5 Tips to Help Build Some Consistency as a Digital Nomad

As a digital nomad, you’ll travel a lot. This means that you’ll change your diet, gym, or “office,” and it will be near impossible for you to maintain a routine – in a traditional sense, anyway.

While this may be part of the appeal of digital nomadism, the truth is that humans are primed to need routine (or at least something that resembles it). Therefore, you need to find a way to introduce some consistency into your daily schedule. This way, you’ll get all the perks of digital nomadism without feeling out of place.

With that in mind and without further ado, here are a few ways you can build some consistency as a digital nomad (no matter how often you move).

Stay In Touch With People At Home

Today, it’s quite easy to stay in touch with people at home, so let’s do a little experiment. Open your favorite messaging app and go through the messages. How many people that you chat with daily do you see weekly? How about monthly?

Now, imagine if these people went to a different country without letting you know. Let’s say that they’re not taking photos outside, that they’re just exchanging memes with you. Would you even know that they’re away?

We’re trying to point out that most of your current “relationships” are digital. This means that, even if you were half a world away, they’d probably still be in the same form and of the same intensity. The only thing that would change is your sentiment toward it. You’re now half a world away without the possibility of going out with them for coffee this week. But, on the other hand, if you were home, you would have the possibility (but likely no intention) to do so. This is a mental barrier and nothing else.

Ultimately, staying in touch with people back home is also a safety precaution. Just checking in to let people back home know you’re alright is a huge thing that might save your life.

Keep Some Parts Of Your Routine.

Some rituals are easier to keep. For instance, you can do a morning routine of a nutritious breakfast, a walk, or a jog outside, no matter where you move. The same goes for your end-of-day routine.

You can even keep your work hours. Sure, you’ll suffer from jetlag for a while and have to adjust to a new time zone, but after 2-3 days, it shouldn’t be a problem to settle back into your own work hours.

If you have a habit of watching a specific TV show, you shouldn’t give up on doing so. Even if the content is geo-restricted in your current location, there is a broad range of servers providing VPN services that you can use to bypass this without a problem. This is one of those tiny things that can give your daily routine a structure and something that you definitely shouldn’t ignore.

Browsing social media and playing video games, for instance, are hobbies that you can take with you without any trouble.

Prepare Your Own Food.

If you always eat local, you’ll have to change your diet every time you move. However, as long as you prepare home-cooked meals, you shouldn’t have trouble maintaining consistency in your diet. Also, you’ll easily cure your homesickness by eating a childhood delicacy.

Sure, you can and should still eat out, but you can treat this as a special occasion – like if you were at home and a new exotic food restaurant opened in the neighborhood.

Keep in mind that keeping track of ingredients in local food will be hard, especially if you don’t speak the language, which is quite dangerous for people with allergies. So, you need to be extra careful and use a translation app or learn how to pronounce the name of the food you’re allergic to in the country that you’re just visiting. This is not a tip or a hack; this is a survival skill in a very literal sense.

Even without an allergy, if you’re not accustomed to a certain type of food, it might upset your stomach and ruin quite a few days. Now imagine this every time you move.

Also, preparing your own food will save you a small fortune. Even if you eat where the locals eat, eating out is always more expensive than buying your ingredients in the farmer’s market or supermarket. Today, you can even order ingredients online.

Find Your Places

The idea of working from a coffee shop sounds more compelling than it really is. The same thing goes for working from a park or a beach. Sure, you’ve decided to be a digital nomad after you’ve seen a photo of a person working from a beach with a cocktail in one hand and a laptop/tablet in another, but this is not how these things go.

If you want a structure, you’ll find a designated workplace as soon as you go to a place. In many of these locations, you can find shared office spaces where you can even mingle with other remote workers and digital nomads like yourself. This way, you can even make up for one of the biggest shortcomings of this kind of lifestyle.

Naturally, this doesn’t have to be just a shared office space. A hotel room or another suitable place can be just as good.

Don’t stop with just your workplace. Pick a gym and go there every day. If you want to dine out, make sure to go to the same place on most nights. This way, you can make every single place you visit your own hometown for a while. Not only will this make you more efficient, but it will also help you develop warmer memories of your travels.

Set Realistic Goals

The biggest problem that many digital nomads face is assuming they can just spend most of their days on the beach and work in breaks from cocktail hours and limbo dancing. This is usually not the case.

Sure, your day never goes as planned, but you’ll always wind up disappointed if you expect too much. This will make you loathe the lifestyle of a digital nomad even when you would have otherwise enjoyed it.

You see, just because you have the privilege of working from any place on earth, this doesn’t mean that you don’t have to work at all. Having realistic goals is one thing, but you still have to put in the hours.

So, work is supposed to come before play, and as long as you stick to that principle, you can sample everything the target location offers in your free time. You can see every national park, local nightclub, and museum in the city.

Structure And Routine Can Keep You Productive And Sane.

Ultimately, you need structure. This is incredibly important, no matter where you are or what you do. You need to make money, remain sane, keep up with the lifestyle, and watch out for your health. Neither of these things are easy to do, even when you’re home, let alone when you’re constantly on the run. Fortunately, where there’s will, there’s always a way.