I am a recent convert to Dropbox, a cloud service for synchronizing the contents of computer folders. It’s clever beauty resides in it’s ability to notice that a file has been added, updated, or deleted and immediately makes the change on the server’s copy of your file folders.

It’s magic happens when you install Dropbox on any, and all, computers that you use. Dropbox copies the changes from the server back to those other computers. A common scenario is you have a netbook computer you keep in a briefcase, a laptop in the dining room, and one or more desktops scattered around the house. The kids may already take turns on the better desktop computer so that they can keep up with their friends online, so you need to wait until later in the evening before you can access that machine to design and print an invitation. However, thanks to Dropbox, you can compose some of the content on your netbook during the day and later revise the text and begin to layout the design on your laptop in the dining room after dinner. The work begun on the netbook is automatically pushed to the laptop once the Dropbox software connects to the cloud. Those updates will then get pushed to the desktop machine when it is your turn to use it, where you can finalize the invitation.

The file synchronization happens automatically and without the need for flash thumb drives or e-mailing attachments to yourself. As quickly as you move from one computer to the next, the documents in the designated folders are moved for you, allowing you to worry about the content, and not the transport, of the document.

Dropbox offers a 2GB account for free, with opportunities to expand that slightly by sharing the service with friends. 2GB may not seem like a lot these days, but for documents you create yourself, it’s should be enough to accomplish a great deal of work. Larger amounts of storage can be bought, and you may want to keep cherished photos or beloved music in those folders as well so that they are backed up in the cloud and on all of your computers.

The Dropbox service allows you to approach certain creative work differently, making it available to you throughout your day, wherever you are connected to the Internet. I often make use of a twenty minute session at a coffee shop near where I work during the day, and what I type on my netbook is safely backed up to the cloud within seconds of saving my work.

When I take one of my children to an activity in the evening, I may continue my own creative efforts while waiting for them. This makes me feel empowered and more in control of my life. I have the option of making progress on my project, whatever it may be, or watching their activity. Having that option makes me happy.

If I find myself in a place without one of my computers, but still have access to the Internet, I can log into Dropbox and access my folders from the cloud. So I don’t feel compelled to drag a machine with me everywhere.

A netbook is small, but an iPad is even smaller, yet it is fully capable of using Dropbox and staying synchronized with your document folder. If you crave a mobile lifestyle but want to stay connected to your home computers, Dropbox and a tablet make a powerful combination.

The Dropbox tour of features is available here (https://www.dropbox.com/tour). I currently make do with the free amount of storage, but I am contemplating keeping some cherished photos and videos there.

If you are a Dropbox fantard like me, let us know how you use it!

One of our readers, Tom, asked:

“Can anyone recommend a legitimate home based business that you can actually live on?”

MY ANSWER:

Hi Tom,

Technology is making it easier every day for a lot of people to work from home. Personally, I run a graphic design business. 10 years ago we had an office in San Diego, clients in San Diego and employees from San Diego. Now, with broadband Internet so widely available we closed the office, have clients all over the country and designers from Baltimore to Buenos Aires.

The easiest way is to create a business where you work with your brain, not your hands. It’s much easier to be home based or even mobile. However, there are a lot of people who have created product based businesses that outsource production and fulfillment.

Finally, don’t get stuck thinking you need to pick ONE business to support yourself. While I make the majority of our income from my design business, I also make money doing photography, Mac consulting, some investments and of course Family Hack. I really enjoy the variety too. It makes life interesting and I’m always learning new things.

Of course, technology doesn’t always have to play a part. Last year, a friend of mine lost his SysAdmin job. Instead of looking for another job, he and his wife decided to make a change. They moved to a less expensive house about 30 minutes outside of town. It sits on several acres that they’ve turned into a “farmette”. They grow their own produce, and raise chickens (and eggs) for sale at the farmers markets. They also opened a dance studio nearby that teaches kids and adults. You can see more info at Sweet Dog Farm and Dance Barn.

Good Luck,
Michael

Tom replied with:

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the response. Although I’m still employed with a solid company I’m looking for ways to transition to a home based business. As a first timer I have found it difficult to work through the legitimate vs sites that just want you to fund something that may or may not work.

