So the new year has rolled around and you’ve probably read a thousand lists about how to streamline your life and focus your attention like a “freaking laser beam”. But really how important is this? How important is it to remove distractions like Facebook or constantly checking your email to increase your productivity? How important is it to focus on a single task at once? If you are anything like me then you’ll know that it is really important.

I am distracted by everything possible…

• Facebook
• Email
• Clients
• Twitter
• My children
• The kid across the road
• The cloud drifting across the sky

Anything that can possibly divert my attention ensures that my focus is nothing resembling a laser beam.

So I have taken this opportunity to round up some of the articles that I thought were honest and straight forward articles on how to focus your attention on your work so you can get out from behind the laptop (or whatever you do) and get out and enjoy your location.

Here are a few articles that you should take a read through to help you focus your attention for the months ahead.

Reducing the Noise in Your Life

Christine Gilbert - The Uncomfortable Truth About Being Productive

Pico Iyer – The Joy of Quiet – this post is mentioned in Christine’s post and is definitely worth a read

Goals and Goal Tracking

Lifehacker.com – Five Best Goal Tracking Services

Aherk.com – Aherk! is a goal-oriented self-blackmailing service. With this app you set a goal for yourself. You then upload an incriminating photo of yourself… Perhaps the one you took of yourself in the bathroom mirror naked and flexing your muscles, or the one of you at that New Year Eve part where you were so drunk and the bottom of your skirt was under your armpits…

If you complete the goal (and your friends agree) then nothing happens, but if your friends vote to say you didn’t complete your goal then the incriminating photo is published on Facebook. I don’t think I would need any more motivation than people potentially seeing me starkers flexing my grossly inadequate biceps.

If you do you Aherk.com let me know you experience with it. Did you achieve the goal you set? Or has the world seen that truly hideous photo of you?

Joshua Fields Millburn – 100 Days With No Goals

Productivity Tips

Copyblogger.com – 31 Pro Tips for a Successful, Satisfying, and Insanely Profitable 2012

Timo Kiander – Effective Time Blocking Techniques To Boost Your Productivity

Morellos Marelisa – 17 Ways to Be Happier in 2012
This article is a little general for me but I thought I would include a least one generic list of things to do.

Ali Luke – Are You Making These 7 Productivity Mistakes?

My 2012

I certainly need to start taking some of this advice as I have a massive 2012 planned. I am currently in Bulgaria, about to go skiing for 10 days and then we head to Western Europe for 3 weeks before heading back to Malaysia in the middle of February for some sun and warmth after a European winter. I have to say it has been a massive shock to the system after almost 2 years of temperatures over 30 degree Celsius.

Our 2012 plans

• February – Return to Malaysia
• April – flights to Sarawak, Borneo for a week
• May – flights to Sri Lanka for 3 weeks
• June/July – possibly flights up to China
• September – we are considering flights to Australia for 3 months
• December – Canada/US to start hopefully 12 months of travelling around in an RV

What are you goals or travel plans for 2012. Why not share them with us in the comments below.

Yesterday I was catching a cab to the bus Station in Macedonia. It was a short 7 minute journey in which I truly feared for my life about a dozen time. Travelling through the city streets swerving in front of a bus to miss the next bus and breaking heavily to avoid the pedestrians crossing (at the crossing) tends to move the luggage in the back of the cab around a little. So as the cabbie opened the trunk to get our luggage out I see my laptop bag (with 2 macbook pro’s in it) drop to the ground. My heart sinks and my first thought was “F*&K there goes my laptop”.

If you were in the same situation today and your laptop was to die (like I thought mine may have) how would you fair? Do you have the right backup solutions in place to ensure that this type of setback isn’t going to ruin all the hard work you have done to get yourself a nomadic lifestyle? Being able to work from anywhere sounds like a dream for most people, and it certainly is, but it also raises a whole new set of challenges that you will need to overcome if you are going to be successful at it.

About 20 minutes after my laptop dropped to the ground I decided I should sit down and just check whether or not it was working. When I opened the lid and typed in my password, I thought I was okay…. A minute later it still hadn’t logged in. So I rebooted and got the flashing folder with a big question mark. Do a quick bit of googling on the second laptop and I find out that this means there is no Hard drive which means it is either cactus or come loose.

