When all you need to work is a laptop and an internet connection the number of places you can work from almost anywhere these days. When compared to traditional jobs that require you to be based in a factory, shop or even just a physical office with access to paper documents, working remotely is an exciting alternative.
To this end thousands of businesses around the world are now being run completely remotely with their team based all over the world. Whilst this easily works for small sole trading companies, the rise in technology dedicated to remote working means this approach can scale too. One example is a company called Automattic, creators of WordPress.com and many associated technologies for the popular WordPress publishing platform, who were founded in 2005 and were valued at over $1 billion as of May 2014 with an almost entirely distributed workforce. Whatever your business aspirations geography is becoming less of an issue.
When working on a business that allows you to work from anywhere it ones up a lot of new opportunities for yourself and people you work with. You can work out of your local coffee shop, work from home to schedule your time around family life, you can jump on a plane and travel the world whilst working at the same time or you can even rent office space and be content with the fact that you have the flexibility to dip out of the office every now and then, plus you will have less downtime when taking unavoidable trips.
With so many people now choosing to work remotely a new type of casual office space has started to emerge, the so called anti-café or co-working space. These are places where you can connect with people working in other businesses and get the benefits of working around other people without necessarily being tied to a single space. These co-working spaces will often hook you into a local community of business people and events that can help you to bring your business to the next level.
When you first start working remotely, if you haven’t done it before, you might not know how you work best so it is important to trial a variety of environments. You may also find that you work best on different types of things in different types of environment. For example you might find that you tend to work best in public places like coffee shops on things that require a certain amount of creativity but need a completely silent environment at home for writing or working on strategy.
One of the biggest things that I find influences my workspace is music so I always make sure to have access to some offline playlists and a decent pair of headphones. There is even a website where you can stream the ambient sounds of a coffee shop to help get you in the zone when you are somewhere else. However what is most important is understanding what helps you to work and finding those key productive environments wherever you may be working from.
What Next
They key things that you’ll need to be aware of are likely to be power sources and WiFi, although sometimes having some offline time can be just as if not more productive depending on your skillset. Whilst finding a local coffee shop shouldn’t be too hard, even in smaller towns, affordable office space is another thing. There is not really a single source that can be recommended as it will be different in every area, however your best bet is to ask other people that work remotely in your area, ask people at meetup groups or check out sites like ShareDesk.net.