Notes from Seattle, working remotely.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 01/28/10)

My wife and I came to rainy and gloomy Seattle on Sunday, January 24th, ostensibly for her to continue her battle/treatment for Lyme disease with a new Lyme-literate specialist who practices here. We're here for almost a week and will head back to NYC on Saturday, January 30th. Her doctor's clinic is actually in Kirkland — about 30 minutes north of downtown Seattle — so we're staying at a Courtyard Marriott in Kirkland. It's not exactly an up-and-coming suburb, but we've managed to find some decent eateries, and even swallowed our pride and ate at the Olive Garden (!) for lunch once. We did manage to find a cute little conveyor belt sushi place nearby so that sort of rebalances the food equation.

While here and shuttling her back & forth to the clinic, I of course work remotely as many professionals do. However, as a creative director and designer it's certainly a step forward to be able to do this without massive interruptions in our workload and workflow. There are pros and cons of working while traveling, and especially when working from the west coast.

The most obvious is the challenges of the 3-hour time difference. So far, I've had no problem keeping my body clock on NYC time and getting started sometime between 6 and 7am. This has worked well all week. We start the day, have lunch and end the day pretty much in sync.

Another challenge is getting work done efficiently. If you travel and need to work and/or solve a problem with a job that's in production, you have to have access to your job files. In the early days of my business, whenever I worked remotely I took my laptop along, and I copied our entire active client job library onto a portable Firewire drive and made layout revisions on it. Then we I got back, I copied the files back. This works fine as long as A) your files all copy without errors, B) you gave yourself plenty of time the night before to sit there and watch 100GB of data copy, and C) nothing happens to your drive in transit. I once took a trip and realized in my hotel that all the backup software I'd used had not copied the most recent "modified" job folders to my portable external drive. It was a depressing moment.

So for the past several years, my modus operandi has been to keep all job files on our office network drive and utilize the power of DynDNS.org. It allows me to access our network externally from any available broadband internet connection by recognizing the dynamic IP Address our router connects with at our ISP. Even with that somewhat sophisticated method of file access, copying the art and layout files can be slow. Like most home or business ISP's offerings, upload speed is much slower than download speed. Consequently, opening or copying my files from a remote location is slow because data is uploading through a slow connection out of our office, and thereby, to me. It works, but it's not nearly as fast as working within your own office's network. Be patient with this method. It saves you the stress of carrying your company's job files around, but it costs you in time.

I can't speak highly enough of smartphones in general, and the iPhone specifically, when working on the road. We've used it to navigate ourselves to virtually every destination we've needed in Seattle through the built-in maps app. (Conversely, the Sony GPS we brought along was nearly useless and often displayed a "weak signal" indicator. Avoid their GPS products.) The Whole Foods app came in very handy when we needed some things that only they stock.

In general, I found Seattle and its suburbs to be pretty wireless compliant, if not a bit too open maybe. I found open wireless connections all over the place. Good for me and accessing info with speed, bad for people who trust the universe and probably get hacked a lot.

Lastly, and this is more of a topical note rather than a summary and closing statement: I was here in Seattle while the Apple iPad media event broadcast on Wednesday. Cool product. I want one. I'm already thinking of the possibilities for client apps for it, and on a more personal note, planning what to do with all my future leftover bookshelf space at home.

That's all from the northwest corner of the U.S. Until next time...