Remote working from your vehicle

A few tips on working from a vehicle following 20 years of remote working experimentation

So, now many of us have been unwittingly forced into remote work for a few weeks, I thought I’d explain my somewhat unusual (but I believe fantastic) remote work environment, having spent the last 20 years trialling different remote set-ups.

As you’ll no doubt have guessed from the title, I work from a car. I started working from a car about 2 years ago, and now I’d estimate I spend 80–90% of my working life in a vehicle. Here’s a few reasons why:

THE GOOD BITS:

1. Focus

Working from home is a never-ending stream of real or imagined distractions, breaking your flow and causing you to context switch. Whether it’s real things like kids vying for your attention or imagined things like “hmmm, might as well do some washing up while I’m here or nip over to sexy-ladies.biz” there’s always some excuse to not knuckle down. Perhaps others are more psychologically disciplined than me, but if there’s a doughnut in the house “for the weekend” I’ll spend the entire day thinking about the doughnut, if not eating it. Much better to just not have doughnuts in the house. To that end, working in a space that is free from distractions makes it psychologically easier to not have to keep fighting the urge. Sheds at the bottom of the garden can offer this but they’re always a just few steps away from distractions. Coffee shops can be a nice break on occasion but they have a myriad of other distractions (namely, people, noise and climate).

2. Freedom

I love having the option of a different view every day. Rarely do I exercise that option as I tend to almost exclusively park at the same lake (below) near my house. That said, it’s important for me that the option is there. Also, if you’re privileged enough to be able to juggle around your workday, you can spend your breaks nipping to the shop or changing location. Obviously you probably shouldn’t be driving to a lake if your country is in a COVID-19 related lockdown.

3. Deep work

My favourite type of work is undistracted work for extended periods of time (read ‘Deep Work’ by Cal Newport for more). Parking up somewhere quiet with nobody around other than a few geese is perfect for this.

4. Connection with nature

As I mentioned before, I tend to park almost exclusively next to a lake. Spending your day listening to the water lapping against the shore, watching the seasons change and spending lunch breaks on walks and meditation sessions around the lake is pretty idyllic. Many a moment of work based anxiety has been mitigated with the help of my surroundings.

THE CHALLENGES

1. Climate

If you’re a sensitive little flower like me, your tolerance for an imperfect climate will be an annoyance. I started off working from a hybrid car which did an OK job of controlling the climate. I then spent the winter of 2019 in the back of a luxury van (above) with no heating other than a little camping gas heater. That was a little challenging. I’m kinda OK with the cold but the fact that it was dark by 3:30pm and sub-zero a lot of the time meant I was running video meetings where people couldn’t see me, which was a challenge. I’m now on my 3rd remote vehicle which is entirely electric. This means I can park up for a 10 hour stretch and have the car maintain whatever temperature I desire.

2. Power

To get power from your vehicle into your electronic devices, your best bet is an inverter that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket, and then turns that into something you can plug a laptop into. I use this one which was cheap and has worked pretty much flawlessly. You wouldn’t wanna plug a tumble dryer in but a laptop and a few USB devices are fine. An alternative would be to install a leisure battery in your vehicle but I never took that step.

While I was using the van and the hybrid, I had to call out the breakdown services on 5 occasions because charging my laptop throughout the day meant the vehicle’s battery was dead. Four times, this meant less than an hour’s delay to getting home. Once it was a 5 hour delay. I used to mitigate this by nipping into a nearby coffee shop to work for an hour here and there, and then hoping I’d get a table near a power outlet. Definitely not ideal. Now I have the electric car, this problem has disappeared. I charge my laptop and other electronic devices all day, plus have the climate control on and this typically uses about 10–15 miles of range per day (it’s about 10°C outside and I have the interior set to about 19°C).

N.B. even if it’s 10°C outside, the car will typically use the AC rather than heater as the interior of the car will be hotter than the outside.

3. Connectivity

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run Google’s speed test widget on my phone. Definitely in the hundreds. Every time I drive somewhere new, irrespective of whether I’m driving there for work or pleasure, I run a speed test and screen capture the result. I use my phone’s 4G connection pretty much exclusively for all my laptop’s bandwidth. If you’re a regular video conference user, you need a minimum of 5Mbps Download and about 2Mbps Upload. Most places I have have 3–4 times this which gives a decent bit of breathing room. My phone contract is an unlimited data plan with Three (be careful of your carrier’s definition of unlimited) which I think for a normal consumer would cost about £22 per month. I typically use about 70–80Gb per month.

4. Posture

I’ve loved the move from the van to the electric car but the posture is a bit of a problem. I tend to sit in the front passenger seat 70% of the time and the rear passenger seat about 30% of the time (when I want to be less exposed). Using the front seat has the advantage of the seat adjustment, but because your feet are much closer to your bum than they would be in an office chair, I find I end up putting more pressure on my coccyx. The van didn’t have this problem as the ergonomics were much closer to an office chair.

To help with the ergonomics, I use an Ikea Byllan laptop support pillow which is pretty good (and cheap).

One glaringly obvious error I made initially was to stay in the driver’s seat. It took me about 3 weeks to realise there were other seats in the car that weren’t encumbered by the steering wheel :)

That’s it. If the above sounds semi-appealing, give it a whirl. I’d love to hear your comments if you thought the above was useful/mental :)