Have Constant Working Hours

Even if you are a freelancer and don’t have constant working hours, plan a time slot during each day when you actually work. I find it best to be a single time slot during a day and the same slot every day. If you prefer, you can try working for a few hours in the morning and then a few extra hours in the other part of the day, but it doesn’t work for me

Working remotely requires you to be very well-organized. It’s not hard to mix up work and private life, so constant working hours are very important to separate them.

If you cooperate with clients or teammates, it’s also easier for them to communicate with you knowing when you’re available.

It might seem encouraging to work for 2 hours in the morning, then go to the beach and promise yourself to finish your job in the afternoon… Been there, done that. I don’t recommend

Plan Tasks for Each Day

In most cases, as a digital nomad, you don’t have a boss or someone who assigns tasks to you. Even if you do, in the end, you sit alone in your hotel or apartment room with no one to punch you and push to work

Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? Well, not necessarily… At the end of the day, you need to get your job done. Good planning is one of the crucial tips for digital nomads. You should learn to be productive. The first step is to plan your work and to know what you actually have to do on a given day. This also helps to self-push yourself to actually work, despite having a tempting beach nearby

I always recommend to write stuff down and plan your tasks using a suitable and easy-to-use tool. Personally, I use Nozbe for that, but it can as well be any other tool that you feel comfortable with. I believe that as digital nomads we don’t use offline paper notebooks anymore for tasks management

Seeing a list of a few tasks for the coming day tells you that you actually need to do something.

Use Do Not Disturb Modes

When your boss or team leader is not looking over your shoulder, why don’t you spend some more time on Facebook or Instagram? I often do find myself opening an interesting website like that just to check what’s happening and “accidentally” spending 15 minutes there… Sounds familiar?

From all the tips for digital nomads I can give you, I find two particularly revealing. The first one is disabling all notifications on your smartphone. Simple as that – just disable them for all apps you have installed (maybe except phone and calendar apps if you use them). Instead, plan some reviews of your email, tasks apps, Facebook and Instagram a few times a day. Thanks to that, you’re not disturbed when working. I also found a Wind Down mode which my OnePlus suggested to me after the recent Android update:

It allows you to configure your phone to enable a grayscale (which is apparently good for using the phone before sleeping) and Do Not Disturb mode during defined hours. It might be a great idea to enable it while working. There’s also a similar feature for iPhone.

The second tip for eliminating the disturbances when working is disabling or restricting access to non-work-related websites. I’m using a Rooster for Chrome extension. First, a light way in which you can use it is just to install it and see on each new browser tab you open how much time you spent on given websites today. It can be eyes-opening during your working day The more hardcore way of using this tool is to define a time limit for each website. If you spend more time on a given site, it yells with an alarm. Can be helpful if you can’t manage it yourself

Have a Separate Place for Working

I literally mean it. If you work from home, hotel room or apartment, find yourself one physical place from which you work. If you start working in the second part of the day as I do (because of time zone differences – more about it below), you might do something not related to work in the morning. Even now, I’m writing this blog post before starting my actual work. I find it helpful to sit on a different chair when I start working. Really, it helps

I try to always have a single physical place (like a chair in a given position related to the table) in the place I live in only for working. Even if switching from blog posts writing to working is only moving a chair to another side of the table, it allows me to enter work mode. It’s like coming into an office and sitting by your corporate PC Just try it yourself and let me know if it does the job for you!

Change your work environment

Apart from having a constant place for working, it’s sometimes very useful to change the environment in which you work.

I normally work at the place we rent for living. We tend to stay in a given city/country for longer – normally at least 2 weeks, sometimes a month or more. When looking for accommodation we always find something with a table and a chair with a back. We don’t want to be dependent on co-working spaces or cafes.

However, after working from “home” for a few days in a row I see that my productivity decreases. I start going around, visiting all these interesting non-work-related websites more often and just getting angry with Rooster yelling at me When such a day comes, we normally plan a visit to a cafe for working, at least for a few hours. Having people around looking at me makes me suddenly much more productive I wanna look like a real digital nomad, so I can’t have Facebook open when they look! There must be some crazy code at my screen so I look like a hacker

You can also try going to a co-working space. I’m not a big fan of them, but co-work can be a very good place to socialize and also focus more on your work.

