Today, I decided to give everybody an oral peak in my business settings, and in particular how I us a mobile office instead of a set location.

First off, I don’t have an official office, or at least one dedicated to my side businesses.  I guess you could call my “laptop and laptop case” my official office, because wherever I go with it, I can do work and be productive!  To be honest though, I probably spend at least 60% of my time in a spare bedroom that has a desktop computer in it as my “unofficial” office!  While I don’t use the desktop as much as I use my laptop while I’m in the room, sometimes I do have both up doing work.  When a guest stays the night, I go down into our media/library room and work there instead (I really do love having a laptop!).

At work I’m limited, my employer has a proxy server than limits me from going to sites such as gmail.com, etc…  So instead I use the local library (which is about 2 miles away) as a critical part of my mobile “side business” office!  Using the library as a mobile office has served me well for years.  I go at lunch so the crowd is minimal (maybe 10 people come and go the entire hour that I’m there), and it’s naturally quiet.  Internet access is provided, the air is perfect with heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, and there is even a small pond outside if I want to escape for a second and take nature in.  In may ways it’s like a Corporate Park area!

Lately, I’ve been using my time at the library to do research and learn more.  Why pay someone to teach you when you have a wireless connection at the library, not to mention all the books I could pickup and read…  The library is something that we all pay taxes to run and a lot of us just let it go to waste?  Why not take advantage of the potential to use it as a mobile office?  Plus, when you are traveling, most cities have their own library, just sitting there, neglected, waiting from someone to come in and use the great free services!

It I were retired or had enough money to stop living my life in a cubicle, I would take advantage of the great mobile office like environment that libraries provide!  I would then travel more, using the mobile office setting that is available in almost every city (and most of them provide internet access at their library too).

If your on vacation, the local Library’s mobile office is just sitting there like a  faithful dog, waiting for you to pay it some attention!

Even if you don’t like the library, perhaps go to one and try it out for an hour.  Try to think of it as a mobile office instead of a place to borrow books, you might surprise yourself and find that you can do a lot of work there!  For instance, this entire article was written at the library that is less than 2 miles away from where I work…

It’s free!!!  Try it, you may find that it beats paying big bucks to rent office space!

Bests,

Don