By Ed Hewitt

updated 1:46 p.m. ET July 10, 2008

Leave the laptop behind, dump the PDA and otherwise abandon anything that could be called "always on" — so goes a frequent recommendation to stressed vacationers. The thinking is that if it's too easy to stay in touch via phone and e-mail with work, social obligations and the daily grind, you'll never really get away from it all.

Sounds like sound advice — except that I'm not sure I agree. I have found that sacrificing a little bit of free time to staying connected while traveling typically makes exit and re-entry — when the most draining work of travel and vacationing takes place — go much more smoothly. In the end, checking in a few times during your vacation is a small price to pay to avoid returning home to a chaotic swarm of neglected responsibilities.

Wired is as wired does
Some folks wouldn't take a walk without all their devices, while others can't wait to jettison everything and get off the communication grid. When my own five-year-old cell phone suffered some water damage last week, I asked a tech-fiend friend about PDA choices on the market. His reply: "Dude, wait two weeks until the new iPhone comes out. The LMNOP and Integrated Jubee Jubee on the new phone are going to be way better."

Do we need to ask if he is going to stay connected on the road? Last I saw he had sent a link to real-time GPS tracking of his hike through the Rockies; not only is he going to stay connected, he is going to make us all stay tuned as well. This article is not for him.

Tools of the trade
Laptop, cell phone, PDA — take 'em along, leave 'em home, take your pick? Let's say most of us have three primary e-mail addresses (work, home, alternate) and matching triple voice mails (work, home, cell). That's a lot of stuff to check while you're trying to unwind; a couple of hours can pass in a blink by the time you have gotten through them all.

My recommendation is to find a middle way. I usually bring my laptop and leave the PDA behind (I don't own one — yet); my reasoning here is that I would rather have full, high-powered and ergonomically convenient access on my laptop for short bursts of time than continuous (I would say unrelenting) but more fluid access on a smaller, more portable device. Others will take just the opposite approach. Let's look at the pros and cons of staying connected, as well as some tips on how to keep things under control if you choose to take your tools with you.

PROS

Less to do before and after your trip: As mentioned above, I believe the most compelling reason to stay connected on the road is to reduce the strain of both leaving and returning. As comfortable as home can be, few things can diminish the glow of a good trip quite as quickly as arriving home to find that two weeks of the detritus of modern life has been accumulating in your absence and that it'll take days to clear it out.

I would say that the only thing worse than a pile of junk mail in a plastic USPS box and fading newspapers on your stoop is a "voice mail box is full" message on your answering machine and a couple dozen screens worth of e-mail on your first login when you get home.

And it's not just when you get home. Before you depart, leaving notes for dog walkers, putting your house in order and letting everyone who might want your attention know that you will be away is almost always more trouble than checking e-mail for a few minutes in a hotel room every day. While traveling, if you can dispatch tasks and information with short, concise e-mails written in a few seconds during your trip, there is a lot less accumulated clutter when you return, and less to do before you leave.

Fewer surprises: The only thing worse than returning from a trip to an inbox full of nuisance e-mails is finding out too late that a major problem has come up. Keeping in touch with work and personal e-mail semi-regularly is the best way both to keep on top of big events. It also gives you ...

Increased control: Trying to fix big problems from a hotel phone, or worse yet a pay phone, is not a fun place to find yourself. If you have a speedy laptop stocked with all your likely contacts, you'll be well positioned to deal with anything that goes wrong.

Lowered expectations: An "away" or "vacation" auto response message followed up with an e-mail with a footer that reads "sent from my Blackberry" lets you get away with murder in terms of brevity and specificity — folks are just grateful to get a reply so they can keep working on or stop worrying about whatever it is for which they needed your attention.

Access is improving — dramatically: On a recent trip, I booted up my laptop to type out a few notes during some down time in a county park, and noticed another person with a Dunkin Donuts coffee on a picnic table doing the same. That sure looks like someone on the Internet, I thought, and so I did a scan for wireless signals — and there it was, an unrestricted access point provided for free by the county. These days, many municipalities are working toward providing widespread wireless access.

The upside of all this is that you may not be forced into a crab-like position trying to work at your laptop crouched over a night table in a dark hotel room — head to the park, put a foot in the lake, check your e-mail. It ain't bad.

CONS

Work follows you everywhere: And I mean everywhere — a gurgling, vibrating PDA can be tougher to resist rescuing than a crying baby. And I absolutely admit it is the rare traveler who can check a load of e-mails, close the laptop, forget immediately about everything she just read and go back to her summer reading.

Iffy access: Searching for Wi-Fi signals, fiddling with access and cables, and dealing with hotel connection speeds that go up and down as other patrons log on and off can be frustrating work. And if you are traveling far afield, all that equipment might as well be a bag of rocks. On a trip to the Olympic Peninsula a couple years back, folks in the group had laptops, cell phones, PDA's — but they wound up using pay phones along the logging roads just to stay in touch with each other, let alone folks back home.

Expense: Many hotels charge around $10 a day just to connect to their Internet service, which ain't cheap. Worse yet, 24-hour access tends to start at noon and end at noon to synch up with check-in times, so if you're not online every day, but set aside a lunch hour at some point to check all your mail, you can end up paying for two days' access just to get through a couple hours of work.

E-mail is a black hole: Some folks can't help themselves when confronted with a full inbox; they can't just dip in where necessary, they have to do a full gainer off the high board and soak everyone sitting near the pool while they're at it. However, there truly is no rule that you must respond to every inanity that arrives in your inbox, and it's your own fault if you permit folks to believe otherwise.

You'll never keep up anyway: Well, it's true.

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