Once again, thanks for the response.

Regards,
Tom

MY FOLLOW UP REPLY:

Hi Tom,

I agree. The filtering is tough. There is so much get rich BS in the work at home industry. You might want to read Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek. There is a fair amount of hyperbole, but also some good info on how to set up businesses that are scalable and less location based. Don’t let the title put you off, It’s just for marketing. The book isn’t about getting lazy. It’s about working smart.

Another idea is to start a business that can use your “solid company” as a first client/customer. I did that when I first started. I worked in a corporate art department. I left only after I knew they would be my first client. It was essentially the same job. The only difference was I did it from home, they weren’t locked in to paying me and I invoiced instead of getting a paycheck. In return I got the freedom and over the next couple of years added new clients.

Being inside the company gives you great access to seeing what they might need. If you can find a way to fill that need you can create a new business for yourself with very little risk. You essentially have a deal before you leap.

Good Luck,
Michael

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Hannah and I recently did a guest lecture at the University of Virginia. In this 10 minute excerpt, I swear a little, make fun of Bono, and probably piss off small retail shop owners. Deal with it. It’s the truth.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Best types of business for a mobile lifestyle? Products are better than services. I tend to do a whole bunch of service businesses, but products are better than services, because a product you make it once and sell it a bunch of times and every time it makes money. A service? You or somebody you hire, which a lot of times is the case in my case, has to actually be there.

So, as much as you may think that being a rock star or a movie star might be a really great life. When U2 showed up down here and put on their little tootie fruity show? Bono had to show up and sing. When you pay your money and go and see U2. Four guys had to fly in from Ireland, put on their little shiny pants and get up there and flop around, but every time they sell a CD they don’t have to do that. It’s a very different model, products versus a service.

The internet is better than physical. If you’re going to sell something, sell it on the internet. Don’t sell it physically. Physically you have to show up and stand around. Physical retail establishments blow my mind. The idea that you have to show up every day at a place kills your mobility right away — you’ve got to open the door at 9:30 and close it at 9:30 (or whatever) and the whole time you’re just standing around just in case someone might want to buy a latte. Just in case. Two hours in the middle of the day, no one comes in? Guess what? You’re still standing there, or somebody you hire is still standing there. It’s just bad for mobility to have some sort of physical storefront or any kind of place that you physically have to go.

Selling information can also be a product, don’t forget about that. If you can create a tutorial, an ebook, some sort of dvd series that teaches something — that is a great product. That’s something that can’t be knocked off by Chinese prison labor. You make some sunglasses that shoot fire out the back of them (or something) and you think they’re the coolest thing ever (or Crocs for Christ’s sake — what the hell’s with that?) and all of the sudden, somebody can knock them off. And you know that Chinese prison laborers, or Indonesian school children are making those things for a fraction of the cost and they’re just going to eat your market in six months. Information as a product is a good one

Industry wise there’s no big rule — like don’t do food businesses or don’t do Graphic Design businesses.

Let’s take books for example. Opening a book store can be best or worst. Amazon is a great example of a best case scenario, they sell a lot of product in addition to books, but they sell a lot of product and it’s all on the internet, so there’s no physical store front. Conversely, if you have a small book store on the downtown mall. I feel for you man, I feel for you. You’re still sitting around doing nothing for hours a day, while people wander in “just looking”. Jeff Bezos isn’t sitting around listening to “just looking” he’s building his rocket ship to the moon or whatever crazy shit he’s into — that guy isn on fire. Excuse my language by the way, I’m a bit of a naughty boy, sorry if I’ve offended anybody.

Another thing to think about with businesses is micro-entrepreneurship. That’s just a fancy way of saying you do a lot of different things — a little bit of this and a little of that — and that’s really a great way to do business. Rather than thinking “what’s my big idea?”, “what’s that thing that’s going to make me a millionaire?”. Think “what’s going to buy me beer this weekend?”. Scale it down.

Like she said, I do a ridiculous number of things.