Luckily I was near a computer store and I borrowed a screwdriver to pull the back off my laptop. Fortunately on this occasion it was simply the fact that the impact had dislodged the new hard drive I had installed. So within 20 minutes everything was back to normal. During that 20 minutes though I was pretty calm, logically going through the contents of my machine and thinking what I had and hadn’t backed up. Which surprised me, I thought I would have been in a bit of a panic.

• Important client files – Check
• Website code – Check
• Billing & Accounting information – Check
• iTunes library – Check
• Travel Photos – Check

If the worst did actually happen the most I would have lost is a few movies and TV episodes that I had converted to digital format before I left Australia and hadn’t yet imported into my iTunes library.

So today I thought I would outline my current backup procedure and my future steps which should make all of my data safe into the future (fingers crossed).

Equipment.

Let me first outline the equipment that I travel with for work. There are more bits and pieces but those are either for the kids or for leisure and aren’t strictly necessary for a lifestyle where you can work from anywhere. I have a 2009 13″ Macbook Pro and after 2 years the laptop was still a great laptop but it was starting to slow down a touch so instead of going out and buying a new one I decided to beef this one up a little with the hope of getting another year or two out of it. So I doubled the RAM from 4GB to 8GB for about $80USD. I then read somewhere about removing the DVD Drive and replacing it with a second Harddrive to give me more space. So instead of just buying a normal hard drive I decided to go with an Intel Solid State Hard drive which would give me a couple of benefits.

• Because the read/write speeds to the SSD (Solid State Drive) are much quicker it would mean quicker boot times and better responsiveness of the programs. I can certainly vouch for this.
• Secondly because there are no moving parts in a SSD it means that it should be a little more robust in the event that it is ever dropped etc.

Now admittedly I do lose a DVD drive but I hardly ever used the DVD drive and if I really need one I can always buy a cheap external DVD drive.

These are the specific products that I bought:

Solid State Hard drive – Intel 320 Series 120 GB SATA 2.5-Inch Solid-State Drive

RAM – Kingston Apple 8GB DDR3 SDRAM Memory Module

Hard drive enclosure – 2.5″ 9.5mm SATA 2ND HDD Hard Drive Enclosure for Apple Unibody

MY BACKUP REGIME

Important Files

I am not a huge fan of having to constantly initiate backups because ultimately even with the best of intension you inevitably forget to do it regularly enough. I do have a 1TB External hard drive that I plug in and use Apple’s Time Machine to backup occasionally. When I am stationary this works fine, but when I am on the move the back up HDD just doesn’t get plugged in often enough. So what I really wanted was a solution that would continually backup the important information on my laptop. This is where Dropbox comes into it. I have bought a yearly subscription to the 50GB plan on dropbox. All of my client website and work files go into this folder and are constantly backed up and synchronised whenever I am connected to the internet. This works perfectly for me.

Dropbox offers a free 2GB account and gives you an additional 500MB for every person you refer. Alternatively purchasing the 50GB plan for $99/year or 9.99/month or the 100GB plan for $199/year or 19.99/month is certainly a very worthy business expense in my mind.

Email

My easy solution here is to use an online email system like gmail. I have now been using GMAIL as my primary email account for the past 2 years and although I occasionally flirt with the idea of using a desktop client to access my email, having my email as a hosted service means I shouldn’t lose any information if my laptop dies. There is always the built in fear that what happens if Google looses all my data. Well quite frankly my feeling is that GMAIL does a much better job at backing up that I do. There are privacy issues etc, but that’s not for this blog post.

Notes / Projects / Business Ideas

I use Evernote quite extensively for personal and business matters. When I start a project I create a new evernote folder and share it with the company. They can then update the folder with TODO items or bug fixes that I need to complete. We can share information and files (although I usually share files via dropbox) but you can do it in evernote if you need to.

I have upgraded to the Premium subscription for $45/year but you may not need to do this for your business. I probably didn’t need to do it for my business…

Billing / Invoicing

I have been using Freshbooks to invoice my clients for almost 2 years now. I have two accounts. One for my Australian company and one for another business. I honestly think it is the easiest and most efficient invoicing system on the market. It is completely online so all of your information is available on any computer so if you laptop dies you can still work out who owes you money.

