The Benefits Of A Remote Job In A Remote-First Company With Vincent

“You have to think what is the worst that can happen and what is the chance of that happening? If that’s an acceptable risk to take, just do it!”

Meet digital nomad Vincent

The benefits of a remote job

Flexible schedule

Freedom to work from anywhere

Although it depends on the company policy, Vincent can work from anywhere so he has geographical freedom. Of course, he needs to get work done but his location is free of choice. It’s an ideal work-life balance for him where he can work remotely, travel and discover the world.

Other benefits we can point out are having a steady income and being part of a team. If you want to learn more about career opportunities and to make money online as a digital nomad, check out our book Digital Nomads With Confidence. In chapter 2, we answer questions about skills, remote-part time jobs, full-time jobs, freelancing and side hustles and so much more.

Challenges of the digital nomad lifestyle

Remote work is a new way of working and, therefore, still being developed. So while companies are figuring out how it works for them, digital nomads also have their own process of making it work. Vincent shares some of the first challenges he encountered as a digital nomad while experiencing the benefits of a remote job.

Productivity

Work is an important pillar in his life. His company is fully remote but to develop remote work skills, he is always open to learning. He shares 3 things that help him become more productive:

😎 Wake up early and take a moment before jumping into meetings.

😎 Frequently take breaks after long meetings. For example, going for a walk, working out or having a coffee outside the house.

😎 Take the time to keep up with family and friends daily.

Balancing social life

We all need community and this is something he finds hard to balance. Making new connections is especially hard at the beginning but with some practice and visiting digital nomad hubs, Vincent knows he will get the hang of it.

A healthy travel pace

He loves traveling but finding the right pace is something all digital nomads struggle with. The more you travel, the less time you have to get work done, so finding a good balance is challenging. When he was in Europe, he traveled a lot and got exhausted. This could impact your performance at work so Vincent realized that it wasn’t sustainable and needed to slow down the travels a little bit so he could still thrive at work while living abroad.

Why companies should consider hiring digital nomads

Connect with our Nienke Nina and our guests

Your host Nienke Nina

More digital nomad tips and life advice via instagram @digitalnomadsdaily

Connect with Nienke Nina on LinkedIn @Nienke Nina Keizer

Find Nienke Nina on Instagram @nienkeninatravels

Meet digital nomad Vincent

Find him on LinkedIn via @Vincent Somsen

Other episodes you might like:

🎧 Episode #54: What Makes a Remote-First Company Culture with Chase

🎧 Episode #26: Digital Nomad Introverts Never Need To Be Lonely With Marcel

🎧 Episode #51: How To Live A Balanced And Joyful Remote Life With Ali

🎧 Episode #53 Must-Know Resume Tips To Land A Remote Job with Michelle

How To Feel At Home In Your Next Digital Nomad House With Julie

“Test the waters. I didn’t think I would ever feel at home in an Airbnb but now I make myself at home immediately. ”

How digital nomad Julie started her location-independent lifestyle

Meet digital nomad Julie who started her first digital nomad experience about 2 years ago. She absolutely loved the lifestyle and after a couple of months, decided to ditch her house and fully become location-independent.

During the weekdays, Julie works remotely for an American organization. She builds software and it’s easy to do her job remotely. At first, she was required to go to the office but after proving herself and slowly becoming more remote, she convinced her employer to let her work from anywhere.

‘‘Asking employers to start doing remote a little bit so it allows them to see that it’s possible. Propose to start with working from home every Friday to avoid the commute so you show them that it’s really not an issue.’’

A well-paying remote job with flexible hours sounds like the dream for many digital nomads, especially those new to the workforce or people who simply don’t want to deal with the hustle of the freelancer lifestyle.

Julie loves her job and shares that she keeps normal office hours and always ensures the company and her co-workers aren’t suffering from her lifestyle. She shares that this is important for her and she is always available during office hours. Julie also slowly transformed her office job into a remote job and this helped her to gain confidence with her boss. When she finally pushed to be fully remote, it wasn’t hard to convince her employer because Julie had already proved she could do it.

Digital nomad tips to make you feel at home?

Everyone has their own needs and ways how they feel at home. Julie shares in this episode what makes her feel comfortable and how she chooses her accommodation:

Doing your laundry at any time.

Like we said, everyone has their own little things that make them happy and for Julie it means having a laundry machine. She hates going to laundry mats so she always chooses a place where she can do her own laundry.

