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I just spent a four day weekend down the coast at Byron Bay, a well known backpacker holiday location about two hours drive south from my hometown of Brisbane. Byron Bay was once a very hippie-centric town and it still carries some of the vibe from days gone by, but today you are more likely to meet up with an international traveler sporting a European or North American accent fresh from learning how to surf or a skydiving jump.

I hadn’t been to Byron since I was kid, so I was eager to remember the place and more importantly, test out a remote-working lifestyle and answer the question - can I actually have a holiday, write blog articles and run a membership site all at the same time?

I’ll be honest with you, as much as people proclaim how great the Internet business lifestyle is, taking your work with you anywhere in the world and of course, sitting on the beach with your laptop, it’s not always as easy as the image portrays.

In previous years I’ve had many a mad dash to an Internet cafe to answer customer support emails for BetterEdit while supposedly on holidays and spent nights at my hotel blogging or responding to emails, with people around me complaining about my inability to properly take time off.

My “holidays” involve my work because I enjoy what I do - I don’t require a “break” from it - I want to do it, however it’s not quite perfect yet. I still get a sense of stress when I travel and feel a need to check the Internet just to make sure everything is okay.

I don’t quite have all the systems in place to cover everything I do, however things are different now because I don’t have as many time pressure deadlines as I did in the past when I was the only person in charge of everything. Now I can let things run without me, but I still have to play catchup when I get back, which is something I want to change so I can actually leave the computer for a few days - even a week - without coming back to a day’s worth of email and helpdesk queries.

Byron Is Seriously Wired

Byron Bay is a fantastically well wired little town, in fact there is better wi-fi access in Byron than there is in Brisbane, but that’s not surprising since Brisbane is absolutely terrible for wi-fi Internet access. All of the cafes and restaurants I went to in Byron had free wi-fi access plus we had it in the apartment we rented too, although it wasn’t free.

If all you wanted to do was head to the beach, spend some time writing articles to your blog and enjoy great food, Byron is a fantastic choice. The great thing about just blogging is that it really is just an hour or two a day activity. If your income is driven solely on publishing a one thousand word article every day or two, then you could certainly make a holiday work easily and get work done too.

Some of you might think I’m strange, but here’s a photo of what I enjoy doing on my holidays (and that’s green tea I’m drinking by the way)…

What To Do When News Breaks While On Holiday

Just as I was leaving for the coast, I woke up to the big PageRank slap that, for 48 hours at least, saw many major blog sites hit with drastic reductions in PageRank. At the time I thought I had finished talking about PageRank since I was slapped prior to the big slap, but since everyone was talking about it because so many blogs and websites were hit, and I was thinking about it, I decided I had to put my theories out there too.

I spent most of the day away from the computer but I was itching to write my article because I knew the situation could change at any time and my theories could become irrelevant quickly. After arriving at Bryon and spending the day checking the place out, I came home to the apartment, hooked the laptop up and wrote out my article - Possible Explanations for the PageRank Penalty Sweep - and published it in the morning of my second day on holiday.

Only a day later many of the PageRank penalties were reversed so I’m glad I got my article out when I did, while it was current and could catch the story while it was still hot. It was so hot in fact, that the next day when I woke up I had an email from a journalist asking for my feedback, which eventually led to a phone interview and a story in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers about Google’s changes to PageRank.

Can Bloggers Ever Rest?

As a blogger with a reasonable profile, at least in my small pond, I do feel a sense of obligation to cover any major stories, especially when my peers do. I was happy that I could write a time sensitive news article to my blog, take a phone interview and get featured in a newspaper as a result, all while on holidays.

I could simply have chosen not to care about any of it, left my blog a little empty while on holiday and all things considered, it probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference. I would have missed out on some traffic and I have to admit I feel a sense of satisfaction each time I do publish an article (as opposed to the opposite feeling of agitation when you haven’t published in a while), but these are marginal things in the grand scheme.

In my case, as I said before, I want my holidays to include time spent online and writing. It won’t be as much as I might spend at home, but for me, a good holiday includes blogging.

You need to figure out what works best for you and I know a lot of people prefer a holiday completely free of any obligations whatsoever. Personally I don’t understand how people can simply sit at the beach and read a book for an entire week, but I’m not one to judge, if that’s what you want to do then go for it.

Thankfully my holidays can involve time spent on the computer and time spent visiting lighthouses.

That’s a lighthouse bulb in case you were wondering.

Yaro Starak
Back From Holidays