• Before your trip, give yourself a few weeks or a month in which you don’t take on any new work. This will give you the time to appropriately wind down existing work, even if it was supposed to be finished earlier (there’s always last minute requests). I only took on two new projects at the beginning of May, although they were pretty large ones. Even though I could have squeezed in a few smaller projects, I didn’t want to push it. My last week of work was hard, working from 8am-10pm finishing up the projects (Dans Hamptons and Eat Life Whole), but they came out great and I didn’t have to work on them while traveling.
• Use a CRM (TwentyTen CRM or Salesforce) and have your contact form connect to it. You should be doing this already, but coming back to 50 emails from prospective clients is unmanageable. Get everything in your CRM so you can work your way through it when you get back. I’ll be posting a tutorial soon on having a contact form update TwentyTen CRM, but here’s a quick summary.
• Make sure your contact form mentions that you’re on vacation, so they don’t expect an immediate response. Also update your voicemail. In my voicemail I said I’d be out of the country and wouldn’t be back until the end of June, and asked them to please use the contact form on my site or email me. When I got back I only had 2 voicemails that weren’t already in my CRM.
• Check in periodically to filter your email. I did about every 5 days. For projects that weren’t a good fit I sent a list of recommended developers, and those that were I reiterated that I’ll be back at the end of June and will get back to them as soon as possible. In my CRM I closed the ones I forwarded away and marked the ones I didn’t as “after trip followup”. I also added prospects that just emailed me to the CMS (30% of my inquiries come from email, 60% from email form, and 10% from phone).
• Give people a fuzzy date of when you’ll be back. I said “end of June” instead of June 21 so that I’m in control of my schedule when I get back. If everyone knows the date you’ll get back, you’ll get flooded with emails and phone calls that day.
• When you do get back, give yourself a few days to a week to catch up. I landed on a Tuesday but my first official day back in the office was the following Monday. During those extra days I went through my CRM and followed up with everyone, scheduling phone calls throughout the following week.
• Only let meetings and phone calls take up half your day when you get back. I scheduled phone calls from 8am to noon for the first few days I’m back. I was then able to work during the afternoon. During my “extra” days before I got back to work I was able to land a few small projects to do this week. This will keep me feeling productive because after a full day of phone calls I feel drained and unaccomplished. I love working, not talking about working, so I’m organizing my calendar accordingly.

And because of TwentyTen CRM I was able to keep it all organized and (relatively) stress-free.

A few months ago I switched www.billerickson.net to Tumblr so that I could them to aggregate all my content from other places (twitter, comments on other blogs, photos…). I kept my blog at blog.billerickson.net, my resume at cv.billerickson.net, and my consulting website at www.ericksonmediagroup.com.

Now I’ve built a single site that hosts everything. I might make a few changes to the lifestream after GigaOM releases GigaPrologue, but we’ll see.

This redesign also better shows my focus on WordPress Consulting. I’ve been doing this for the past few years, but under the guise of “Web Design.” I’ve found that by getting specific and telling everyone you’re a WordPress Dev, it seems to result in more workflow.

What do you think of it?

Here’s what I’m doing right now:

• Events
  • BarCampTX – We’re having BarCamp Texas in Downtown Bryan tomorrow. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done. Someone needs to drive down to Houston to grab the shirts, and we need to build 2 walls tonight! We’re in a huge room that we want to break up into three rooms, and just this week found out we’d need to build these walls.
  • BIL – aka, “The Other TED.” We’re reaching critical mass with this one. We have some amazing speakers already lined up and word is spreading throughout the science and technology community about it. Two days ago we finally confirmed the location – we have a conference center reserved for March 1 & 2. I’m working on promotion mostly right now. Getting interesting people to actually commit to a topic and add themselves to the wiki. We have a little over a month until BIL happens!
  • Trip to California – Cody and I are going to California for a week (two of those days being BIL). We’re setting up meetings with all the people and companies we know but haven’t met in person. If you’re interested in meeting up, send me an email.
• School
  • Two quizzes on Monday
  • Paper due on Tuesday
  • Still have work to do in moving my midterms around. I’ll be missing three midterms while I’m in California for BIL. I was able to get BIL considered a “University Sponsored Event” but I still have to work with my professors to move the midterms.
• Reading – some of this falls under school, some pleasure
  • Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace – I’ve heard great things about this book for years, and started reading over the Christmas break. I’m only about 150 pages into it (it’s over 1000 pages long), and it’s on the back burner now.
  • Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill – for Philosophy 111
  • Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant – for Philosophy 111
  • The Little Book that Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt – for Finance 421
  • The Game by Neil Strauss – This one is about the art of being a pickup artist, and “the community” behind it. One of my friends is friends with a leader in the community, and I thought I’d read up on it in case I run into him. Very interesting book about the psychology of social situations.
• Work
  • Still webmaster at Mays Business School. Working on some video stuff at the moment.
  • About to relaunch Coursevote, my facebook application.
  • We’re launching A blank site at BarCampTX.
  • Working on Activist Apparel, a clothing line owned by Always Creative and I.
  • Creative Space stuff. We’ve been doing a lot of networking and meetings in Houston recently.

So yeah, that’s a quick summary of what I’m up to. Busy Busy Busy

My blog is now at http://blog.billerickson.net and running on WordPress. I’ve imported all the content from my old blog, and I’ll be blogging from here now. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, the feed is the same as it was before: http://feeds.feedburner.com/billerickson. I’m not sure how often I’ll be blogging, but I’m guessing it will be once or twice a month.

http://www.billerickson.net is now my tumblr feed, which pulls from my blog, flickr, twitter, del.icio.us, any comments I make on other blogs, or anything else I find interesting. This will be updated much more often than the blog, probably 1-10 posts per day. If you’d like to subscribe to this, here’s the feed: http://www.billerickson.net/rss.

We’ll see how long this lasts before I change it up yet again.

I’ve been in London for the past week. I love it here, and I might be living here next summer (either here or Sydney, Australia).

I haven’t taken my camera out much or done the tourist thing since I did that last time I was here. Mostly I’ve just been walking around the city, hanging out with friends, and doing a little bit of shopping.

Be back in College Station next week, and we’ll be moving into our new office – The Creative Space.