Sunday, August 5, 2012

Working away from office - my mobile office

One of the things I really love about my job is that I may work not only in the office but from home, in coffee shops, while travelling etc. Ok, there is always the danger to spend all free time working this way, but still the fact that you don't have to go to the office in order to move on with your daily tasks is in most cases a big advantage.
Working during a flight: Mobile office!
For example, in the case of a strike of the public means of transportation, I may as well work from home. In case I want to work in a more fun way, I may take my netbook and go to a WiFi-enabled coffee shop or even a park to work from there. It is really important that I rarely depend from hard-copies of documents, so mostly from files that are either stored in the cloud or available in my external 2.5-inch hard disk. In the rare case that e.g. a document is required in printed form for reviewing or I have to go through a large deliverable, then I only have to remember about that before leaving the office.
I like the idea of a mobile office. I have managed to do a significant amount of work during and in-between flights (e.g. preparing my presentation for the next day, reading supporting documents for a meeting or replying offline to emails to be sent later), during commuting to work (e.g. checking my emails using my mobile phone, taking notes for the day, organizing my tasks etc.) and while waiting for my number to come in e.g. a bank (I usually update the twitter accounts of projects). I can take advantage of this short travel times in order to be productive and organize my work.
Trip to Naxos island - working on board!

A collection of useful stuff like notepads, diaries and color pens, tablet or netbook (not all the time!), usb sticks and a portable USB hard disk (for keeping some important files with me all the time), hard copies of papers/deliverables/DoW for reviewing and commenting on, chargers, cables and adapters are usually in my backpack to make this possible.

Of course this is not always good, as every occasion and free time can be really easily turned into additional work time but that's the nature of my job, which I really like!