How to stay on track with your personal and business goals as a digital nomad

At the start of last year I left England and moved to Colombia. I hadn’t left the country before for more than two weeks, had never been anywhere by myself and my Spanish was shit. 

It was one of the best years of my life. 

Here I am living my best life quad biking in the Sacred Valley, Peru.

To claim that it was plain sailing would be a lie. However, I had a remarkably fortunate time throughout - six months in Medellin, Colombia then onto Ecuador and Peru briefly before settling into Buenos Aires until the end of the year when I returned. 

There are many good reasons to leave the UK behind and live in South America - better cost of living, better weather and the opportunity to learn from new people. For me, in England I felt like I was plateauing, like I wasn’t really growing. My business was growing, sure, but I wasn’t really satisfied. I didn’t feel like I was being challenged enough. Life was too easy, too comfortable. 

It felt like I could blink and I would wake up at 40 doing the same things day in and day out. It would be fine but I wanted more than fine. Comfort is the enemy of progress. I’m terrified of future regret. 

I scaled back the business which was my main source of income and doubled down on what was really important to me while I was away. Namely, growing the journal business and writing my first book. It’s difficult to really explain but I just knew for some reason that to break the mould and dedicate the time and effort needed to write a book I needed to throw everything out. I needed to go somewhere that no one knew me, where I didn’t know anyone and have a pure experience untainted by the past. 

While it might sound like I was running from something that wasn’t really the case. Ultimately, wherever you go, there you are. A better description would be I was running to something. 

Running to test myself in a realm I was untested within. True freedom. 

The thing about many of the places I lived in South America is that pretty much anything you can think of, you can do. That thing will be readily available to you at a very reasonable price and to a very high standard. 

What this then requires from you is discipline. 

When living in a world where you are so fortunate that anything is possible you learn the necessity for instilling rules around your behaviour. This is non-negotiable for productivity. Juggling meetings in different time zones whilst maintaining a writing practice and balancing creativity with spontaneity isn’t easy without a system.

This is not intended to be a long and shameless plug for the benefits of using an Evolve Journal but is my honest experience; without it, I’d be fucked. 

That’s not to say you can’t employ some other system to keep you in check but the bottom line is you need a system. If you’re working on multiple projects, you set your own hours and you don’t have a boss then you can't just wing it.

I’m an inherently lazy person. I understand that about myself. Is that an excuse to be lazy? No. 

Freddie and I (below) created a system for productivity and the proof is in the pudding. My life doesn’t work without it. 

Saying that I’m this dependent on a little book telling me what to do is kind of strange but that’s the truth of it. 

Keeping a journal is like life on easy mode, sometimes it even feels like you're cheating. Don't believe me? Try it ;)