Freelancers and digital nomads know very well that one of the hardest things to do (or at least one of the more crucial) in your daily activity – after payment reminder to your clients – is organization.
Home and spaces oragnization is not the easiest thing, for so many reasons. Home spaces are those where you can find and loose concentration so many times, is where your mom, friends, sisters call, where postman rings (even twice) to ask you to sign, is the place where you may have had a fight the night before with your boyfriend or where you may have someone unknown in bed that hasn’t waken up yet.
Even more so… organizing your errant-work-station is harder and harder if you travel for work or if you… travel, and that’s it.
There are many free lance and digital nomads professions where to re-create a proper work space while in travel is as difficult as crucial. Among them, travel blogging, and that’s why the internet is full of articles rich in tips (some of them very very smart and useful) about how to recreate the right work environment almost everywhere.
So, I’ll go with my tips, coming from several years of experience and mistakes that I’ve done sometimes.
1 – Mind the desktop
The most of times we can’t take the whole desktop (I mean, the table where we work at home) with us, but as the word suggest, you have another desktop to deal with. It’s the one of your computer.
If it’s full of images you upload and download, drafts documents, notes, videos to edit and if you can’t perfectly remember what’s your background pic this mean your desktop is… like mine.
Well, before leaving (and at least once every 10 days) you should clean it all and trash all the useless things.
When away, all work rhythms are different and irregular and you must keep some space safe from all the mess in order not to loose or just to find back concentration.
2 – Mind the mobile
If you are a creative, social, travel worker, I bet your mobile is a part of you and a part of your job.
I propose you a game: count all the app you have on your mobile that you use for work. How many of them are in the same screenshot?
Do you find it helpful for the concentration to have them so scattered arpund? If I had my e-mail app close to the one for the perfect make up, it would be like having my coputer in the toilet, don’t you think so?
That’s why I have, over the first home, the icons of the telephone, contact list, whatsApp, E-mail, my main socaial icons
Twitter, Istagram and Facebook.
In the second home screenshot there re the Apps I use for work and some more of them are collected in the same box on the 3rd home and so on. Find your order and follow it.
3 – Mind the notes
I know most of you, digital and soul nomads, are graphomaniacs and like sketching and making amazing portraits while talking in a skype call, pretending you’re taking notes of what your colleague is saying.
Actually I’ve noticed that leaving every time with a clean and new block notes is very useful: it helps you to organize your work. I also find very useful mouse-pad-block-notes.
Here you can note all your daily schedule and priorities.
4 – Picture of your daily timetable
Do you have a time table board in your home-office? I do and suggest you to.
It’s useful like my school time table in order to always remember the homeworks for the day after.
When I travel I can’t take it with me but I have a picture of it both on my computer desktop and in my mobile.
I’ve learned in a workshop about digital nomads some very good tool such as TRELLO.COM, ASAN.COM, X-MIND and SLACK.
Thet are all tools to organize work, schedules, contacts etc.
5 – Be like… you look like on Instagram
Flexibily is not, necessarily, sacrifice and having all your office in your mobile phone doesn’t mean that the environement sourrounding you won’t influence your concentration.
When i work out I like posting pics of my workstation on Instagram. You know that the most ‘likes’ pics about #work, #job on Insta are tidy, clean, celestial. Well, I try do be like this. As far as I can…
Any other suggestion or tool? Write in comments!
16 Comments
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melody pittman
OMG, my daughter is organized just like you. In fact, that #4 picture is right up her alley! I am all over the place but there is a method to my madness. LOL
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Megan
I love the last one. If I thought about that I’d keep myself so much more organized. Thanks for sharing some tips.
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Aileen Adalid
These are really great tips! I do the same things as well, but probably except for the last part. I think it just really depends on people because for me, often times, a messy desk makes me more productive, creative, and fast haha!
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Sabrina - In My Suitcase
You lucky! I can’t help but creating a big mess around me and I wish this made me more productive. But it just makes me loose everything 😛
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Lotte
Excellent tips! I do find my desk cluttered regularly and know it’s time to clean up, because it truly is y much easier to work and focus when your surroundings are well-organized!
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Laura
That’s funny. We all look so organized and put together on Instagram. Reality can be quite a different thing. It’s hard to organize your workspace, but like you said it does help quite a bit.
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Sabrina - In My Suitcase
Laura, I see there is a big gap between “bloggers life seen by instagram” vs “bloggers true life!” 🙂
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Jenna
Great tips! I agree–it’s so important to stay on top of organization when you work on the road. I’ve been working on getting things much more organized lately. Love the tip about keeping different screens for different parts of your life!
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Jackie Sills-Dellegrazie
Good idea to clear out the clutter at your desk. Ignore your phone for an hour and you’ll be amazed at how much work you get done. I just started using Trello and it’s been very helpful to visualize next steps.
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Stefan
OMG it’s so true – it’s so hard not to procrastinate – my phone the worst distraction. It’s been 2 days now I’ve been trying to do a blog post and still nothing…having that separate between home and work definitely helps.
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Debra Schroeder
Nice tips. I should clean my desk every 10 days because it starts getting cluttered. Hadn’t thought about posting a picture of my work area on Instagram, but that would be very motivational to keep my on top of things.
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mia rose
Muchos Gracias for your blog article.Thanks Again. Really Great.