Typhoid Sarah

It's another one of those up-early-because-I-can't-sleep-but-yay!-the-house-is- quiet-enough-to-blog mornings. The reason I'm up too early is because I was horribly ill last night from taking the pill form of the Typhoid vaccine. I'd felt so bad-ass that I'd found a way to avoid the Typhoid shot several days ago. Now, I'm dreading the fact that I have three more to take this week and wondering if the shot might have been a better option. Hint: When they say drink several large glasses of water; they mean it. Every bit of moisture seems to be sapped from my body. I can barely even blink without my eyelids sticking! (TMI?)

All the vaccines signify a change in my travel plans for 2009. While I'm having to be coy on exactly what they are, let's say there's a significant project or two brewing that's going to involve some extended international travel. While some of the projects are new, the growing obsession with studying entrepreneurship around the world isn't.

I grew up in a family of seven with parents who are teachers; we had no money for international travel. When I got my first reporter job for $21,000 a year-- I wasn't exactly flush with funds either. More than ten years of being a beat reporter with two weeks vacation hasn't helped matters. So ever since I quit BusinessWeek to write my book, I've been making up for all that lost travel time. Last year, I went to Israel, Cannes, London (twice) and Mexico, but the bulk of my traveling was my 15-city-book tour.

That book tour was amazing, but exhausting. Part of what made it so exhausting was that I was wedging tons of small trips into my already packed schedule. So I'd wake up at 5 a.m., go shoot at Yahoo all day, hop on a plane to, say, Omaha, go to a late night tweet up, get up for a few more events the next day, stay out talking to entrepreneurs until 2 a.m., wake up at 4 a.m. for a flight home, write a BusinessWeek column on the plane, then race into Yahoo to shoot more. I'm not exaggerating.

So this year, as my job switches from book promotion back to reporting, my new travel plan is focus, especially because most of my travel is self-funded. I am only doing two types of trips: Ones where there is a very specific reporting ROI-- where I am following a specific, amazing story that has not been written-- or ones with a more literal ROI-- ie, where I'm getting paid to speak to support the former travel.

This means, I'm cutting out most conferences. It's a hard call, because conferences are fun. I'm sad watching via Twitter right now as all my friends arrive in Munich for DLD while I suffer through mini-Typhoid fever on my couch. But I can't be on the road as much as I was in 2008, for the sake of sanity, health, my marriage and my work and that means something has to go. And if I study my travel in 2008, I got way more out of trips where I filled my time meeting with new people without all the distraction and noise of a conference around us. Conferences are great for connecting with people and deepening relationships with people I already know. But increasingly I don't meet a lot of great new sources at them, and I don't get great new stories ideas. By definition, being at an event with a hundred other reporters keeps you in the echo-chamber.

That was the reason I reluctantly skipped Le Web in December. And why I'm on my couch, not in Munich right now. It also means I won't be attending SXSW; I'll be in another country instead. If you read my BusinessWeek columns you know I never attend Ted, and this year is no different. I will still attend AllThingsD and The Lobby (assuming there is a third Lobby), but those are two of the only ones set in stone on my calendar.

So you won't be getting conference circuit news, fun videos and photos here in 2009. But you will (eventually) get genuinely new and different stories that could never come out of a conference. Some of those will appear on the blog, some may appear in my BusinessWeek column, and some you won't read about for quite a while. But I'm pretty sure you also won't read about them anywhere else. And that sort of makes the Typhoid stomach-ache worthwhile.