If you pry me away from my technology for too long, I get nervous and twitchy. Sometimes I develop a rash. But traveling with a laptop has its own unfortunate side effect: a constantly sore shoulder from lugging it around. The portable PC also cramps my style if I want to head to a social event directly from work; I always worry about it getting lost or stolen.

Surely there must be a better way to leave the office without a laptop yet stay in touch with e-mail and my documents. Thanks to some innovative products and recent technology trends, there now is. Not everybody can lose the laptop entirely, but in many situations where I used to lug it with me, I can leave mine behind.

The quickie
Heading out of the office for a meeting or a lunch? You won't need access to spreadsheets or reports, so you can make do with an e-mail-centric PDA, such as a BlackBerry, a Treo, or a Good G100. When I was a freelancer and taking a ton of meetings at my local Starbucks (which is also a T-Mobile Wi-Fi hot spot), I had great results with the Wi-Fi-capable Palm Tungsten C; I could keep up on my e-mail while waiting for my meetings to start.

Here at the office, the guy next door uses a Tungsten T3 for e-mail on the train; it connects via Bluetooth to his cell phone. Frankly, I can't imagine doing e-mail sans keyboard, and I wouldn't recommend that anybody looking at a connected PDA consider one without a keyboard.

The big downside to the wireless solution is that these little gems are expensive, and service on them isn't cheap. If you're paying for one yourself (as opposed to expensing it), the cost can be hard to swallow, especially if you use the device only during quick outings.

The day extender
Managers love broadband and home offices because the combination enables employees to work at home until they drop (or the kids throw ice cream on the keyboard, whichever comes first). But lugging the laptop back and forth between the home and the office is a big drag.

My biggest back saver: the remote-control program, GoToMyPC. With GoToMyPC installed on my laptop at work, I can lock the machine in its dock, then lock my office door. That helps ease my anxiety about leaving the machine behind. Once I get home, I can connect to it from my desktop machine, almost as if I brought the laptop with me.

I say almost because, even over my solid DSL connection, GoToMyPC's screen-sharing technology isn't as responsive as the machine itself. But for e-mail and other light tasks, it's fine. If I want to access a document, I use GoToMyPC's file-transfer function to copy it to the desktop, work on it there, then zap it back when I'm done.

A tip for heavy remote-control users: Get a second monitor. Most video cards support two monitors now. When I'm connected via GoToMyPC, I devote one monitor to the remote machine and the other to my local PC. It works surprisingly well and makes it easier to keep track of which machine I'm working on.

There are other remote-control solutions, and there's even one built into Windows XP, but I've found GoToMyPC easy to set up and use, and it's very dependable--which is good, because when I leave my laptop at the office, I rely on it in a big way.

I may give up remote control when somebody releases a good system to keep the files on my desktop and my work laptop synchronized over the Internet; start-up DataPod is about to introduce a product that does this.

The remote office
If you need access to your office files and you're heading someplace where you know you can commandeer a PC, I have an alternative to remote control. It's the Migo, a little USB key that lets you carry a clone of your computer with you. Plug the Migo into any other PC, and you'll have your desktop, your Favorites, any folders you want, and your Outlook files.

The Migo is secure; the work you do on your borrowed machine is stored on only the Migo, and data on it is password-encrypted. When you plug the Migo back into your home PC, it updates all the work you've done while you were away. It's a good solution if you can be assured of borrowing a computer at your destination.

The only flaw in the Migo plan: If you connect to an Exchange e-mail server through a virtual private network (VPN), it won't work because the Migo can't transport your network connection. But if you're a POP e-mail user or if you want to migrate among PCs that have the VPN setup you need, the Migo is a really creative, low-cost way to take your computer with you--without actually taking it with you.

At one time or another, I've used all of the solutions above. But none of them really replace a laptop. When I want to work on an airplane or in my hotel room, I need to bring my own gear with me. Even a modern PDA, which can have as much computing power as the laptops of a few years ago, won't cut it. And just as I don't think we'll ever go back to the days of using other peoples' phones, I don't foresee the day when we'll completely forgo our own personal, portable computing devices: personal is simply where it's at.

But it is possible to leave the office and work productively without a laptop. You can get your work done, and your shoulder will be the better for it.