Be prepared for different timezones

Being in your home country and occasionally traveling, you may not realize how timezones can affect your life. And I don’t mean having a jet lag from time to time

Most of my life, I used to work in the mornings, normally for 8 hours a day. When we started our round-the-world journey in June 2019 and finally moved to Southeast Asia, the timezones came into play. The time difference between Poland (where the client I currently work for is based) and SEA is 6-7 hours. I have to be in quite a constant contact with my teammates and our final customer (also from Europe). Because of that, I had to change my working hours and start work at 12 PM (noon). It totally changed how I organize my days now and how I manage my productivity.

Don’t treat different timezones as a bad thing. Just make proper use of them and plan your days accordingly. I imagine it might be even harder if you do some freelancing and have many customers from different parts of the world. Or maybe it’s easier in such a case because these customers are used to an asynchronous and distributed working style? Let me know in the comments if you are in such a situation!

Embrace yourself for unexpected issues

There might be dozens of tips for digital nomads, but unexpected always happens. Especially if you are used to having a fast, stable Internet and uninterrupted electricity When working while traveling and often changing places, you need to be prepared for unexpected issues that you don’t normally think about being home.

In Southeast Asia, power outages are a normal thing. No one cares if there’s no electricity for 3 or 4 hours. Well, except you who needs it for work Be prepared to control your emotions when such a thing happens. You will quickly find out that there’s no one to blame for that – even if your AirBnb’s listing mentioned constant electricity access It’s better to accept it and focus on a solution. Go to a cafe or a co-working space during this time. Always have your laptop’s battery and a power bank fully charged.

The same applies to the Internet. We often found ourselves booking a stay for a few weeks and then realizing that the Internet is very bad… Sometimes I couldn’t even comfortably take part in an online video meeting that we have with my team every day. At first, I was getting very angry blaming myself or hosts of the guesthouses we stayed at for it. I was sometimes driving a scooter through the island to find a place with good Wi-Fi. With time, I learned to accept it Now I always have a mobile Internet data package ready for such cases. If it fails, I simply say sorry to my teammates and they understand. The world doesn’t end if you miss one meeting

Learn to Communicate Asynchronously

Last, but not least – communication Working in a physical office makes it easier to find someone and talk to them. Even working remotely, but in the same timezone, it’s easy to call someone directly.

However, being a digital nomad assumes that sometimes you’re not in time sync with your teammates or clients. Amongst many tips for digital nomads, an important skill to possess it asynchronous communication.

If you communicate via standard means like email or text communicator, write simple and straightforward messages. It should be understandable, not too long and focused on the goal (getting an answer). Emphasize that you are expecting concrete answers which will move your work forward. You can even say that if you don’t get the answer, you’ll be stuck with work.

It’s important to prepare others that when they answer your question with another question it doesn’t help you. Asking asynchronously means that you leave a message now and are expecting an answer later. Later – this is an important keyword here. You may leave a message when you finish work and are expecting to have an answer when you start to work the next day. Your colleagues might be asleep this time and you’ll have to wait another few hours for them to be online again. It takes time and practice to get it right, but it’s worth working on it

The good thing about asynchronous communication is that the exchanged messages do not require an immediate answer. That’s the goal, but as I mentioned above you need to set up some boundaries on when you expect to get the answer to not block your work. I also really like the idea of task-based communication. If you use a task management system at work you can try communicating as Nozbe guys do.

Do you have any other tips for digital nomads you can share? How do you make your days better organized? Let me know in the comments!

The post 8 Productivity Tips for Digital Nomads appeared first on CodeJourney.net.

But don’t worry, we’ll go back to programming soon!

If you haven’t read my post about productivity tips yet, I encourage you to do it now. I shared there some habits I practice in my everyday life to make it better and more efficient.

Today we’ll shed some light upon a bit related topic, which is about freeing your mind from unnecessary information consumption.

Information consumption

First of all, we should start by defining what it means to consume information. Let’s start by defining from where the information can reach our minds:

• TV
• general news websites
• specialized websites, e.g. this blog or any other specialized website/blog
• social media
• newspapers
• magazines
• physical adverts, e.g. billboards
• books
• podcasts
• video/text tutorials/courses
• face-to-face conversations with people
• public speaking sessions/lectures
• … and many more.

Consuming information means to spend time exploring (watching, reading, listening to) these information sources.

There’s however a very important feature of each of these media – their persuasion character. Information sources can be general (out of consumer’s control) or specialized (fully or partially controlled/chosen by the consumer).

Let’s then try to divide above-mentioned sources into general and specialized ones:

I intentionally made general ones red and specialized ones green. Why?

