How to Keep Client Work and Travel in the Same Week
The comms calendar and the status doc go first. The city gets what is left.
[ journal ]
Tuesday I had a client review at 8am NZST and a ferry I wanted by noon. The week only held if the calendar held first. The city did not get a vote until the status doc was current.
Client work and travel in the same week is not a vibe. It is a comms problem. Who expects you live, and when. Who can live on a written update. Which hours are overlap and which hours are you in transit with a laptop bag and a face that should not be on camera. I put those hours on a calendar the client can see, or I write them into a shared doc before I book the ticket.
Status docs save more trips than optimism. A short note: what shipped, what is blocked, when I am next at a keyboard. I would rather send that on Sunday night than explain a missed ping from a train. Silence reads as disappearance. A paragraph reads as an adult who left the city and brought the work.
I batch client messages into windows. Morning overlap if the client is behind me on the clock. A second window if Europe needs a reply before they sleep. Outside those windows I am moving, or I am off. The week fails when every hour is theoretically available because I am “already traveling anyway.” That is how you arrive at a lookout with a slack unread count you will resent.
This is not the sightseeing problem. Sightseeing is what you do with leftover daylight after the work is honest. This is also not the problem of wanting the trip so hard you book it against a delivery week. That is desire arguing with a date. Here the dates already exist. The question is whether you will treat them as real while the scenery changes.
I keep a one-page week: calls, delivery, travel legs, a line that says “offline in transit.” Clients who cannot live with that are not clients I can take on the road. Louisiana taught me to over-explain when I am anxious. Aotearoa taught me to write it once, clearly, and then do the work. The ferry can wait until the review ends. The review cannot wait until I feel like a person who travels.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.