Yellowfish is my primary business, no doubt. Pays the mortgage, pays the plane tickets, pays for Fat Jack’s little happy pants and all that stuff. That is a business that generates a six figure income. Over $100,000 a year, for those of you who aren’t good with numbers.

Family Hack is something we started a couple of years ago as a way to just answer questions people would have when they’d meet us. A friend would say “Michael and Hannah just got back from Argentina.”
“Really what did you do there?”
“We just went down for a fun, just hung out for a month.”
“Who watched your kids?”
“We took the kids.”
“But, what about school?”
“We homeschool.”
There were all these questions…
“How do you do that?”

We decided we’d start a website — put up how we did that and that’s how it started.
Now it’s veered into some sort of mishmash of house hold tips, home school articles and all kinds of weird stuff, but that’s how it started. Two years ago it started just as a site with all these sort of little goofy articles about how we live our life and now, as she said, earlier this year the site was peaking at over a million unique visitors a month, it just went crazy. It has steadily grown. That site alone makes a five figure income every year. So that’s another example of micro-enterpenership We have Yellow Fish making a six figure income and Family Hack making a five figure income.

Then I have Campaign Fox, which we’ve just launched very recently (just a couple of weeks ago), which is an email marketing service. My clients can go on, they’re already into email marketing — “hey let’s send an email news letter to our clients”, that kind of stuff. So I said, let’s make that for you, rather than giving business to someone else. We have clients built in, who already want this, and I’m just going to do this myself. So we built this system that they can go in and whey can do their own newsletter, build it themselves, I don’t have to get involved and every time they send it, I get paid. So that’s a great example of a service business that’s actually a product business.

Another one is MacHintsandTips.com. By the way, Campaign Fox makes a four figure income, it’s right now probably generating a couple of thousand dollars a year. It’s just got started and I’m estimating. That’s a couple of thousand dollars. That’s a new Macbook Pro. I like that! I’ll take that free Macbook Pro. Mac Hints and Tips.com — speaking of mac books — that’s a site that I do with a partner of mine. He had ninety-five hundred macintosh hints and tips in a database and I said that is valuable and so, I as part of my fifty percent compensation in the site, designed the site, got the whole thing online, up and working, searchable, keywords and all that stuff tagged and his job is to put tips up on the site. He does all the work on a daily basis, I do all the front end stuff. That’s another site that generates a four figure income.

What else am I doing? AdJack. AdJack is this Youtube for commercials where you can win money. You watch five commercials, you’re entered in the sweepstakes and you can win half a million bucks. That I just own part of. I don’t get any money on a daily basis, but if it goes public and stock prices raises? Boom! If it gets bought by a private investment company, or whatever? I get a chunk. I just built that site for equity (or ownership, that’s just a fancy way of saying ownership).

Again, setting your business goals is important upfront.

Let’s say you wanted to start a bookstore. If you say “I want to be the next Amazon.com”, you’re going to fail. You’re always going to be a failure, even if you have ten bookstores all round the Virginia region and they’re rocking and you have a hundred employees, and everybody’s all happy and you’re voted entrepreneur of the year. If you wanted to be Amazon.com you’re a failure, you’re still a failure, because of the way you set your goal. Lower your expectation. Everyone’s trying to be Steve Jobs for Christ’s sake. Just be happy.

If you decided, “you know what I’m going to open a bookstore, but I just want enough money to buy beer on the weekend. That’s what I want. I want to buy a pizza so I don’t have to cook one night a week”. Go to the Goodwill. Go to the used book aisle, pull off a dozen books, go over and list them as used books on Amazon and you’ll make enough money to buy beer this weekend, you have a bookstore. So there’s a huge range between amazon.com and selling used books on Amazon. You’re still in business.

Don’t get intimidated by this idea that you have to employees and that sort of stuff. I have no employees, not one. Every single person who works for me is a contractor, they’re hired for a specific task. Now I have contractors in my design businesses that have been with me for years, They work almost full time, that’s the way it works. If I slow down one of those contractors doesn’t get work that week, but I’m not out of work.

