Honestly one of the dreams I had 20 years ago when I started my first company was to be able to work from anywhere and particularly to be able to work someplace warm, ideally on the beach somewhere with a drink in my hand. But does that really work?
First of all the drink (unless we are talking about water or soda..) is obviously not a good idea. Secondly working in the sun, if you have a job like me where you use your computer almost all the time, is not always the most comfortable experience either, mostly because of the terrible ergonomical situation that it generally implies.
Planning
What I find to be productive when working outdoors is doing planning the actual work that I should do later on. I use Evernote since a couple of years and I do pretty much all my planning in there.
I specifically apply the GTD method to my Evernote systen which means I have an Inbox that you continuously fill with all the information that I want to store or act upon, and then sort this information into different folders such as Next actions, Project, Archive, etc.
Doing the sorting of all the info that goes into Evernote actually takes some time, so to get the system to work in a good way I have to spend about 15 to 30 minutes everyday organizing. This can be a pretty boring task and one that you easily put off. But it so happens that this is a very suitable activity to do outdoors, or in anyplace where you’re not in the comfortable space of your normal office.
A good thing with Evernote is that it is possible to work offline on a mobile device, (in case you don’t have access to Internet or just would like to avoid unnecessary exposure to wireless radiation) organizing and editing notes, then later synchronizing changes to the computer and other devices.