Digital Nomads: Here’s How to Stay Organized

Being a digital nomad can offer you a great lifestyle. You can make your work flexible, choose to work wherever you want, and even travel while you’re working. There can be downsides to being a digital nomad, and one of them is that it can be difficult to stay organized. When you don’t have a regular schedule or anything to anchor you, it can be easy to get distracted or find yourself becoming disorganized. If you want to keep your work and your life in order, you need to find ways to stay organized. Here’s how you can stay as organized as possible.

Pack a Go Bag

There are lots of useful tools you can have with you when you’re working. But you also risk leaving things behind at home or even losing something if you’re not careful. If you want to make sure you always have all of your essentials with you, having a bag that you can pack with everything that you need can help you. Whenever you go somewhere, you can check that you have your usual items in your bag. You can carry a variety of items to allow you to set up your office wherever you want. Take the vital items like your laptop and phone, but bring some convenient things too, such as coffee and a phone charger.

Find Reliable Places to Work

Being a digital nomad means that you can work wherever you want. Sometimes, that might mean going to a client’s office. However, you will often need to find somewhere to set up and work away from home. You can be lucky enough to discover a cafe or somewhere similar that’s the perfect place to work. But you can also struggle to find somewhere suitable. When you’re moving around, it’s a good idea to have some places to use that you can rely on. There are various places that could work for you, from libraries to business centers.

One of the best things a digital nomad can do is have a membership to a coworking organization. Choose one that has spaces in a number of locations, and you can always seek out somewhere to go. At Bond Collective luxury coworking spaces, you can enjoy a hot desking setup, finding yourself a desk in whichever office you choose. Sometimes you might also have access to business lounges and similar spaces through memberships to certain groups or even through your credit card provider.

Use a WiFi Hotspot

A reliable internet connection is vital for any digital nomad. Having reliable places to work can help with this, but sometimes you need to be able to work anywhere. Having a portable hotspot gives you an internet connection that you can take with you anywhere, so you can set up your workspace in a cafe, on a train or wherever you can get your hotspot to connect. If you don’t have a hotspot, you can use your phone as one in a pinch, although it can be expensive if you don’t have a lot of data included.

Develop Methods for Blocking Distractions

Digital nomads need to be able to commit themselves to their work. Without the structure of a 9 to 5 job and a standard office environment, there can be many distractions that stop you getting your work done. If you want to make sure that you can be productive, wherever you are, and whatever else is happening in your life, you need to find the best methods of blocking out distractions and getting into the best frame of mind for working.

You might use many ways to prevent distractions and to get in the right mood to get your work done. When you’re working on a computer, you can use tools like StayFocusd to block websites that distract you. You might listen to music to block out any other noises and distractions. You might go for a walk to clear your mind so that you’re able to sit down and work or use the time while you’re walking to think about your work.  Everyone can find that different methods work for them when you’re trying to concentrate on their work, so you need to find what works for you.

Keep Track of the Date and Time

When you’re a digital nomad, it’s not always easy to keep track of the date or even the time of day. You might have deadlines or often find yourself working at the similar hours to many others so you can keep up with clients, but you don’t always have something to help you keep track of the days. There are various tools that you might use to help organize time for you. Just having a digital calendar that you can synchronize with different devices can make a difference. Alerts to let you know when you have a deadline coming up or a meeting to attend can make sure you don’t lose track of your sense of time.

Even though you don’t necessarily have to stick to any kind of schedule, which is one of the advantages of being a digital nomad, it can be useful to give yourself particular hours or days that you work. Even if it means you work every morning and have the rest of the day free or you get all of your work done from Tuesday to Friday so you can have a three-day weekend, it’s useful to have set hours to follow. It will help to give some structure to your day and make it easier to get your work done on time.

Organize Different Clients and Projects

When you’re self-employed, you technically work for yourself. But the reality is that you can end up working for a variety of people at the same time. When you’re trying to juggle a number of clients and different projects, keeping them all organized can be difficult. You need to find the best way to keep track of your deadlines and the tasks that you’re working on. Some people might like to use tools like Trello or Basecamp to help them organize their projects. Other people prefer the old-fashioned methods and keep a diary, use a noticeboard or write their daily tasks on a whiteboard. You can choose whichever methods work well for you.

Plan Your Time

When you have lots of deadlines to meet and things to do, prioritizing everything isn’t always easy. It can help to plan your time at the beginning of the day, week or month so that you know what you need to do and when. Prioritizing your work will help you to make sure you get everything finished on time. Planning in advance also gives you the chance to group similar tasks together, which can help you to focus instead of moving quickly from one task to another. Task management apps will allow you to plan what to do and when.

Find What Works for You

When you’re trying to get organized, remember that the most important thing is to find out what works for you. You can find plenty of suggestions for the best ways to work or the best schedules to follow, but they won’t necessarily work for you. If you do find a suggestion that’s useful for you, you should use it, but sometimes you have to experiment with your own things to find out what works for you.

Staying organized when you’re a digital nomad can be hard, but it is possible. Once you start working on your own system, it’s easier to stick to it.