We recently had the opportunity to talk with Dan Clements about his terrific new book, “Escape 101: Sabbaticals Made Simple” It’s an inspiring and practical guide to taking a career break without losing your money or your mind. Here’s our interview with Dan.

Family Hack: Some jobs seem easier to “escape” from than others. What jobs would you choose to put in your Top 10 for easy escapism?

Dan Clements: I honestly don’t believe that it’s about the job – it’s about the mindset of the person doing the job that determines how easy it is to get away.

That being said, there are some jobs that lend themselves to portability, or to periodic downtimes:

Jobs with structured extended leave programs
Teachers
Career jobs at a companies with established sabbatical programs
Jobs with global demand
Doctors
Nurses
Portable work
Writing
Design
Programming
Any other web-based freelancing
Jobs with a defined end
Temp work
Contract work

There are many others, but these are the ones that always strike me as the easiest. A lot of these are easy because they let you take your work with you. Many people will prefer the idea of taking a complete break from work, but the trend towards mobile work lifestyles is definitely worth considering as an alternative way to escape.

FH: Are there jobs you think are unsuited to a sabbatical?

DC: No, but there are many people who believe their jobs are unsuitable.

I do think small business owners are the toughest to convince. They tend to work extraordinarily long hours, and are often in a place of, “No one can do this but me.” Once they do get away, though, they appreciate just how much taking time away can do for their business.

The real beauty of all of this, though, is that the more challenging your life is to leave, the greater the benefit of leaving. It’s an elegant equation.

FH: You believe that fear is one of the things that stops people from taking extended time off. What helped you break through this fear and take your first sabbatical?

DC: We’re planning our next escape and those same fears still tend to appear, despite having done it several times. In the end, what helps us the most is:

A belief that we can do it. I always think, “Okay – lots of other people have done this with less cash, more kids, tougher jobs and more debt. So why can’t we?”
A belief in the value of the time away. We truly feel that the benefits of living deliberately like this offset any costs of being away.
Two worry-busting questions. Anytime we’re worried or stressed, we ask “What’s the worst that can happen?” Normally, the worry is some sort of financial/business/career type setback. Then we ask, “Can we live with that?” Once we accept that worst-case scenario, moving ahead becomes far easier.
Lots of envisioning. You need to find a way to make things real. For example, I just picked up a travel guide to the South Pacific for a short sabbatical we’re planning. As soon as I opened it, I started getting really excited about going. Once I’m able to imagine what the time away could be, it helps motivate me to put things in motion. It’s the little steps like those that eventually get you there.

FH: You say “if you can afford to buy this book, you can take a year off.” Since money is a common excuse, will you expand on that a little?

DC: We’ve gone to a lot of effort in the book to try to boil the financial side of escaping down to something manageable for virtually anyone. Our last sabbatical cost roughly $200 a month for food and accommodation, and it was spectacular in every respect. The secret was in choosing the right opportunity (and there are many).

You can spend more than that or you can spend less, but the point is that in our culture, the amount we spend on television, books and coffee is enough to fund a sabbatical. It doesn’t have to be as expensive as it seems. The savings to finance our last relocation worked out to about the price of a book each, per month. Once we got where we were going, it was so inexpensive that we could do it by credit card if we had to.

Part of the shift in mindset needs to be toward just starting. It might seem impossible to get together the money you need, but the trick is just to start. Even setting aside the price of a book each month starts the ball rolling.

You don’t have to see the whole solution – in fact, most of the time you can’t – you just need to take those first steps and get some momentum. That’s particularly important on the financial side. Just start, and things will come together.

FH: What are the best and worst things to come out of taking a sabbatical?

DC: The perspective that you gain on your “normal” life is certainly the highlight for me. It’s like climbing a tall tree, and seeing life as a grand panorama spread out before you. It’s very challenging to get that sort of big-picture view of things when you’re neck-deep in it, but it’s that big picture is what helps you improve your life when you come back to it.

Ironically, that perspective might be the “worst” part in some ways. It has a way of bringing the parts of your lifestyle that you’re unhappy with into stark relief, and making them difficult to tolerate. Fortunately, that tends to work as a catalyst for change, and that initial discomfort always seems to bring you to something better.