Enough space to workout

Working out is an important part of her day and she prefers to work out at home instead of going to the gym. She likes gyms, but she finds it annoying to search and switch gyms and figured out home workouts fit her digital nomad lifestyle better.

A handy tip she shares are the water weights shown in the image below. Of course, traveling with real weight is impractical for digital nomads and these weights are a great option. Click here to order them too!

Avoid getting annoyed about power outlets.

Find a house in the right neighborhood.

Be conscious of the Wi-Fi.

How does digital nomad Julie find community and friends?

Connect with our Nienke Nina and our guests

Your host Nienke Nina

More digital nomad tips and life advice via instagram @digitalnomadsdaily

Connect with Nienke Nina on LinkedIn @Nienke Nina Keizer

Find Nienke Nina on Instagram @nienkeninatravels

Meet digital nomad Julie

Find her on Instagram @juliebetrippin

Other episodes you might like:

🎧  Episode #01: How to Thrive in your Digital Nomad Relationship with Anat & Orr

🎧  Episode #05: Dealing with High Anxiety While Building a Successful Online Business with The Remote Yogi

🎧  Episode #07: Overcoming Fears and Building Community with Digital Nomad Magali

🎧 Episode #21: 10 Years Of Traveling The World With Daisy

Generating Passive Income To Create Your Travel Lifestyle with Dain

“Travel isn’t always rainbows and sunshine.”

Meet part-time digital nomad Dain

He recently moved to Australia and lives there while traveling in Southeast Asia and working online. Dain is from the UK and is passionate about traveling. So he is designing and building his dream lifestyle, including digital nomadism and travel. He shares in this episode why he chooses to live the digital nomad lifestyle part-time and how he is working on multiple income streams.

Slowmadding and part-time nomadding

Many digital nomads these days, including the host Nienke Nina, enjoy the slower-paced lifestyle. Dain shares that travel can be exhausting, but this is not what you always see online but and he also learned this during his own travels. So constantly keeping his own well-being a priority means for Dain to take it easier and slow down his travels. He also enjoys staying longer in a place so he can fully enjoy it without rushing things.

Dain is a solo traveler and doesn’t shy away from going on trips on his own. He loves it and the biggest perk of solo travel is that you’re on your own time and schedule. So you can plan easier when you work and when you have fun.

How to travel and earn money at the same time

While it looks easy these days to just pack your bag and start working Dain is very conscious about how he designs his life.

He fell in love with the travel lifestyle and doing more of that is his goal. To reach his goals, the first year was to learn how to make money online. Currently, Dain makes money via:

💰 Ads in his Youtube videos

💰 Branded deals in his videos

💰 Freelancing video editing and photo editing via Fiver

💰 E-commerce via Etsy shop with prints

💰 Affiliate marketing

The second year is about doing that while working online. So after getting some ideas and is now focused on building passive income streams. Like creative freelancer digital nomad Micaela shares on the podcast, this takes a lot of work and time, so he is currently finetuning his processes so his passive income streams are actually passive and it can run on their own. While these income streams are relatively small, he remains focused on his end goal, so while building it, he keeps in mind to make all streams easily scaleable.

Typical travel misconceptions digital nomads experience

Many people think and say that traveling and living the digital nomad lifestyle, full-time and part-time like Dain, is stress-free but Dain disagrees. He shares some personal experiences definitely worth tuning in for and some typical travel misconceptions. We listed a couple below but make sure to listen to the full episode.

😵 Bad accommodation

😵 Long airport lines

😵 Visa and immigration issues

😵 You could get scammed

😵 Bad internet, so how Nina likes to call it Wi-Fi anxiety

😵 Not meeting like-minded people

Community is essential and Dain shares that he finds friends by doing activities he likes doing. So he is into yoga and working out, so he will join the yoga class and usually finds like-minded people immediately.

