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These outdoor essentials will make doing your usual 9-5 a breeze

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Everything you need to work in the garden this summer

The sun is finally shining, and it’s beckoning us outside. After being cooped up in our makeshift home offices for two years, peeking out of our windows and dialling into Zoom calls from stuffy cupboards under the stairs, we can finally work outdoors and get our tan on.

But the realities of working outside in the garden or on the balcony, with the sun shining on your face, glare hitting the screen and your laptop constantly overheating might make it less of an enjoyable affair than you first thought.

While you might have already cracked the formula with our WFH essentials, working from outdoors might not be so straightforward.

If you want to work well this summer when you’re outdoors, we’ve rounded up a survival kit worth of gadgets to help ensure you’re just as productive outside as you are when working in.

We’ve found a product for every possible working outdoor annoyance, and then put that product through rigorous testing on our north London balcony and in our parent’s garden to ensure it successfully fixes that problem.

With this set-up, you won’t need access to many (if any) plug sockets, so you can work well without having to thread an extension lead out of the window. We’ve thought about sun glare, noise, persistent and fast access to the internet, your laptop overheating and, of course, you over-heating.

If you’ve gotten used to using an external monitor over the years and think you’ll miss the extra screen real estate while working outdoors, you’re going to want to get yourself a portable monitor. Our top pick is the Asus ROG Strix XG17AHPE, a super-thin sleek-looking portable monitor. It’s intended for gamers, so it’s incredibly high-spec, giving you a 240 Hz maximum refresh rate and a buttery smooth, tear-free experience. Maybe a little overkill, but it has one of the largest displays we’ve seen (17.3in) on a screen for the purposes of portability.

It’s not cheap, so we’d only recommend this if you intend to use the monitor on other occasions – it can plug into smartphones via the USB-C and micro-HDMI port, for instance, so might be a good investment if you also plan on playing some PUBG on a bigger screen. While it comes with a folio-style folding stand, it’s not super versatile if you want to move it into specific configurations. You can buy it with a tripod if you need some elevation, but this does bump up the price.

To use, all you do is plug the monitor using the included USB-C cable into your laptop and off you go, no mains power socket needed. There’s a 7,800mAh battery, giving you up to 3.5 hours of use at 240 Hz. An hour of charge will give you an extra two hours of use.

While the matte-finish display does get incredibly bright, you will want to set the brightness to maximum if you want to be able to see the display outdoors. Even then, the glare still does get in the way when the sun hits it directly on, so we’d recommend buying a sun shade or an extra screen protector, reviewed below.

If the Asus monitor is still too small for your luxurious outdoor setup, you’ll be hard pressed to find a portable monitor any bigger. The next best thing is a large monitor with a built-in USB-C hub, like the 27in Dell P2723QE, which removes the need for excess cables.

You need access to at least one mains outlet to use the monitor, but once that’s ticked off, you can just plug the included USB-C cable directly into your laptop to get it all connected. This keeps your workspace clutter-free, but also does the neat job of mirroring your laptop screen and charging it at the same time. No extra plug needed. On the rear, you’ve got USB ports, an ethernet, USB-C, HDMI and display port, so you won’t need to connect anything to your laptop. Plus the monitor looks incredible.

There is some passive anti-glare, but like the Asus monitor, you will need to get yourself a sun shade or a screen protector, because there is still a noticeable amount of glare when working outdoors. It’s not a flashy monitor in any sense of the word – there’s no cool features like adaptive refresh rates or HDR, and it’s not an OLED screen. But what you do get is a sharp 4K picture that will ultimately get you working more productively outdoors. And when you want to take it inside, you’ll be able to work productively and clutter-free there, too.

One of the biggest annoyances you’ll face when working outdoors is not physically being able to see your screen because of sun glare. There are a couple of different ways you can get around this, and one of them involves the use of a laptop or monitor sunshade.

There aren’t many (good) options here, but Base12’s laptop shade does a really great job. OK, it’s basically a tent for your laptop, but it really does work well for making your laptop screen visible, even if it is a bit overkill. It’s quite tall, so you pretty much block out any sun from hitting you face-on, potentially negating the reason why you hopped outside. There are neat openings on either side of the shade for your cables to be easily threaded through, as well as pockets for you to put any of your belongings.

It’s pretty lightweight, which is a bad and good thing. Your 15in or smaller laptop will need to be heavy enough to weigh it down or it might go flying, but it’s light enough to carry around. The only issue is that it’s pretty difficult to get it folded back up into its original compressed shape, so much so you might end up just securing it flat with a rubber band.

