Digital Nomadism, take my money!
In August of 2018, I had one of the best experiences of my life, traveling to Canada and the United States with my fiancee. At first, I had two goals with this trip: to participate in SIGGRAPH as a volunteer and take a vacation. That's how I planned the trip while buying the ticket in January of that year.
But since life is dynamic and things do not always happen as planned, in April I faced a difficult situation where I worked at the time and I got to the point of asking the bills which gave me some fear because I still had bills to pay and my life had turned upside down. To summarize, two months later I was able to establish myself in a freelance job this time working remotely.
Since my first week, I tried to explain my situation with the trip already programmed and to understand how the company saw my situation with SIGGRAPH, after all, I planned the trip before to arrange this work. It turns out that I was well received because of my volunteer work at the conference and the trip could happen, however, no longer as a vacation trip and that was when the first possibility of doing Digital Nomadism arose.
According to Wikipedia, “Digital nomads are a type of people who use telecommunications technologies to earn a living and, more generally, conduct their life in a nomadic manner.”
It is a dream of concept and much desired by my generation that wants to live traveling. Well, I was super excited and quite anxious (side effect of three stressful years of my life). I started planning: for twenty days I would work while traveling and would have to balance my work hours during the conference.
I arranged my travel dates with my team and made the most of my trips occurring on weekends or evenings. Because I was in a different time zone, I would wake up early to work (at 5:00 AM) and go on with my schedule until lunch, if I did not have meetings scheduled for the afternoon, I would put my backpack on and go out touring, returning to lodging as late as he could. Upon arriving I worked another hour or two or finishing an important task (which led to a clear night in the last days of my trip).
This was my routine: alternating work and tourism whenever possible. It was a tiring but fantastic experience.
One thing that went through my head was that I had never done such a routine and obviously I just followed it because my travel time was short (and the dollar very high!) So I had to optimize all my resources: I slept little, ate cheap (and badly) and lived in a hurry. It was the price paid for inexperience.
I would have done it all over again if I could, I know I was doing the best I could. But for the future I suggest to be attentive to the following aspects:
DO NOT HAVE A ROUTINE AFFECTS YOUR PRODUCTIVITY
During the trip I was very difficult to enter the state of flow and consequently took longer than expected in some of my tasks, which gave me a bad feeling of worthlessness and that sometimes left me depressed, also disrupting my tourism. For this to work out, you have to behave like a local resident and have a healthy routine.
GOOD FOOD IS FUNDAMENTAL
Living fast food just because it's cheaper will destroy you anywhere in the world. I missed home-made food.
RESTING THE BODY AND MIND MUST BE PART OF THE ROUTINE
I ended the trip extremely tired and still had to face more than 20 hours of travel back to Brazil, this was one of the factors so that I could not enter the state of flow and ended up affecting my trip in a general way since I needed of quite stimulating (coffee !!!) to stay attentive.
"I WILL OPEN THE COMPUTER IN THIS STARBUCK AND WORK SOME HOURS" IS AN ILLUSION
It did not work with me. Slow Internet and a lot of noise frustrated my concentration and soon I abandoned this way of working. Work from home or in places built with the intention of giving you a sense of being at work. Starbucks to read emails and look there.
In the end, the cons are quite small and easy to solve with the experience and I will definitely insist on digital nomadism in the future, even with the tiredness I felt contemplated with everything I was living and still managed to work at a good level and extremely motivated by account of the opportunity he was having.
The learning I carry from this experience is that being a digital nomad is not being a tourist while you work, but being native anywhere in the world no matter where you come from, a world citizen who works without frontiers.