If you’re an average American, then you spend 46 hours working every week, which adds up to 2,392 hours a year; and if you started working right after graduating from a four-year college at age 21, and plan to retire at the average age of 62, you will dedicate close to 100,000 hours of your life to work.
If you work in an office, that’s nearly 100,000 hours behind dreaded, bland cubicle walls (give or take a few thousand spent at the water cooler). But since you can’t give up work, why not just give up the office, instead? With a plethora of new technological innovations; like clear wireless internet, cloud services and mobile technologies, working outside the office is not only easier but more encouraged by businesses.
In a recent survey, 62% of businesses were favorable to employees working remotely, while 75% considered it a more accepted way of working. So the time is ripe to break free of the monotony of the office, sitting in your cubicle staring at your Employee of the Month Award from 1991. Instead, check out these seven advancements that can get you started working from anywhere you want.
1. WiFi
In cyberspace, WiFi just may be sliced bread – that is, the biggest thing all following technology gets compared to. It has single-handedly killed cables, letting users connect to the Internet wirelessly and helped spur the proliferation of laptops, thus making it possible to get online and work from nearly anywhere. This is why some national restaurant and retail businesses offer free WiFi to lure in customers. You can work in an active setting among bustling consumers at:
McDonald’s
Starbucks
Panera
Caribou Coffee
Barnes & Noble
Meanwhile, some cities provide free municipal wireless so that you can find a park bench and turn a whole city into your co-workers. They include:
Raleigh
Houston
Seattle
Denver
But if you don’t live in one of those advanced-thinking cities, or you hate Starbucks, you can make your very own WiFi hotspot. Wireless carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile offer small portable WiFi hotspot boxes that link to satellites to provide Internet access to multiple computers in a specific area. You could technically car pool and head to the woods, mountains, beach, lake or bar and start working.
2. Netbooks and Laptops
It doesn’t seem practical lugging around office equipment so that you can work outside the office. Fortunately, netbooks and laptops have been advanced to the point of weighing next to nothing while rivaling and even exceeding in power anything you have sitting on an office desk.
In fact, a variety of netbooks and laptops weigh under three pounds (less than the human brain needed to operate it) for easy portability. Yet, they still pack a punch featuring storage space upwards of 2GB and powerful Intel processors.
3. Mobile Desktops
What if you can’t bring your office computer with you? How will you access all of the necessary data and applications to work? The solution is mobile or remote desktops. By virtualizing your office desktop, you can access it, and everything stored on it, from anywhere. That means jumping on a hotel-lobby computer and pulling up company reports or working in bed on your personal computer at home.
4. Web-Based Apps
But aren’t there just some things that have to be done in an office? What about meetings or project planning? With the many web-based apps available today, your boss may have to get used to seeing employees wearing pajamas, sweat suits or nothing at all to meetings. Web and video conferencing apps like Skype and GoToMeeting allow users to see, speak and present information to each other, even when everyone is scattered across the globe.
Meanwhile, cloud computing office suites like Google Docs make it possible to create or tweak a variety of documents, from text pages to spreadsheets, all online. You don’t need an office computer with a bunch of software, but rather only one that can link to the Internet.
5. Solar Chargers
If the sun is shining outside you have yourself a free outdoor office power source. Why let a low battery send you scurrying back into the office when you can power back up with the sun’s rays? Available in portable rolls, solar chargers connect to variety of devices and convert the power of the sun into electricity. You can feel good being out of the office and environmentally friendly.
6. Ergonomic Outdoor Office Furniture
Not all advancements that’ll get you far away from the office involve computer chips or electro-magnetic waves. To complete the office experience in a very un-office setting, you still need office furniture.
Taking portability to a whole new level, unique retailer Hammacher Schlemmer sells a retractable director’s chair that easily folds into a messenger bag – great for when searching for a place to set up camp or office. Meanwhile, selling on Amazon is an adjustable desk that can fold into a compact position and features a vented surface to keep your laptop from overheating.
CONCLUSION
New technology has pushed a lot of things towards extinction, from courier mail to books. With advancements discussed above, the office just may be next. Either way, it has certainly created a variety of avenues for getting the heck out of the office, but still staying productive.
