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It's another grim day on the road. At 11 p.m., you're finally back in your hotel room after a 16-hour sprint -- and you face another two hours of work to catch up with the e-mail that has come in since morning. What's a CEO to do?
The best way to avoid that late-night e-mail crush is to deal with the messages at odd moments during the day. And the best solution for that is a Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry (from $299 with service from wireless providers AT&T Wireless (AWE), Cingular, Nextel (NXTL), or T-Mobile) or a palmOne (PLMO) Treo 600 ($499 with service from Sprint PCS (PCS), AT&T Wireless, or T-Mobile).
WI-FI SEARCH. Either device can hook into your corporate mail system and deliver your mail securely. With practice, you can tap out messages fairly quickly on their microkeyboards. And the latest software advances even let you read many kinds of attachments.
A wireless card for your laptop is another way you can put otherwise wasted time to work. Wi-Fi (high-speed wireless Net access) is great, and most laptops built in the last year or two have Wi-Fi radios built in. Service is only intermittently available, though. You may find public Wi-Fi access points, or hotspots, at the airport or a hotel meeting room, but probably not in a conference room at a customer site or in a limo stuck in traffic.
The alternative is a wide-area network card that uses the wireless phone system, and your best bet here is Verizon Wireless' (a joint venture of Verizon (VZ) and Vodafone (VOD) data network. The carrier has begun rolling out a service it calls Broadband Access, which provides data speeds of 200 to 300 kilobits per second.
FLYING BLACKOUT. Such high-speed service is now available only in the Washington (D.C.) area and western San Diego County, but Verizon will light up additional cities this year and plans to cover most metropolitan areas by the end of 2005. Where Broadband Access isn't available, coverage automatically switches to Verizon's standard data network, which provides dialup connection speeds of 40 to 50 kb/second.
To use the Verizon data network, you'll need an AirPrime PC3220 PC Card adapter ($130, after $100 rebate with activation), which works on any Windows laptop. Unlimited data service is $80 a month.
These wireless tools will keep you online just about anywhere except in a plane, and so far, air travelers have no good solution. So flying time is still a good opportunity to relax or, if you must, work offline. Either will be easier if you can create your own little comfort zone in the otherwise nerve-jangling environment of a plane.
MUSIC COCOON. You can't do anything about the seating, the beverage carts, or the air quality, but a good personal sound system can make those annoyances easier to take. I recommend the combination of the Apple (AAPL) iPod mini or original iPod ($249 to $499) and a pair of the new sound-isolating headphones from Etymotic or Shure ($99 to $499).
Despite a growing field of challengers, the iPod remains the best and easiest-to-use music player around. Not to mention the sensual good looks of either the chrome-and-white standard or the colorful anodized-aluminum mini. And if you don't want to just chill out with some music, the iPod can also play recorded books and other spoken-word content from Audible.com.
The isolating headphones look a bit like earbuds. But their silicone rubber (very quiet) or foam (even quieter) tips -- the products come with an assortment of each -- fit inside your ear canal, sealing out ambient noise. Once you turn on the music, you're not going to hear that squalling baby two rows back. You're also going to miss PA announcements, so if your fellow passengers start looking concerned, you may want to pull out an earpiece and listen.
INFORMATION INSURANCE. A final suggestion is less a time saver than a potential (professional) life saver. If you travel with a laptop, odds are that some information crucial to the purpose of the trip is on the hard drive, be it a presentation, spreadsheet, or other data.
Laptops get lost, stolen, or dropped, and sometimes refuse to work for no apparent reason. You always want a backup copy of that information. The easiest way to carry it is on a memory key that plugs into the USB port of any computer and will allow you to use your data on a borrowed machine in a pinch. Starting at under $25 for a 64-megabyte version, they're cheap peace of mind.