One of the most time-consuming preparatory tasks is getting the laptops set up for full-timing. Jett has had a laptop for over a year and hers will be easily prepped for travel. In her case it is largely a matter of switching her one comcast.net email account over to the ourwanderyears.com domain. And maybe some work getting the backup procedure tweaked. But nothing major.
I, on the other hand, have purchased a new laptop and intend to move everything over from my desktop machine to the laptop. This is a HUGE amount of work. Besides email addresses (at least 5 of ’em) and backup, I also have numerous applications (e.g. photo editor, Skype, tax software, Quicken, etc.) that need to be reinstalled and files brought over. The file issue I will address by moving them to a portable hard disk, then moving the disk to the laptop. But reinstalling applications will take a lot of time.
I have been fairly smart, I think, in dealing with email addresses. A couple of months ago I changed my Outlook rules so that emails would be sorted into different bins depending on which email account they were addressed to. Today I set up an email client on the laptop and configured all of the ourwanderyears.com accounts to be received there, then removed those accounts from Outlook on the desktop. So I now have the desktop only receiving emails for accounts that will be closed by September. Any email that appears there is a de facto notice of a need to correct somebody’s address book. Except, of course, for those people and companies that I don’t want to follow me when I leave.
You know who you are.