Digital nomad marcel also shared this advice and more community-building tips in episode #26: Digital Nomad Introverts Never Need To Be Lonely With Marcel

Connect with our Nienke Nina and our guests

Your host Nienke Nina

More digital nomad tips and life advice via instagram @digitalnomadsdaily

Connect with Nienke Nina on LinkedIn @Nienke Nina Keizer

Find Nienke Nina on Instagram @nienkeninatravels

Meet the digital nomad Dain

Find him on Instagram @dainluka

Check out his videos on YouTube via @Chasing Dain

Other episodes you might like:

🎧  50: Creating Your Career Around The Lifestyle You Want To Live With Natasha

🎧  18: Selling Sheep To Start A Travel Lifestyle with Micaela

🎧  49: 8 Freelancer Mindset Challenges to Overcome For Success With Steve

🎧  35: Building A Successful Creative Freelance Career With Suzanne

🎧  32: How To Become A Travel Blogger And Make Money Online With Isabel

🎧  09: How To Achieve Financial Freedom With Digital Nomad Dean

5 Tips To Live A More Intentional And Balanced Life with Digital Nomad Kasia

“You can travel the whole world and travel to the most beautiful places but your struggles and unsolved things will follow you.”

Meet digital nomad Kasia

She is a dutch digital nomad combining work and travel for over 3 years. During her last year of traveling, she decided to take it a notch down and become a part-time digital nomad. She is now enjoying a slower-paced lifestyle where she party lives in the Netherlands and travels some months of the year. Many digital nomads who have been traveling for years make similar decisions, and it shows once again that there are many different ways to live a digital nomad lifestyle.

What does she do for a living?

Mindfulness and meditation are important pillars in Kasia’s life and this is also how she makes a living. She also chooses retreats for digital nomads, entrepreneurs and freelancers, for example, the Borderless retreat. The focus of each experience is focused on helping people to live more consciously in their personal as well as professional life. Through meditations, workshops and an engaged community Borderless Retreat facilitates life-changing experiences. Digital nomad Dean who shared tips in episode 09: How To Achieve Financial Freedom With Digital Nomad Dean also joined on the beautiful experiences and at DND we also are keen to join.

Tips to feeling more grounded and live a balanced life

Finding the balance between the so many things we need to do, think about, or are responsible for is challenging. Even more so for digital nomads because while it looks easy, we hear on the podcast a different reality. People like Kasia are important in our community because they have many tips and practices to help feeling more grounded. In the episode, we asked Kasia what she does to feel more grounded and balanced.

#01 Creating routines for different moments or moods.

Generally, her routines include movements, meditation, journaling and sometimes an extra moment for herself with cacao. What is interesting here is that Kasia doesn’t have a routine set in stone because she simply doesn’t feel the same every day. So if she needs longer to feel better the rest of the day, then that is totally okay. Some days hr routines could take 15 minutes and even up to an hour.

#02 Setting an intention for the day.

A common conversation topic among digital nomad entrepreneurs and freelancers is burnout caused by overwhelm. While this could have many other reasons, one of Kasia’s tips is to set intentions before you start your day. You can focus on how you would like to feel throughout the day and even during the day check in with yourself if you are following your intention.

#03 Check in with yourself regularly.

As the day goes by, you might get tired, lose track of time or when you hit a roadblock, it’s hard to deal with it. This happens to the best of us and intentional self-reflection during the day can help you stick to your intention. Kasia shares that there are many ways and the key to success is to find your way by betraying different things. Think about a 5-minute meditation, breathing exercises, journaling or a walk in nature in between work or after work.

#04 Process emotions and thoughts through journaling

This technique isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but generally, when we write, it helps to process emotion. Some digital nomads journal every day, others everyone and some people more at times when they feel unbalanced and have too many feelings and thoughts to handle. There are also many different ways to journal, and the popular approach is to write down everyday things you are grateful for. Journaling can also be about the future digital nomads using this technique to set daily intentions.

#05 Positive self-talk

Have you ever thought about the things you subconsciously and consciously tell yourself? Just like everyone else, sometimes our heads are filled with negative thoughts that don’t support our well-being at all. Of course this can happen but paying attention to how we talk to ourselves is very important because words can be powerful and influence our belief system and confidence tremendously. Self-talk isn’t just about positive words with the purpose of feeling better but also about accepting that we simply don’t have to feel right all the time. Especially women in their early thirties deal with this as hormone cycles could change.

We learned in this episode that you can travel the world and see the most beautiful things, but it never removes your struggles and emotional barriers. Many digital nomads are focused on learning how to prioritize nurturing themselves. Luckily, we have beautiful people like Kasia who are there to help others.

