It's easier than ever to reinvent your commute

Enter the time machine and go back to 2019. Sometime before the COVID pandemic radically altered about every facet of modern life. In those Before Times, it's estimated that less than 10 percent of the U.S. workforce worked full-time from home. The office was where it was at – with breakrooms, all-hands-on-deck meetings, and shared birthday cakes in the conference room for beloved (or at least tolerated) co-workers.

Since March of 2020, however, the landscape changed. A new analysis from the Pew Research Center finds that some 35 percent of workers with jobs that can be done remotely say they work from home all of the time. While that’s down from 43 percent in January 2022 and 55 percent in October 2020, it still illustrates a significant shift in where Americans go to work.

But "work-from-home" is only part of the story. For a huge number of us, home offices only exist as a place to store a computer or keep a bit of paperwork. When COVID hit and office buildings went dark, many of us took the concept of remote work far beyond a spare room in the house.

Sure, before COVID there were a number of us spending our working hours in coffee shops or shared spaces. Sales reps have been on the road even before "Death of a Salesman" was printed in 1949. Touring musicians and flight attendants rarely had a home base to conduct business. But the pandemic in 2020 changed things. It jumpstarted the quest for almost all facets of the American workforce to creatively redefine what "working remotely" means.

PACKS TO BE REMOTE

Remote Equipment (a company fortuitously named a few years before the pandemic hit) makes backpacks that enable folks to redefine the concept of remote. Some of us can meet daily deadlines and commitments at the quiet coffee shop down the block. Others handle their assigned tasks and responsibilities from some of the coolest, kick-ass places on the planet. And a whole slew of us work remotely from a mixture of spots that range from the spare bedroom of a friend to the back of a sprinter van parked inside a National Park.

The bags Remote Equipment makes are designed to enable a lifestyle and workplace no longer constrained by the address of the office. Quite simply, our bags are for the active, on-the-go lifestyle.

On this website, we'll tell stories of 21st-century workers ­– people who have carved out career paths that either require or allow them to work remotely. But it won't be just folks pecking away on a laptop in coffee shops (not that there's anything wrong with that). Our goal is to spotlight fascinating folks who call their offices some of the coolest places on Earth and who get to work with some of the most interesting people around.

In this space, we'll highlight the people and careers redefining what working remotely means. Hopefully, these spotlights will educate and connect us, and perhaps inspire us all to be a little more remote.