Make Your Car an Office on Wheels

Does it feel like you spend more time in your car than in your office? You're not alone--even if you don't carpool. A recent wide-ranging study by The Dieringer Research Group revealed that almost 21 million Americans work in their automobiles. It's not really surprising when you consider how many of America's 135 million workers have outbound jobs--salespeople, client-services providers and entrepreneurs in particular. Work pressures being what they are, we've long turned on everything from cell phones to laptops to get a little jump on work outside work. We download e-mail, spruce up presentations and, of course, make lots of client calls while we're gridlocked.

ITAC, the Telework Advisory Group for WorldatWork, calls this "embracing telework"--the new way to describe our decades-old love affair with telecommuting. Not only are a third of us working at home these days, but we're also "mobile working" in planes, trains and automobiles. More than 15 million of us can even be found working at parks and other recreational sites from time to time, according to ITAC, whose web address pretty much says it all: www.workingfromanywhere.org .