For those who don’t know, I’m a digital nomad and I work remotely. I haven’t always been this way but certainly for the last year or so I’ve been pretty much on the road, working wherever I happen to be staying for the night.
Now the question I really want to look at today is can you maintain a work life BALANCE while traveling?
Well, it’s not as simple as it sounds. At first, you’d think ‘well it’s just the same as normal, right? You do your work then you stop work for the day and enjoy the evening’. Well, it’s not that simple at all. You see, for the most part if you’re working from the road, you don’t have SET hours.
Especially if you earn passive income, but even freelancers as a whole.. Your hours are more or less flexible. So it becomes more and more tempting to just work in the evening and see awesome things like temples and mountains during the day. After all, that’s one of the reasons you became a digital nomad, right?
To be able to work whenever you want and have the freedom to decide when you work, and when you play. The problem comes when the lines start getting blurred, and you’re not sure if you SHOULD be working or playing.
The lines getting blurred
To start with, there are no set lines that you MUST adhere to when starting out as a digital nomad. There are no set hours, and there’s certainly not a set number of fun things or day trips you must do. If you wanted to, you could very well just sit in your apartment the entire month and not go outside except to get food!
But that’s not how most of us live it. We like to go out to cafes, explore the cities, go on hikes and day trips. We like to actually enjoy the places we’re staying in. And soon enough you’ll come up against what I call the ‘ultimate fork in the road’ as a digital nomad.
There will be a point (many points in fact) where you’ll wake up one morning with a load of client work to do (if you’re a freelancer) and you KNOW you need to do it. But at the same time, you ALSO wake up that same morning really wanting to go and hike that mountain your friend just told you about.
The weathers perfect, but the client deadline is looming. What do you do? And it’s harder because really, you’re the one who makes the decision. In a traditional job, you ask your boss if you can take some time off to go on holiday, and he says yes or no.
It’s a simple binary decision, made wasier by the fact that once you’re actually ON holiday, you can’t work even if you wanted to.
As a digital nomad, you’re doing both, all the time. You COULD work every day, the entire day, or you could NOT work every day and just have fun. The real problems start to come when you just can’t make that decision, and so you end up just giving in and doing the most fun thing or the easiest thing.
And SOMETIMES that easiest thing IS actually sitting at home and doing some work, because if you’re in a place where it’s tricky to get around or there’s not much to do NEAR where you’re staying, it actually becomes easier to just stay in and do some work.
But that’s not what happens most of the time. Most of the time, you’re staying somewhere epic and you have choices to make every single day that could either be doing work or having fun. It becomes even harder when you’re traveling WITH someone else like a friend or a partner.
How can you possibly choose to NOT have fun with them and instead do work for the day, the sun’s shining outside and you’re itching to explore more. It’s not always this difficult, but there is certainly a turning point for a digital nomad where you HAVE to get better at making decisions.
Sometimes, especially if your work takes a while to actually convert into money in your bank, you’ve got to just put in the hours and get on with it. There will always be more time for having fun later.
When it makes sense to play instead of working
There ARE times however, lots of times, where it makes more sense to play and enjoy the place you’re in that it does to work. For example, during my stay in Asia (I was there about 4 months this time) there were a few places that we only stayed in for 1-2 weeks like Siem Reap in Cambodia and Catba Island in Vietnam.
Now for those few weeks, it made NO sense doing work every day or even at all, because there was just so little time to actually be there and experience it, that I’d miss out on some amazing things if I worked. I was staying just a few minutes away from the incredible Angkor Wat temple complex which was incredible..
But if I’d worked during that part of the trip I might not have had time to see all that I did. But there are times like when I stayed in Ho Chi Minh city for a month (to get that Airbnb monthly discount) that it made perfect sense to work. In fact, there was so little to do there that I ended up working most days.
But that meant that when I moved onto places like Chiang Mai in Thailand, I was able to enjoy pretty much every day for the month as if it were a holiday. So I think it’s important to have a balance, with everything you’re doing. That being said, work when it makes sense to work.
If you’re only staying somewhere for a week, and there are loads of incredible things to see and do there, don’t waste that time working. You can always earn back the money you’ve spent, but you can’t get back the time you’ve wasted.
Making a schedule
There is one more part to this though. A schedule can help you in MANY ways. For example, instead of saying ‘I HAVE to work between the hours of 9-5PM every single day’, say to yourself ‘I have to work for about 3-4 hours a day, every single day’. Now those hours can be done at any time of the day, which gives you back your freedom.
You could decide to put them in first thing in the morning, early! You could work 5AM to 2PM and STILL have the entire afternoon and evening to do whatever you wanted. Or you could work in the evening if you’d prefer to be doing things in the morning. The choice is yours.
The problem with passive income
One of the biggest issues I have with passive income, is that it sort of trains you to be lazy. Let’s say you’ve spent a few years setting up a website, and it brings you a bit of passive income every month. Now, that income will probably stay like that for a while, but you don’t KNOW how long it’s going to stay there for.
The issue with that is REALLY what you need to do is to work on it every single month so that your business will stay profitable for longer. They say no business lasts forever, so it’s really just about how long you can stay afloat before a powerful competitor or something like that comes and knocks you out.
