Many of you may have noticed the silence of the Ausmerican over recent weeks...well months in fact!

We are on schedule to leave Prague next week, spend some time in Washington DC and experience the Obama inauguration, work, visit family then head to Wellington, New Zealand in March.

Now that our last shipment of belongings has left it's time to reflect on how a change of assignment affects the life and work of the 'trailing spouse'.

In my situation, a full-time teleworker, remaining productive, contactable and efficient is important to me and relies on an infrastructure; well organized office, desktop computers, high speed internet, Skype, VoIP phone, my bookmarks, printer, scanner... the list goes on. But what happens to all of this when you change locations?

We received confirmation of our Wellington assignment about 6 months before we were due to arrive there. In this period work needs to progress as usual but the work environment changes significantly. First the planning; Travel, accomodation in DC (innauguration week - Good luck!), shipments by sea and air, clear out clutter before packing, do we ship a vehicle?... wrong side of the road, no we have to sell it. How do we ship our pet? What local accounts to we have to close? Internet, mobile phone....leave them to the last minute.

Planning, details, lists, and notes. Any expat that has been through a move knows how much work this involves, but maintaining work productivity in a home office while that household is dissolving around you adds another challenge.

It's now about three months until we arrive in Wellington, here's what I've done so far to keep working in this transient environment.

Before the 'comfortable' desktop gets shipped away, it's important to start working on a laptop to practice working solely in that environment. In my situation this means a work laptop with VPN access and a personal laptop that also serves as my desk telephone using Skype. Initially you will miss your usual applications and configurations from your desktop, those shortcuts and bookmarks that you use daily often without thinking about them, until they aren't there. Replicate them on your laptop.

Using online applications is an innovation that has improved this task over recent years; Some of my recent migrations away from the machine constrained Outlook are Google's gmail and calendar. Remember the Milk task list manager,  and Evernote for recording other snippets of information. This move away from Outlook is something I've been trying to do for sometime, I think I'm finally getting there.

Voice communication hasn't been a major impediment because I've been using Skype for a long time. It's proven to be highly reliable and cost effective using the SkypeIn and SkypeOut functions as well as SMS, conference calling etc. For those times that I want to give callers the option of whether to call into a conference call or not I've established a Conference Call Bridge using www.freeconferencecall.com .

If, like me you are the type who prefers to work from printed copies of documents, get used to living without the printer.

I've managed to maintain my productivity and I'm now down to an office in a 'carry on' bag. The only project that has suffered is the Trailing Spouse Network. This site and associated communities . I promise it will return, with more informative Netcasts and ways for other trailing spouses to contribute and earn some income from participating... stay tuned.

My next challenge in maintaining productivity while on the move is getting reliable, affordable high speed internet. I'll let you know how I go with that.

-- Jeff