Because general media is what’s out of our control and influence – we cannot choose what we see on the TV (except of switching the channel, which doesn’t help much) or read on some general news websites. These sources are designed by someone else to persuade us to take exact actions (vote for a given political party, buy a given product etc.). General information sources should be generally avoided (more details later).

On the other hand, specialized resources are the ones directed to someone interested in a particular field, which makes such information possible to be selected by the consumer (not imposed). Of course there might be some exceptions from this rule, but this is a general observation I have. Specialized information sources should be consciously consumed (more details later).

What about social media?

In the table above you can see that I classified social media as half-general and half-specialized knowledge source. That’s because social media are generally also to persuade us to do something. We’re not customers of social media platforms like Facebook – their customers are advertisers who pay for displaying ads for well-targeted group of people.

On the other hand, there are some medias which can be – at least partially – controlled and made specialized by us. Good example is Twitter, on which the feed is not an infinite one and the order of tweets is always the same – in opposite to Facebook, which is on purpose designed to display an infinite feed loop. Have you noticed that every time you refresh your Facebook feed the order of posts you see is different? That’s how Facebook wants you to scroll and refresh it infinitely. You refresh the feed in hope some interesting post appears. This is out of your control.

On Twitter, the tweets you see are always in the same order (sorted by publication time). What’s maybe even more important you can easily unfollow the people you are not interested in and you’ll not see their tweets/retweets anymore. This way, Twitter is more specialized medium.

I won’t tell you to stop using social media – of course you should use it, but do it wisely. Try to be as selective as possible, unlike the FB pages you’re not really interested in, unfollow people you don’t see any value in for yourself.

Low-Information Diet (LID)

So what is this Low-Information Diet (LID)? How can it help to free our minds?

This idea is presented by Tim Ferris in his awesome book The 4-Hour Workweek. When I read the chapter about Low-Information Diet 3 months ago it really changed my life.

The general idea is to consume as less information as possible. If you actually consume something, it should be as specialized and adjusted to your interests and possible. Everything you consume should bring the real value to yourself.

As I already mentioned in my post about productivity tips, everything you have in your mind or you have to do makes you constantly thinking about it (even if you don’t realize it). Your brain processes the information “in the background” – sometimes it’s enough to write things down to release your head from thinking about them. Now try to wonder how consuming tons of information from general news websites or other irrelevant sources litters your brain!

My implementation of LID

When I implemented the Low-Information Diet 90 days ago, I defined the following rules:

Rule 1: I don’t watch TV at all

This wasn’t very complicated, because we haven’t got TV with my girlfriend in our flat for 6 years already and I’m crazily happy about that

Instead, I choose series on Netflix that interest me and watch them sometimes for an hour in the evenings for relaxation.

Rule 2: I don’t read any political or general news

I don’t read any news. Simple as that. I just don’t ever open any news websites.

Exception: as soon as I wanna know more about some specific topic, then I read – but only concrete articles focused on this particular topic and only on defined times of a week/day for specified time period (e.g. on Friday evening for 10 minutes).

Rule 3: I keep my social media clean, ignoring irrelevant

First of all, I reviewed all Facebook pages I “liked” and “unliked” all that I didn’t find any value in.

Then I did the same with people I followed on Twitter.

I repeat such review from time to time.

The question I ask myself reviewing each page/person is: “Has any of this page’s/person’s posts really brought me any value during the previous month?” If the answer is “No” – I unfollow.

Rule 4: I don’t use push notifications on my mobile phone

I disabled all push notifications (Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Instagram) on my Android phone. The only notifications I now receive are direct messages (SMS/WhatsApp/phone calls) and reminders from Nozbe (more on Nozbe here). Nothing more.

Instead, I check my social media and email twice per day on pre-defined hours (I put two 30-minutes events in my Google Calendar at noon and 4PM for that, but yours can be shorter or longer depending on your needs).
It’s also critical to never check emails/social media just after you wake up. This is truly unleashing. Never start a day with littering your head.

Wait… so you’re totally outdated!

Now you can wonder, how the hell can I live in today’s world? How can I consider myself an up-to-date person? How can I not be updated on everything what happens in the world being part of IT industry?

