Digital Nomads Never Work more than Four Hours a Week

byAlexEvans

11.9K followers

3 years ago

One of my first connections with the online marketing world was an airport read; you know, the one you pick it up to read on a flight.

On reflection, the somewhat misleadingly titled "The 4-Hour Work Week" by Tim Ferriss ignited a fire, and the journey began—one of the strange phenomenons that have evolved around the online marketing world is that little work leads to a life of pure leisure.

In order to succeed, the reality is that we can end up working more hours than in our former lives to reinvent ourselves as bloggers, freelancers, and entrepreneurs. When it comes to bricks and mortar businesses, it is the same; the reality is that we work harder than we do when we sell our time for money and work for someone else, be it a company or individual.

Designed to work

The thing is that we are designed to work; it is inbuilt and reflecting.

"I don't want to work four hours a week. I like what I do, and I want to do it. I'm happy to work. I'm not trying to get away from work."

Although many do not count working online as work, it is an expansive activity—a significant amount of time is spent networking, building skills, and working on professional development endeavors and online-focused projects. There is a concentration of digital nomads in technology, marketing, e-commerce, and coaching professions, broadly defined. Reflecting on what people are doing in this space helps make sense of what others are doing efficiently and makes it possible to learn from one another's strategies.

No real definition.

There seems to be no actual definition in regard to being a digital nomad. There are some markers!

If you have reached that point in life where you do not want to;

• Spend one-third of your life living with a sense of enslavement.

• You don't want to rent out your body and mind for five of seven days of the week.
• Spending every day counting down the minutes to lunch, watching the time drag by until 4 p.m. Friday.
• But much, much more than that, you don't want to confine yourself to choosing work that isn't meaningful and doesn't matter to you.

You have become a prime candidate for becoming a digital nomad. The last year, living through numerous lockdowns and uncertainty has created the atmosphere for this shift. When we think about the digital nomad lifestyle, we have this vision of life on a beach. I am not sure about you, but laptops and beach sand are not the best of friends; that is just the start of it. You can guarantee the battery will go flat; you will drop the connection before dropping the device in the water, lol. ( experience speaking there.)

Digital Nomad ........ ah, cool.

I have done the off-grid online thing, and it's not as straightforward or as romantic as you think. Some days you need to be fifty steps ahead of yourself to stand still. In the online world, there is one key thing, and that is a mindset. Everyone is online for entertainment value, and still, very few are looking for legitimate ways to generate income. You go into your local supermarket and scream out at the top of your lungs.

Any online marketers here?

You will hear a pin drop; there won't be many, if any.

If we shift our mindsets, then the heartbeat is nomadic in that we are doing something that is outside of the norm. It is nomadic in that it looks from a different time perspective; content creation is a classic; it is created today, published online, and then works for the creator in their absence. What part of the marvelous universe that is I am still pondering.

Normal or Not

What we are doing is not normal, and when we take that on board, it can be liberating and empowering. If you stop and think about all your friends and associates, out of all the people that you know, how many would have a chance of footing it in the online world? Some of the folks I know wouldn't have the patience even to contemplate visiting the online marketing world.

A while ago, I thought about it and reflected from a nomadic perspective; some folks with the right inputs, knowledge, and resources could give it a crack. That, in turn, becomes a solid value proposition. There are two ways to look at it; if I sell something online, I get paid, or I get paid a commission, Yay me.

Then again, if you sell something online, there's satisfaction because you have helped someone, and you get paid or paid a commission; I call that a yay plus. We all want to sell stuff; that's the name of the game. How we do it is a mindset thing, and the mindset from where we come from is a thing. One you are selling and one you are helping, helping people to find solutions.

A breakthrough for me was the thought that it wasn't selling. It was helping; for some reason, when you think in terms like that, everything changes. In reality, you become a digital nomad; you are operating outside of the norm, there is no fixedness about it. It is kind of like being a time nomad. Do you only want to work four hours a week; no, because it is rewarding and fun.

Thank you for sticking with it, a bit of a ramble; all perspectives are different. It is all about working out what's the proper perspective for you.

Alex Evans.