Connect with our Nienke Nina and our guests

Your host Nienke Nina

More digital nomad tips and life advice via instagram @digitalnomadsdaily

Connect with Nienke Nina on LinkedIn @Nienke Nina Keizer

Find Nienke Nina on Instagram @nienkeninatravels

Meet the digital nomad Kasia

Find her on Instagram @kasia.peleszuk

Other episodes you might like:

🎧 Episode #07: Overcoming Fears and Building Community with Digital Nomad Magali

🎧 Episode #48 How To Set Boundaries and Why You Want to Go Slomad with Kristin

🎧 Episode #51: How To Live A Balanced And Joyful Remote Life With Ali

Building A Business To Live Your Dream Lifestyle with Jeanna

“There is no amount of hustling in the world that is going to give you just the experience of time.”

Meet digital nomad and successful female entrepreneur Jeanna

She is a successful entrepreneur and started her digital nomad back in 2016 and decided to quit her job and travel to Central America and is living the digital nomad lifestyle as a slowmad. Jeanna isn’t the only one that enjoys the slow-pacing lifestyle. We talked about this with digital nomad Kristin in episode #48 title of the episode.

Jeanna is an entrepreneur who built her agency First Page Strategy from the ground. Her company employs around 40 people and it’s a 100% remote business. Jeanna isn’t the only one living abroad and she shares that her employees live a location-independent lifestyle and work from different places. In fact, it’s an important pillar in her company and she shares that she intentionally designed her business around this because she wanted to work with people who share these values.

Working from different places and building a successful remote business are milestones achieved but Jeanna wanted to become financially independent. This motivated her to work even harder and live comfortably between the USA and Honduras.

Building a successful online business while traveling

Owning a successful business sounds sexy but Jeanna shares that it’s not the easiest path. Before getting to where she is today, it took her willpower and hard work. Jeanna shares some things that helped her achieve her goals and brought her to where she is today.

Creating routines always to be your best self

Jeanna shares that routines are essential to ensure that she does all the work that she needs to do daily. Even when she goes to a new location, she sticks to the routine and developing discipline and routine was what she probably spent the first 2 or 3 years on. Some helpful tips Jeanna includes in her routines:

• Always get dressed and don’t work in pajamas
• Get somebody movement in the morning like a workout or yoga
• Working around your productivity hours so for Jeanna this means working in the morning
• Get work done in a quiet place and limit distractions

Becoming 100% location independent

An important pillar in Jeanna’s life was the freedom to work from anywhere. So she intentionally designed her business around this lifestyle and worked with people who share the same values. She currently has 40 people on her team working, all working remotely.

Take disconnecting and detox seriously

People are busy and especially entrepreneurs like Jeanna. Disconnecting is essential to stay on top of her game with steady routines es as mentioned above. Jeanna shares that she is obsessed with her technology boundaries. She manages her notifications and costumes her home screen and sound.

She also hides her work apps so she doesn’t get notified when she isn’t working. For example, during the weekends and afternoons. Really manage notifications and quiet hours to do what you must do during the day but still be available. She customizes her home screen not to allow any red badges of notifications in her home screen. She hides slack and ClickUp in another folder that she can’t see on weekends and afternoons.

Becoming 100% location independent

Lastly, Jeanna is 100% out of work when she takes a holiday. Of course, it’s tempting to check your email or want to know what to do but having these technology boundaries help her to stay sane.

A popular book that Jeanna read and that helped her a lot is called “Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport”. Click here to get it on Amazon.

The balance is more on my personal life and not on work. Work is just something that fits in the larger piece of the pie. To do that, I need to be thinking about my boundaries constantly and I can’t let those boundaries be crossed otherwise, it’s like working for another 9-5 company in an office.

Jeanna’s final piece of advice for all digital nomad entrepreneurs is to take the hustling off your plate as much as possible so you won’t burn out. So make sure where ever you go to experience places, meet people, enjoy hobbies and of course, enjoy life.

Connect with our Nienke Nina and our guests

Your host Nienke Nina

More digital nomad tips and life advice via instagram @digitalnomadsdaily

Connect with Nienke Nina on LinkedIn @Nienke Nina Keizer

Find Nienke Nina on Instagram @nienkeninatravels

Meet the digital nomad entrepreneur Jeanna

Find her on LinkedIn @jeannabarrett

Other episodes you might like:

🎧 Episode #07: Overcoming Fears and Building Community with Digital Nomad Magali

🎧 Episode #48 How To Set Boundaries and Why You Want to Go Slomad with Kristin

🎧 Episode #51: How To Live A Balanced And Joyful Remote Life With Ali