Remote from Work

Don’t just work from home when you can work anywhere.

View from Beach Tent Door. image by author

With memorial day behind us, it is now summertime. It is time to be out and about and enjoying ourselves. Well, in these corona-times you might not want to be surrounded by the hoards of your fellow man. It is good to stay in and have some self-reflection time. I have enjoyed this confinement. I have worked from home for the better part of a decade.

Ergo, I am not suffering from cabin fever. I do however have a secret. A secret that I have just come to terms with sharing with the rest of the world. With great soul searching I declare:

When I work from home I might be on the beach. Yeah, I work from home, from the beach.

I feel better — my soul is free from that secret burden. I hope you will accept my shame. Let me tell you how I wallow in my beach office sins. I am not talking about simply taking a hotspot to the beach and declaring success. You need a fully-armed and operational battle-station..err…beach office…yes…beach office.

Facility

Yes, you will need a facility on the beach. Because of sand. I have already lost a Nikon point-and-shoot to sand many many years ago. It only takes a couple of sand grains to junk your electronics. Therefore you need to invest in a portable domicile. Preferably a dual-purpose facility you can amortize across many uses.

I am recommending a canopy. A canopy for obvious sunburn avoidance reasons. Additionally, you can use the canopy for different purposes. In your backyard for those cliche hipster parties, as an example. However, for beach office purposes, you need a canopy that you can then convert into a tent. For this reason, I am recommending an EZ UP based solution. Specifically, an EZ-UP Camping Cube combined with a canopy.

Camp and wake on a fall day. image by author

I possessed several canopies over the years and EZ-UP, as a name, does describe how easy they are to use (EZ-UP if you are reading this, you owe me for all this free advertising). The canopy provided the cover and the tent provides privacy. Additionally, the tent adds weight to the canopy so the beach breezes don’t blow your shelter away. Beyond just the privacy element, the tent also keeps the sand out. Now you have a semi-sealed environment to keep the sand away and protect your speakerphone, MacBook/Chromebook from a sandy death.

Your facility will also need additional accoutrements:

1. Couch
2. Heater for cooler weather (place on paver/brick not direct on tent floor)
3. Fan for warmer months (do avoid peak summer — just to hot!)

Connectivity

Now that you have your facility, you need connectivity. I am not recommending hot-spotting your phone. You will need your phone and why overheat your phone — especially if you have a fire-prone Samsung device (burn, literally). Additionally, the surface area of the antennae will not be better than a dedicated hotspot.

As hotspots go, the carriers in North America carry fewer options now than they used to. There are many great 4GLTE hotspots — 5G hotspots are arriving. I currently use an unlocked Netgear Nighthawk M1 as my hotspot. At this point in time wait for the unlocked M5 that supports 5G and WiFi 6 when they become available. If you find a cheap M1 make sure you perform a firmware update immediately. I recommend getting an external antenna. People wax poetically regarding the effectiveness of an external antenna. I have found it useful when near the edge of coverage when all the phones report no bars. So your mileage will vary.

POWER

A MacBook Pro battery can last a good while if you are not doing anything CPU intensive. However, you should always have a bucket-of-amps available to sustain you throughout the day. This is where you go big or go home. Go big with an Anker PowerCore 26800! I have directly observed charging up a MacBook Pro an additional 15% over a thirty-minute period while the Macbook is asleep. Since you are at the beach, power down and jump in the water during lunch break to charge up your computer.

You could always upgrade your power situation with a small generator. At that point, you might as well be camping for multiple days or doing a pop-up beach conference center that now just needs a portable projector.

…

…

Okay, I might do that to up my beach game!

Ah, the truth has set me free! Now, I am not encouraging anyone near a beach to indulge in my vice. Okay, that is exactly what I am doing. At the beach (during the middle of the week), the distractions are low and I can attest to the productivity while remote from work. I do recommend you do a connectivity test and dry run the logistics of deploying your battle station…err…beach office…before you commit for a full day.