Well, that’s simple. I’m still up-to-date How do I achieve that? Let’s see:

1. Instead of reading/watching news, I talk to people (at work or home) – as soon as something interesting or important happens in the world I got to know about it from them. Talking with people who read a lot of news from various sources and hearing their opinions, e.g. on election candidates can even help me to choose a person to vote on. If they’ve already spent dozens of hours on research, why to reinvent the wheel?
2. When I hear about some topic and want to dig into it – then I look for some articles/news, but focused exactly on the topic which interests me. This way, I maximize usage of my valuable time
3. As soon as I meet someone interesting (e.g. speaker on a conference), I follow such person on Twitter. Then I explore Twitter twice per day and see only posts relevant to my interests. That’s a very good way to stay up-to-date with industry latest trends, new technologies etc.
4. When there’s some important event happening somewhere (examples: conference I’m interested in, Himalayan mountaineers rescue action I’d like to follow) I watch hashtags on Twitter. This is crazily specific and the information gets to me unbelievably fast. This is 1000000 times better that waiting for a news to be published on websites like BBC/CNN. What’s more, Twitter provides more realistic information, in most cases published by people who are on-site when something happens, so it’s not poisoned or already influenced by public media.

It’s all about selective ignorance

So you see, this is all about selective ignorance. You can read many psychological articles on the Internet, for example here, but taking into consideration what we covered in this post we can define it as:

1. Filtering out all irrelevant information, which doesn’t bring real value to yourself
2. Accepting the fact that we don’t need to know everything
3. Letting other people find or “transfer” information to us (like discussing about election candidates without prior research)
4. Accepting to stop consuming if something turns out to be irrelevant, e.g. stopping reading an article/blog post in the middle of it if it turns out to not be interesting (don’t be afraid of it!)
5. Releasing your brain from thinking “in the background” – don’t think that you need to check your email now, because some important email can wait there. Don’t open Facebook, because some world-breaking post may have just been published there. The simplest way to achieve that is to define time-frames in your calendar for exploring your socials/emails – your brain then knows why you don’t check it right away – because you’ve already scheduled checking it for later.

Summary and… CHALLENGE!

As you can see, Low-Information Diet is not that hard to implement in your life. There are just a few habits/routines you need to introduce. But believe me – it’s truly unleashing! You’ll be the same up-to-date as previously, or maybe even more and with relevant data! You’ll probably also talk more with people around you

1-week Low-Information Diet CHALLENGE:

I’d like you to, starting today, for the next 7 days go on an information rehab:

• no TV
• no news
• social media once per day for 30 minutes (set calendar event!)
• emails twice per day (set calendar event!)
• no push notifications on the mobile phone

After these 7 days, come back here and share your thoughts in the comments We’ll see how it works for you!

See ya!

The post My 90 days on Low-Information Diet appeared first on CodeJourney.net.

If you don’t really care about productivity, organization of your days, planning of tasks to be done during next X days, this post is for you  I totally didn’t care as well, but I felt a bit disorganized, I knew I could do more or at least be conscious of what I’m able to do and what I’m not. Finally, without studying anything like GTD, I managed to introduce few simple habits to my everyday life that make my life easier, allow to complete some tasks faster and make me aware of what I have to do and when. I’d like to share those manners with you – maybe you’ll also find them helpful.

Write everything down

I heard from many people promoting better life organization, that writing things down is a very important step in being more productive. I definitely confirm. Writing things down cleans up your brain – it makes you not thinking about something you have to do – you just write it down and you are sure you’ll take care of it when the time comes. Such brain-liberty is very powerful. You can use your brain to think about the activity you’re actually working on at the moment, not having many “background” topics taking your brain’s “resources”.

Of course, you need to find a place in which you store your notes (or tasks – whatever you call it). For me, such place must meet the following requirements:

• be easy and fast to use in every situation
• be accessible from every place, on every device
• synchronizing across multiple devices
• allowing to set deadlines for each task
• giving a possibility to group tasks

I’ve personally tested few todo lists / tasks management applications, including Freedcamp, Todoist or Wunderlist, but finally I found the perfect one – Nozbe. You can use my affiliate link to register, if you don’t mind As a bonus you’ll get one additional month if you decide to but a premium subscription. This project has been started and is developed by Michał Śliwiński who is productivity enthusiast. You can hear more about him and his project in DevTalk#44 podcast (Polish only).

Nozbe allows to store tasks, set their deadlines, group them into projects and categories. It’s very simple and that’s the best about it. Free version allows to create maximally 5 projects, which is fair enough for me. Nozbe can be installed on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android or iOS, which allows for quick adding of tasks (there is a keyboard shortcut in Windows and notifications panel’s widget for Android). I’ve already been using it for few months and I’m very happy, it helps me a lot, really.

