do List

• Danny: I Want Sandy.
• Mike: Gubb.
• Me: I Want Sandy integrated with Jott. I am a huge I Want Sandy fan. I hear great things about Remember The Milk (RTM). RTM has a great looking iPhone/iTouch application, the iPhone with its built in wi-fi being an great mobile office gadget in its own right.

Somehow email was not on the list while photo editing was! I am not going to bother covering photo editing, but I will put a plug in for Gmail, particularly if you have it integrated with the Thunderbird desktop client.

What are your favourite and/or indispensable tools for when you are working remotely or travelling yet need to be connected? I would love to hear about them in the comments.

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