A few people have asked me just what we take with us for our mobile office as location independent professionals.
I have to be honest and say that even though between the two of us we have been traveling with only around 42kg (packed in one hard suitcase and one 65 litre backpack) for the past 5 months, we’re probably still carrying quite a bit of superfluous ‘stuff’…
Here’s a list of the tech gear we have:
- My Sony Vaio laptop – very light, slim model
- J’s Apple Mac laptop – very chunky & heavy compared with mine
- A logitech microphone for skype calls
- Small pair of Canon binoculars
- Charger for our Canon SD700IS camera
- Smaller black softbag to store our many laptop cables & laptop lock
- A 120GB portable hard drive
- At least 3 travel adapters
- Another bag to store other charges (mobile phones etc.) & cables in (black, long bag)
- A laptop ‘skin’ bag to keep all papers, some installation CDs, DVDs etc. together in.
As far as the rest of our office equipment goes, here is what we’ve currently got:
- A mini office set from Muji (this has some post it notes, a mini
highlighter, a mini stapler, an eraser, a small roll of sellotape, a
pencil sharpener and 2 pencils) - J’s drawing & painting kit (handily kept in a black case)
- A selection of books for inspiration & ideas (currently have The
E-myth, You Squared, Small is the new Big, Hypnotic Writing and a
couple more of J’s illustration books) - A selection of USB drives for additional storage & easy sharing of files
- J’s WACOM drawing tablet
Next time, this is what I think we’ll do differently…
Leave out the following:
- Most of the many additional cables we brought with us ‘just in case’
- J’s WACOM tablet
- The books (this leaves us free to pick up new ones along the way)
- The Logitech microphone (will bring a smaller, sleeker version)
- Some of the papers, CDs and DVDs we brought with us
This is what I think we’ll bring in addition:
- A small, portable printer (J needs this for his work – we thought about it before then decided we wouldn’t bother as they’re kind of expensive but I think it would be very useful)
- More adapters (although if we come back to Grenada we won’t need these as the plugs are the same as the UK here)