But that will happen faster, if you DON’T work on your site at all for a year or two. And that’s a problem that only passive income brings really. With freelancing work, you know that if you stop working, you don’t get paid that month, just like a regular job.
With passive income, once you’ve built it up you could stop working for a week, a month, even a year before things started turning down and getting worse. If you’ve set your site up the right way you’ll be able to step away from it for a long time before you NOTICE anything’s wrong. But by the time you notice something’s wrong, it’s too late.
Before you have time to react, your competitors already written hundreds of articles, created a better product, amassed a bigger following, got better reviews and so on. But that’s the sort of thing that you can’t fight if you’ve not been working on your project for months on end.
If you’re working on your passive income stream every DAY then, it’s much LESS likely you’ll get blown out of the water by someone else. You’ll still be in the game, but it’s SO tempting to just not work when you’ve got a passive income stream set up.
I’ve fallen for this trap before as well, where I think just because I’ve got a passive income venture setup, I don’t need to do anything. We all need to work on something otherwise, one day it will stop producing income. There’s no TRUE 100% passive income, except maybe some types of investments and bonds and things like that.
But in terms of a website or a business generating a passive income, it’s never going to last forever. Although I have a long list of passive income ideas, none of them will truly last forever, and so the best approach is to pick a handful of them and work on them all at the same time.
Build strong systems and REALLY build an audience across multiple platforms and you’ll be alright. The thing about business is that ANYONE could potentially compete with you, and people are getting smarter every single day. Every day there are programmers and indie creators building the next big startup in a cafe somewhere in Bali or Thailand, and there’s not much we can do to compete with them.
I think a lot of the younger generation who are coming up now and learning to code while they’re still in primary school, there’s going to be a lot of new opportunities for people like that. I remember back in the day, you were considered a genius if you coudl code HTML and CSS, much less create a business online and make money from it.
Now, it seems like almost everyone has a website, a big Instagram following, and they know how to code a homepage. So the options are still there, but they’re getting less by the day. That being said there are also MORE new opportunities coming up, just for different things.
You can for example, make a lot of money as a freelancer by learning to code or run marketing campaigns for small to medium sized businesses. There is a massive need for that skill and therefore the market rewards people who have it handsomly.
What to do if you’re new to the nomad life
If you’re completely new to the digital nomad life, you’ve probably googled something like ‘how can I maintain a work life balance as a digital nomad’ and come across this article. Well, it’s easy for you to be honest. There are lots of things you could do as a nomad, and if you’re good with technology and really anything online, you’ll do fine.
There are lots of things you could do, many paths you could take. Web development, writing, social media management, coding, or even going completely your own way and starting a YouTube channel, making a digital product like an ebook, and selling it your audience.
There are really lots of things you could do, but just remember, even if you manage to set up a passive income stream, it won’t last forever, and there are always going to be people trying to take it away from you. Think of the people scouring forums every day looking for the next trend or the next startup company to build at the weekend. There are lots of people who lurk in forums just waiting for people to post those ‘look at my online success’ stories, so they can copy them.
In fact I’ve spoken to a couple of people who literally make their money by waiting for success stories like that to pop up, and then they just copy it all really fast and try and do it better. There are lots of people like that, so you have to bare that in mind. Also don’t share TOO MUCH about your online success on places like Reddit because like I said, there are copycats everywhere!
If you’re new, I’d suggest having a look at my Digital Nomad Bootcamp course which shows you how to start an online business from scratch about something you love, and actually make money doing it, which is something lots of courses aren’t really showing you these days.
Finding the balance
So as I said, if you are new and you’re struggling to find the balance, there are a few things you could try. The most obvious one is to just be firm with yourself, and make sure you make time to work and you make time to play. That’s not as easily done though, and you’ll find yourself being pulled more to the fun side of things, and less to the work side of things.
The best way I’ve found of maintaining a balance is to set your business up so that it IS fun when you do work on it. For example, these blog posts I write on here are fun to write, and it’s a good way of getting my thoughts about some things down on ‘paper’. I’ve set this site up so that in some ways, writing blog posts like these pays me one way or another. There might be ads on the page or you might click through to an affiliate product or something like that.
In the same way I’ve set up my travel vlogs so that by sharing the experiences I’m having, there’s a chance I’ll get paid too. When the audience gets to be a bit bigger, there will be ad revenue from the views. You could click the links in my video descriptions and that earns me a small bit of money too. It all adds up.
In terms of actually finding the work life balance, you just have to decide what’s important to you. Of course, if you’re a freelancer or something like that, there’s no way around it, you need to put in the actual hours. You can’t travel the world without working as you go.
But that doesn’t mean you have to work at set hours, you just need to work ENOUGH hours during the day or the week that you canc voer your costs. You might for example, have some savings that will enable you to take a month or so off work, and enjoy the things around you.
Then you know that when the months over, you’e got to get back to work to start building that savings account up again. For the most part, we know when we need to work and when we can afford to take time off. So just get out there, enjoy the world and work as you go!