Life on the Move: The Benefits of Going Portable

It’s easier than you might think to live a very portable lifestyle, and an ever-increasing number of people now view their ‘home’ as simply a hub to return to in order to regroup, ready for their next adventure.

You could, if you really wanted to, go totally mobile; washing your clothes in public launderettes and sleeping in hotels or friends’ houses, but that’s probably a step too far for most people.

But you don’t have to go to extremes, and with more and more employers offering flexible working conditions – including the opportunity to work from home – living the hermit lifestyle doesn’t have to mean giving up on having a regular income.

If you decide to take the plunge, there are a few simple steps you can take that will soon have you working, resting and playing wherever you feel like it, rather than being tied to a single building.

Upwardly mobile

Probably the most significant part of your life to make work is your career, as you’ll need money to live – so consider whether you might need a change of job, in order to be able to do it from anywhere.

Employers are legally obliged to consider requests for flexible working conditions, and can only really say no if there’s a good reason to do so, so a large proportion of admin jobs could potentially be made into mobile roles thanks to external online access to company networks.

A lot of design jobs could probably be done on the move too, from architecture and fashion to web design, so consider investing in a good-quality laptop with good graphics if it’s likely to be an important tool of your trade.

Head in the cloud

If you’re going to be computing on the move, you’re going to need to embrace cloud technology – and many people have already done so without even realising.

Web-based email accounts, as opposed to those that download mail from a server to your local hard drive, let you log in on different devices and still see all of your messages.

Consider extending this to include all of your work files, as there are online storage services that can instantly and automatically sync local folders with online storage space, making sure that the most recent version of all of your files is accessible from anywhere.

This is especially useful if you use a smartphone, as some of these services have apps available that will give you access to your files from your phone, without you having to hook it up to your laptop.

In this way, you are just a little bit more ‘free’ than if you needed cables to connect everything up – helping you one step further along the road to a fully mobile lifestyle, without you having to go back to basics in order to achieve it.

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