FUTURE BACKUP PLANS

At the moment I still have a pretty big gap in my backup solution for my travel photos which are nudging on 250GB in size. At the moment we transfer them to yet another external hard drive. The problem with doing this is that we have absolutely no backup solution if that external hard drive was to fail.

About a month ago I 1TB hard drive which had almost 800GB of movie and TV episodes on it corrupted and I lost all the data. Simple as that. One second it works and the next it’s unrecoverable. Seeing how fickle this was I have decided that backing up our travel photos to an external drive is simply not good enough. So when I get back to Penang from our trip in Eastern Europe I plan to buy and set up a Network Storage (NAS) device.

NAS – Network Attached Storage

Okay, what is a NAS device. You can buy these in all sorts of configurations, but I am planning on buying one that has a minimum of 4 hard drive bays in it. That means I can buy 4 hard drives and configure the system to distribute the data over the 4 drives in what is called a RAID5 configuration. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. In effect it means if one drive fails I can replace it and rebuild the information from the other three remaining drives.

Because NAS devices can be connected to the internet, with a little bit of set up work and the use of a dynamic IP service like dyndns.com or something similar I should be able to connect the device to the internet and be able to access and backup all of my information wherever I am in the world. The only draw back of this method is that it is bulky and it is impractical to carry around with you. We have a home base in Penang, Malaysia that we can set this up at and just leave it running while we are travelling. So if you are looking to go down this path that perhaps try to set one up at your parents place or a good friends place. You could bribe them by offering them some of the storage space or by offering to pay for some of their monthly internet connection subscription as it will definitely use up some of their bandwidth.

Other backup solutions

Being the Apple fanboy that I am I did consider the buying a Time Capsule, as another digital nomad that I know does this and given it is not too bulky he can just bring it along. It also has a inbuilt router that can be used to share his internet connection where ever he is. There are two drawbacks to the Time Capsule that I can see.

1. There is only 1 hard drive in the Time Capsule so you are just as susceptible to a hard disk failure as you are in your laptop.
2. Airport Security have no idea what it is so it can (and did) cause a couple of tense moments for this particular nomad.

Life has changed significantly in the past 10 years. In 2001 we travelled through a few European countries including a trip to Spain and back then we travel with a couple of laptops but they were bulky and we certainly didn’t have a backup plan back then.

Hello, I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce myself. My name is Colin Burns and I have recently taken over running the NuNomad.com website from Carmen and Ricardo.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for all the amazing work that they have done on this website and on building a resource and community to help people achieve location independence. They have truly created a great resource and I hope that my endeavours and enthusiasm for being apart of this community will help us to build a truly great resource for everyone whether you are looking to work from anywhere in the world or if you are already on the road and looking for a community to to help support your endeavours.

My background

I don’t know a lot of you guys so I thought I would spend a little bit of time in this blog post telling you a little about myself, what makes me want to get involved with nunomad.com and what makes me qualified to write anything about digital nomadism and location independence.

This very second I am sitting in a (cheap) hotel on the outskirts of London, tomorrow I will be somewhere in the south of England and next Tuesday we’ll be starting our adventure through Eastern Europe. (Yep, in the middle of winter may not have been one of our  smartest ideas, but we are suckers for a cheap airfare). So here we are in London, showing the kids the sights and spending a lot of time as a family.

In the past 2 years we have backpacked through Bali, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and spent 5 months driving around East & Southern Australia. All of this has been done while earning enough money to feed, clothe, educate and fly around 4 people (albeit two of those are rather small). So given that fact that I have been able to combine work and a travel lifestyle I think I am able to help when it comes to talking about being able to work from anywhere.

The family aspect of digital nomadism may not be of much interest to you and I promise that this website will not become a location for me to write about how cool my family is and how excited I was when my son, Noah lost his first tooth or the pride I feel when my daughter Hayley looks up at me with those big blue eyes. We have a website for that here and we even have a website for long-term travelling families here so I promise you I won’t be turning this website into a website devoted to long-term family nomadism.

By profession I am a Web Developer. I have been for the past 10 years. In Australia I owned a small web design firm which I sold/gave away in 2008. After working for a mid-sized firm for 16 months I decided to leave and go my own way again. Not long after this I finally convinced my wife that digital nomadism was the way forward for us and since that time we haven’t looked back.