I had a tough time after we returned from Paraguay last year – I had this sense that we were somehow “worse off” in our First World existence, and that we’d done our daughter a disservice by coming back. In many ways, I still think we were happier and healthier there, but we’ve also settled nicely back into our life, and have made even more positive change as a result of being away.

FH: What effects have these sabbaticals had on family/children?

DC: Our last career break was our first since our daughter Eve came on the scene. It was a profoundly rewarding and connecting experience for our family.

Eve was five when we went – she learned to speak Spanish, and went to a small local school. It was incredibly brave of her, I think, and that confidence has stayed with her. She makes friends easily, seems far more socially adept, and seems keen to try just about anything.

That trip was a gift for all of us. We’re quite a team, and I think we’ve developed this “we can do it” mindset that’s really made a permanent difference for our family. I can’t think of anything more important that we could do for our daughter or ourselves.

FH: Are there any resources that you’ve discovered since the release of the book that you are excited about?

DC: There’s a great surge in lifestyle related books and websites right now – it’s quite exciting. Since the release of the book, we’ve been in contact with so many great folks. It’s wonderful to see so many people taking control of their lives.

Some favorites:

Escape & Lifestyle Design
www.MyTropicalEscape.com
www.FourHourWorkWeek.com
www.EscapeFromCubicleNation.com
www.TheSabbaticalCoach.com
www.ThinkSimpleNow.com

Work Anywhere & Entrepreneurship
www.Anywired.com
www.LocationIndependent.com
www.SelfMadeChick.com

In this video I show you how I use a brilliantly designed and dirt cheap file holderto keep my active projects organized, in view and easy to retrieve. The system also makes working while traveling a breeze.

Product Link:
Rubbermaid File Folder Organizer

Have a good tip…we’d love to hear it.

1. The Cable Shelf:

My choice for taming cord spaghetti is a cable shelf. I like it’s large capacity and easy access. When we travel I can easily remove the cables I need.

Life Hacker has a step-by-step article showing how they used my favorite cable shelf to whip one of their desks into shape.

2. The Cord Hog

The Cord Hog is simple to use, comes in many colors and is appropriately priced….ie: dirt cheap.

3. Under The Desk – DIY Grid

This design puts everything under your desk on a pegboard with wire. While I admire the ingenuity, I’d use velcro instead of wire. It will allow easier removal if you want to take something on the road or replace it. Follow the step by step instuctions at decluttered.com

4. Another DIY project.

A nice cheap solution. I love it when people use items in ways they were never intended.

5. The Cable YoYo

The CableYoyo is an interesting design. If Apple made a cord handler this would be it.

6. Closet Hooks

This video from Unclutterer.com shows a quick way to use closet hooks to kill the chaos.

7. The Cable Winder 

The cable winder is another little plastic doohickey.

UPDATE: My new favorite cord solution is more ambitious but oh so cool. Take a look at what this guy did.

What is your cable taming trick?:

Do you have a favorite way to deal with cable chaos? We’d love to hear from fellow Family Hackers who have tamed the techno beast.

FreeConferenceCall.com overcomes the problem of hosting a conference call without a super-macho phone system. The service lets you easily set up a teleconference with up to 96 yackers. Did I mention it’s FREE?

Another cool feature lets you record the gabfest for playback. The sound file can also be downloaded so Podcasters are using this option to easily record interviews and multi-person shows.

NOTE: If you use SkypeOut, check out the competing service at PowWowNow.com.

Now, let’s tackle the issue of getting the group to agree on a time. How many times have you wanted to slash your wrists during the process of figuring out when a group of people are available to do something. This is where Doodle.ch comes in. A brilliantly simple tool that lets you poll the participants. Below is an example showing fictional Thursday is the best day for plotting world domination. Let the pillaging begin!

This is the background story of how a family with two small kids lives the mobile lifestyle talked about in the best selling book the “4-Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferriss. This blog will feature lots on in depth, detailed posts on how we’ve made “family hacks” to get the most out of our time, money and mobility.