Why We Became Digital Nomads
3 Key Factors That Made Us Embrace a Digital Nomadic Lifestyle
This is the first part of a series of blogs in which we’ll share our experiences on workationing (working and vacationing at the same time). We’ve been on this journey for the last twelve months. Our travel destinations were sub-tropical islands like Madeira, Tenerife, and La Gomera during the winter months, and across the length of Germany (from Bavaria to the North Sea) during spring and summer.
This workationing lifestyle was an organic transition for us as we’ve always loved to travel and the push towards remote work in the recent years has helped us take our travel addiction to the next level.
We begin the series with the WHY-part and in the next posts, we’ll be sharing our insights on ‘How we manage to implement this lifestyle?’ and ‘What are the challenges?’.
So, let’s get started: Why did we embrace this lifestyle?
Here are the 3 key factors:
- Flexibility to Choose Our Climate, Work(Space & Time) 💪
- The Novelty Factor 🦋
- Immersive Travelling 🏝
Flexibility to Choose Our Climate, Work(Space & Time) 💪
Climate ☀️: First and foremost, we wanted to escape the long, German winter. We realised that we feel most comfortable in a warm climate with an average temperature of 22 degrees Celsius, with the sun shining most of the time. That could mean middle and northern European countries between May and August, and warmer climates between October and March. Also, we love water. Thus, most of the stays we pick are either near the ocean, a lake, a river, or have a pool.
Workspace 💻: We love the fact that we are able to choose our working environment — it can be at a campsite, a park, in the woods, by the beach/river/pool side. All that’s needed is good internet connectivity. As our work equipment just consists of a laptop and a phone, we are neither bound to a particular desk, nor a particular house, town, or country. It’s an amazing feeling to just pick up our bags and be gone.
Time 🕰: Here’s a rough calculation of time spent commuting to work for one person:
Back and forth: 2 hours every day → 10 hours every week → 40 hours every month → 40 * 11 months = 440 hours every year = 18 days.
18 entire days!
We rather use all those hours on pursuing our hobbies or learning something new.
The Novelty Factor 🦋
We love the novelty that a nomadic lifestyle brings about. As we usually don’t stay more than a month at one place, there is always something to look forward to: a new home, unique sceneries, an unexplored cuisine, a different language and culture, and new people.
This constant change in our surroundings also sparks our creativity — you tend to look at problems from a different angle (literally!) which often leads to innovative ways of solving them.
Immersive Travelling 🏝
This style of travelling is not so much about the tourist attractions you’d seek out if you were on a holiday. Since we stay longer at a place than we would if we were just holidaying, we don’t stress ourselves by following the tourist routes. We get to live like the locals do. We appreciate the fact that our long-term stays allow us to explore each region thoroughly and truly soak up the culture.
Basically, the best part about workationing is that work and vacation is happening at the same time. In your non-working hours you feel as if you were on a holiday. And in fact you are!
We hope this post gave you some idea about our reasons for embracing a nomadic lifestyle and maybe we even inspired you.
Here are some insights on how we manage this lifestyle and the challenges that come with it:
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