Now some of you might think, well duh, anyone who has web development skills can be a digital nomad. Not true! And I can say this emphatically. Having a skill set that allows you to be mobile is only one of the many challenges you will face when you choose to become a digital nomad. For example, how does one get new work, what rates should you charge, how do you position yourself in the market? Do you want to work through online job boards like elance.com, odesk.com etc or do you build your own network to source work. Both methods have their pros and cons. These are some of the things that we can all help each other with.

Like any freelance work, digital nomadism requires you to think like a business person. Anyone can do it and I hope that through this website we can help equip you with the skills and information that you need to become truly mobile (if you are not already).

The future???

I have some pretty big plans for nunomad.com but before I start doing the things I want, I thought I would take the time to ask you all to help me come up with some ideas for the site. As I said I have the skill set that will allow me to transform the nunomad.com website into exactly what this community needs and wants.

So I would like to ask you to share your thoughts on what direction you would like to see this website go in. What type of articles, what type of resources, what type of functionalities would you like to be a part of nunomad.com.

One of the things I would like to encourage is the building of our community through our Facebook Group. I hope to foster an environment of sharing and support for others who are new to digital nomadism or are even on the road already and just want a community to be a part of to share in their successes or to help during the harder times.

What’s next?

I would like to start the discussion in our Facebook group (but I am still happy to hear any comments through the comments here). I will start the conversation by asking a few questions and hopefully everyone’s feedback will help us get to a point where we can all move forward together. I would really appreciate your honest feedback about the different parts of the website, how you use or don’t use particular parts of the website and generally any thoughts on how you think we can improve.

My sincere aim in this transition is complete transparency. I want you at all times to know where you stand and what the future direction of the site will be. I can’t promise that every suggestion will be carried out, but I can assure you that every suggestion/criticism will be heard and taken on board. Most of the communication surrounding the transition will be done in the Facebook Group so please head on over and join in.

I’m really looking forward to meeting a whole new group of people and hopefully together we can create a resource that will help the ever growing community of digital nomads.

All the best,
Colin

by Ricardo

Last July I posted an introduction to CouchSurfing.com, an organization that connects travelers with (if only temporarily) anchored people – people with an extra room or couch to offer you while you visit their town and country. The pros to CS were pretty obvious: a free place to stay a night or two with people who share your lifestyle – not unlike staying over at a friend-of-a-friend. And for the host, it’s being able to meet others. The cons may be that two days stay isn’t enough, or that if you’re nomading you might need to take over a place, or be less sociable while you focus on your work. For the host, your hosting out of the goodness of your heart, since no money changes hands at CS.

But let’s say your travel budget isn’t so lean. Or, that you have a nice extra room you’d like to make some money on.

A friend of mine recently turned me on to Airbnb.com. Unlike CouchSurfing.com, which is a quasi-nonprofit organization, Airbnb.com is about commerce. They link people with extra rooms, bungalows and apartments, with folks who are seeking their own space – and are willing to pay for it. But unlike traditional B&Bs, which are operated as primary business, the people at Airbnb.com allow only private parties to use their services. Like CS, they act as intermediaries (or even emissaries of goodwill) between those who wish to make a little money on their guest accommodations, and those who want something more than a couch or room space. And, if you believe the well produced video introduction to Airbnb.com, you can be slumbering in anything from a well appointed penthouse to a rustic tree house, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.  As for price, it’s not always super cheap – but definitely reasonable. For example, a night in Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA), a sort of well-healed destination, will run you anywhere from $35 (private room) to $400 (3 bedroom house), with most people offering their places between $80-$125.

Like CS, Airbnb.com offers a complete profile of the accommodation, the surrounding area, as well as about the host – which is very important since you’ll be staying in someone’s private residence rather than a business. There’s also a review section for you to consider the experiences of past guests. And for the host, they get to review your references. You know, to make sure you’re not a total whacko.

In this economic recession, being able to offer up your extra space for some extra cash so that others can have a bit of home comfort while they’re on the road or nomading seems like a winning combination.

Have you got some experiences to share about Airbnb.com or other similar people-hosting service?

Photo: A room at Janela de Marcia in Florianopolis, Brazil. An example of an Airbnb choice.

This post was bought to you by Flight Centre who will help you find cheap international flights out of Australia to all parts of the world.