Could you run your business from Mexico?

Raise your hand if you knew I was on vacation last week in Cancun, Mexico.

Ok Dad, you can put your hand down now. Indeed I did take a much-needed vacation with my wife and without my kids to the beautiful Excellence Playa Mujeres resort.

I'm not telling you this to make you jealous (really, I'm not). Rather, I want to prove how technology allowed me to take this vacation with hardly anyone noticing.

Write blog posts in advance

In order to pull this off, I had to do a couple of things. First, I had to write five blog posts in advance. The software that drives the Noobie web site allows me to do this and to schedule when each one will appear on the web site. I scheduled one blog post to appear each weekday that I was gone.

I also subscribe to a couple of services that automatically post updates to my Twitter and Facebook accounts so there appeared to be activity on those services as well, even though I wasn't actually updating any of them.

Truth be told, one of my Twitter followers, jim_brown, started getting curious and eventually sent me this tweet:

@mrnoobie haven't seen you around (twitter) much lately, hope you're doing well.

Manage email

As far as my email, I intentionally did not set an away message, which is an automated reply that is sent back to anyone sending you email announcing you are on vacation or otherwise unable to reply to your email. I did this for security purposes. I feel like setting an away message on your email is the technological equivalent of letting newspapers pile up in your driveway while you're on vacation.

The downside to this was that there was a chance that a high-priority (in my mind) email would be sent to me and go days without being answered. I tackled this by taking both my laptop and my iPhone along with me on vacation. This came with a promise to my wife that I would only check email every other night while she was getting ready for dinner. As much as I love my laptop, I didn't want to be that guy sitting by the pool with his laptop on vacation.

And because my email is all hosted by Google, I able to easily gain access to the Internet through the hotel's free wi-fi connection and quickly browse my email for those high-priority emails. And when I did identify a high-priority email, I simply sent a one or two sentence reply indicating I was on vacation and would address the email when I returned. Kind of like a private manual away message.

Last but not least, voice mail

The last thing I had to contend with was voice mails. Again I was only concerned with high priority calls and for this task, my iPhone fit the bill nicely. I powered up my iPhone once per day and left it on just long enough to notify me of any new voice mails. The nice thing about the iPhone is that the voice mails are actually downloaded to the phone so you don't need to be connected to any service to listen to them.

All said and done, my technology toolkit did the job. I may have even convinced myself that some day I could run my business from anywhere!

P.S. In case you are wondering, yes, I am back in the U.S. and this is really me typing this blog post!