3 Lessons From Being a Digital Nomad For Running Your Company
Read Time: 4 min
How becoming a digital nomad taught me how to run a remote-first company.
We work remote and it forced us to solve challenges that every business struggles with.
I have lived as a digital nomad since 2020 and have been building a fully remote company since 2018.
Our team was fully remote long before the pandemic made it necessary.
Working remote wasn't a band-aid solution for us; it was our default.
I have learned how to navigate the pitfalls of remote work over the past six years.
Running a remote-first company as a digital nomad fixed problems most of us face daily at work.
Slow, unproductive teams that miss deadlines.
Unmotivated, distracted team members waiting to be managed.
Depending on single team members who become bottlenecks.
Team members burn out under pressure because they think they can't take vacations.
And the high cost of onboarding and training new hires.
I don't understand why company leaders insist on returning to office culture.
Most jobs in the Western world can be done remote, despite what managers want you to think.
The secret is that most managers would lose their jobs if we fix our work environments.
Let's take the US as a representation of the Western workforce for a second.
A quick search revealed that up to 80% of the US workforce could work remotely.
So why aren't more people using this freedom?
I learned the following three lessons from remote work that can be applied to any desk work setting.
These three things will improve your company even if you don't want to do things remote.
3 Lessons Every Company Should Learn From Remote Work.
1) Communication is King
I can't just walk over to my teammate's desk to ask them a question in remote work.
I bet walking over and interrupting someone else is a central part of your office culture.
It is one of the most crippling habits in every company.
Interrupting others is the default work culture in most on-site companies I have seen.
This is ridiculous!
Every interruption increases stress, pressure and mental workload for the interrupted person.
It takes about 23 minutes to refocus after being interrupted.
How often are you interrupted every day?
How often are you interrupting someone else every day?
I let you do the math on how much time your business wastes daily.
And we didn't even consider noise, notifications, or incoming phone calls.
Having to ask many questions is a sign of bad communication.
Every question means that the person asking is missing a piece of information.
90% of these missing pieces got lost in bad communication.
Don't stop asking questions, though.
This will only hide the symptoms of considerable problems in your business.
Learn how to communicate relevant information directly, precisely, asynchronously and without ego.
Then, ensure that the other person received the correct meaning of the words you sent.
If you confuse, you lose.
Let's look at this step by step:
Only relevant information: I only communicate information we need right now.
Direct and Precise: I use specific terms and no ambiguities. Every misunderstanding will prompt questions later.
Asynchronously: I do my tasks as if someone else would take over tomorrow, and I am not available anymore. This is what happens constantly in real life.
Without ego: This means no hidden agendas, politics, or I in a team.
2) No Paper, Everything Is In the Cloud
I learned the hard way that work only exists when uploaded to the cloud.
Since then, in my companies, there are no more:
Paper post-its.
Notes scribbled on sheets of paper or whiteboards.
Local hard drives.
Processes with a single-person bottleneck.
I had one team member coding on a feature for a week.
They never made one commit to our bitbucket remote repository.
Then they disappeared.
We had no progress on this task for a week. It was a big one.
So, another team member started over with this task from scratch.
One week of work was lost because we didn't follow these simple rules.
Later, the missing team member reappeared.
Stuck in a warzone, a rocket had hit the internet node of the city (true story).
Of course they were frustrated that their past week's work was deprecated now.
Work only exists when it is uploaded.
Here are three things you need to become paperless:
A digital and cloud-based second brain. I love Notion for this, but there is a ton of good software out there.
A digital and cloud-based project management tool. Again, I use Notion for this, but Trello, Jira, etc., work great, too.
Document every process of your company in your second brain so anyone on the team can take it over.
3) The Power of Systemization and Automation
I lived near a beach most of my time for the past four years.
With such a beautiful nature outside my door, motivation to do basic tasks gets difficult.
So, I found ways to eliminate these tasks and free my time to play outside.
I only spend time on the things that are:
100% necessary to move the needle for my business.
Can't be automated.
And can't be delegated to someone else.
In my first company, one of our processes was to render image assets for our trading card game.
A set of cards had around 100 cards that all needed an image.
We plan to release a new set of 50-100 cards every six months.
It took one designer two months to render all these card images once.
We constantly balanced the game, so cards needed to be re-rendered weekly.
This designer did only this one rendering cards task every day for months.
Then, one of our devs took two weeks on a side quest, building a tool to automate the rendering process.
Now, we could render a whole set of cards in five minutes, and anyone on the team could do it.
This is the power of automation.
If a bot, software, or machine can do a task, a human shouldn't touch it.
I sent you a diagram of my simple optimization process above.
Document and store your processes in your second brain.
Start with the most crucial process and walk through the diagram.
Repeat with all other processes.
This simple system will free up your business 20-40 weekly working hours.
How much money does this save you?
What will you do with all that free time?
Wrap Up
The three big lessons running a 100% location-independent company taught me are:
Communication is King
Work 100% digital and cloud-based.
Simplify, standardize, and automate everything possible in your company.
I used these lessons to reduce my work time, make work more fun, and spend more time with what truly matters to me.
You can do the same.
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Thanks for reading to the end!
You rock!
Cheers,
Marcel