Best: Screen protector for sun glare

If you want something a little less bulky and more, well, discreet, then you’re going to want to get yourself a screen protector – specifically one that fends off sun glare. It’s not completely effective at limiting all glare – you’ll need a literal shade for that – but it does stop most of it, making working outdoors a much more comfortable experience. If you want to put a figure on it, then ViaScreens says that its matte screen protectors block out 80 per cent of screen glare.

The sun barely got in the way at all when we applied this one to our laptop. It comes with an applicator, dust removers and alignment tabs to ensure you get the best fit. It’s a little fiddly, as all screen protectors are, but there’s a helpful video to show you how to get it on perfectly.

ViaScreens sells matte screen protectors for almost every single laptop model. We’ve tested it on our MacBook Pro, but you can pick one up for your laptop, monitor or tablet, and they all have different price tags.

So, you want to use a big monitor outdoors but you’ve got nothing to plug it into? You need to get yourself a portable power station. Our pick here is Anker’s powerhouse II 400. Anker is one of our favourite brands for anything charging related.

First off, this thing might look small, but it’s extremely heavy. There’s a good reason for that though, and it’s because it has a huge 388.8Wh battery inside. You’ll find three USB-A ports, a USB-C port – good for charging your laptop – as well as (amazingly) a 12V car socket, a 300W power outlet for any plugs you might need and two DC ports. There’s also a flashlight on the side. And best of all, you can use all these ports simultaneously.

Anker estimates that you can get around 23 phone charges, 5 laptop charges, 11 iPad charges and 20 camera charges before having to recharge the devices itself. And don’t worry, the digital screen tells you how much battery you’ve got left, so you won’t be caught unawares. It takes about five hours to recharge the power station though, so you might need to do it a few times during a working week if you’re continuously powering an external monitor.

Overheating can have a really big detriment on your laptop’s performance, and when you’re working outdoors, the risk of it overheating increases. To resolve it, you’ll want to get yourselves a laptop cooling pad.

Our pick here is the Klim glacier laptop cooler. It has six powerful fans, ensuring our laptop stayed icy cool while working outdoors. It plugs into your laptop with a USB cable, so you don’t need to plug it into a wall outlet, and it has a spare USB slot on the cooler itself, meaning you won’t lose any of your precious ports. You can control the speed of the fans from the bottom of the cooler, with a maximum of 1,200 revolutions per minute for each fan. Because it’s a cooling pad intended for gamers, you will get some flashy RGB lights on the side which you can make look less embarrassing by hitting a button and changing it to a static colour.

There’s also an in-built elevation stand behind the cooler, allowing you to angle your laptop up. It works with laptops up to 17.3in in size, coincidentally the same size as the portable Asus monitor above, and there are little feet on the bottom to stop your laptop from sliding down.

If you struggle to get wifi outdoors in the garden and find yourself hotspotting from your mobile phone’s data plan, you’re going to want to buy a wifi extender that boosts the wifi signal far enough for you to connect to it in the garden. The TP-Link RE650 AC2600 isn’t the best-looking thing in the world, but it does the trick.

While it takes a little while to set up, the Tether app makes it really simple to connect your router to the extender. It uses dual-band 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz connections, meaning you should get top speeds when working outdoors and dialling in to Zoom calls. It plugs directly into any power socket, so you can get it as close to your garden as possible.

Our speeds were relatively high when we connected to the extender from a couple of metres away from the house, so there was nothing lost there in terms of loading bars.

Working outdoors can get unexpectedly loud and there’s no better way of shutting out the noise than with a pair of noise-cancelling wireless headphones. We adore the Sony WH-1000XM4, which deliver incredible noise cancellation and are super comfy to boot. We couldn’t hear the rumble of the freight trains even when wroking outdoors, so most of the low frequency sound gets drowned out.

They’re not too warm on your ears either, so your head won’t get too hot with the sun beating down on you. The touch controls are seamless and snappy, making it a doddle to skip back and forward and adjust the volume, and it helps that it sounds really good. Our songs sounded rich, full and buoyant, with sparkling highs and moody lows.

And if you’ve bought a cooling fan for your laptop, there’s no harm in getting one for yourself as well. As always, we want to try and reduce the need for mains outlets, and this fan from MeacoFan is a total dreamboat.

It’s small but mighty, and kept us surprisingly cool outdoors. It’s completely cordless, featuring four different speed levels, as well as a small light on the base for any night-time work. You’ll get 14 hours of continuous use if you keep it on the first speed level. But if it runs out of juice, simply connect it via a USB-C port on your laptop while you’re working.

This is a really neat little fan that’ll do wonders outdoors and in. It doesn’t swivel, but you can tilt it up extremely high, so we liked putting it on the garden floor and aiming it up at our face.

For the latest discounts on WFH essentials, try the links below:

For more working from home tips, why not invest in one of the best standing desks

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