As soon as you have your place chosen, just work out that simple habit of writing things down (in case of Nozbe – adding them to your Inbox). When someone comes to you and asks you for something – write it down and say “Sure, added to my tasks list”. The person is then confident that you’ll take care of what he/she asks for and your brain is not occupied by it until you have time for it. When you’re on a meeting, and something to be done by you appears – write it down. If you suddenly recall you need to visit your dentist soon – write it down. Simple as that. You’ll see how much it helps.

Review and plan your tasks

As soon as you write everything down, try to work out the habit to review your list of tasks. If you have only one place in which you put everything you want to do, review such tasks inbox every day (e.g. in the evenings) and decide what to do with each task – either add it to the project/category and set the deadline, leave as it is if there’s nothing to do for now or delete if there’s actually nothing more to be done in a particular topic.

Apart from daily tasks review, perform a general, weekly-review of all your tasks in all projects/categories. I do such reviews every Sunday in the evening. It allows me to know the scope of things to be done on a higher level – across different projects and categories. I can also see if all the tasks are properly scheduled so I can manage to complete them. It’s better to plan than not, even if you finally don’t realize all tasks as planned.

Create what-to-take lists

When you pack for a business trip or holidays, don’t you forget something every time ? If yes, just create a check-box list containing all the things to take for particular type of trip. When you pack for the next time, add necessary things to it. If during the journey you notice you forgot something, add it to your list, so the next time you don’t forget it. Very simple, but saves a huge amount of time for packing.

I use Google Keep for storing such lists. Here you can see how my list of the things to take for a business trip looks like:

Having such what-to-take lists, I don’t wonder what I should take when I go for a business trip, what should I take when I go for holidays etc. Firstly packing is fast, and secondly I know I won’t forget anything. I totally recommend such approach.

Create what-to-bring lists

Does it sound familiar to you: your family members asking you “Oh, bring me that nice shirt when you visit me the next time if you’re not using it anymore!” ? Or your mum calling you and saying “I bought you a beautiful sweater, don’t forget to take it when you visit us!” ? If yes, then for each such place you visit (parent’s house, sister’s house, brother’s house etc.) create what-to-bring list and just add to it each thing you need to either bring from or take to there. Then when you spontaneously visit your sister, you just open the sister’s home list and see if you have something to bring her or to take with you. Again – simple, but helpful.

Digitize your receipts

Have you ever wasted few hours on looking for a receipt, when wanting to return something for a warranty repair ? Maybe you finally found the receipt, but it got blank ? If yes, move your receipts to the cloud. As soon as you buy something and you know the receipt or invoice may be useful in the future, make a photo of it using your smartphone and store it in some cloud files storage service.

I use Android application called CamScanner for that – it allows to make a photo of a document, cut it, make it look as scanned and send to Google Drive, on which I store all my receipts and invoices. If you name your scanning files properly, it may save much of your time looking for a receipt or even make it possible at all to return something on a warranty repair if needed.

Use calendar only for time-important events

Before I discovered todo list apps and finally found Nozbe, I used to store everything I need to do in my Google Calendar. I treated it as my inbox – if I had something to do, I added it as a reminder to the calendar and set its reminding date at certain time, usually in the evenings. It happened that around 9 PM I had 5 or 6 pending calendar reminders notifications on my phone. When I mistakenly cleaned up my notifications panel, all those reminders were lost.

Calendar – as its name suggests – should be used only for events for which the time really matters. For instance, when you arrange a doctor’s visit in a month or two for concrete day and hour, add it to your calendar setting event’s time to exactly your visit’s day and hour. If you need a reminder few days/hours before, don’t add another calendar event few days/hours before (as I used to do) reminding you about the event – instead – if you use Google Calendar – use “remind before” notifications:

I also use Google Calendar for recurring events, for instance end of my car’s insurance or family members birthdays. The time is the most important for such events.

Summary

I’m not any kind of productivity fanatic. I also didn’t read any productivity/GTD books or courses. I think that such involvement in productivity management is not needed in many cases. In this post I presented few simple habits I introduced in my life that help me to be a lot more productive and just make my life simpler. If you want, you can try them out yourself

What productivity habits do you have ? What kind of tasks management tools/todo lists are you using ? Share your thoughts in the comments!

The post Simple habits for better productivity appeared first on CodeJourney.net.