There’s nothing more constant than change, and this constant change impacts even things that were taken for granted.
You would imagine yourself as an adult like most people getting a job, the commuting, doing the 9 to 5 schedule and eventually plan at least one trip during the year with your vacation time. Of course there will be certain variations to this for many people but they all lie into a sedentary lifestyle. Now imagine this, you can also be an adult, get a job, grab a laptop, a carry-on, and a couple more bags and that’s it! Take complete control over your time investment for your professional and personal life with no boundaries on where to do it. Does it sound far-fetched?
Let’s keep building on it. There’s a chance that due to current global events many have embraced an online job, which leads you to adapt to things like no direct interaction with your teammates, no commuting, and maybe some higher accountability watching yourself getting more stuff done with the isolation that your household can give you.
Without realizing it, you now have embraced many of the principles required to have this “nomad” lifestyle and the one you must consider to do the full transition is analyzing how much of a traveler person you are. Maybe a few quick trips outside your country changed your perspective to explore more the world and you have consciously understood that this the way you’d like to live: traveling and working together with no strings attached.
Becoming a nomad
The reality is that there’s people already living like this and there are different scenarios for how you can become a digital nomad. There’s people that don’t yet want full transformation, so they still own a place as a base of operations and plan a few months of the year for traveling and working. There are some who have more than one bases of operations in different places of the world, define a traveling schedule throughout the year so they can rotate through those strategic spots. And there are those that adapt to the full-blown nomad model where the base of operations does not exist, they just invest time tailoring the traveling plan.
As time goes by and since the community now vocally communicates as a whole there’s also another aspect to consider to approach this lifestyle in an efficient way, by deciding where it is economically sustainable to settle and how much does relocation is taking a toll on your health to settle for a long period on a specific area. Health in general is very important, so living a nomad life means a world of new. New foods, new activities, new cultural norms, and new routines. With all this newness, it’s no wonder why it can be so difficult to stick to a balanced diet and fitness routine.
Integrate some good practices of a sedentary lifestyle: finding your local grocery store, do physical activity every day, don’t slack with your sleep and if you work out, make it portable.
Now, we’ve covered the adaptation basics but the most important thing is to cover the biggest gains of being a digital nomad.
What’s in it for you, besides all the traveling
Being a digital nomad improves your creativity, you might even get surprised by how much of an impact travel can have on your work. While travel could distract you from work, when done right, it can spark new ideas. Working from different locations will inspire and help you become more creative in the long run.
Being a digital nomad can make you much more social. There’s plenty of people talking about how traveling helps overcome their social anxiety, traveling forces you to talk to more people and go out of your comfort zone. It also helps you build friendships and drastically expands your social network. That means that you just can’t help learning about many different people, getting to know them, their interests, and their differences; and all these helps you get to know not only those particular individuals, but people in general.
Being a digital nomad can make you more responsible. When you travel and work at the same time, you need to become fully responsible for yourself. However, that also means you need to learn to get work done, as you quickly learn that nobody is going to do it for you. You either take charge and are proactive—and then find yourself well-placed to achieve much more enjoyment and success from this exciting way of life—or you don’t, and either miss out on work or on travel. You have to be responsible even before you’ve even booked your first trip to work away, as there are so many small things that you need to think about in advance and take care of. All the little details of everyday life that are surprisingly easy to forget.
This is just a brief overview of what you, as a person, might get in return by embracing this lifestyle, but as everything in life you need to navigate the sustainability and goals. The most important thing is to make the time to do the introspection of how much this change is positively or negatively affecting your life, and see it not only as a tool to help you travel, but as the freedom to go wherever you want for as long as you want.
