Dipping Our Toes Into the Digital Nomad Life.

Finally settling back home after a delicious week away at the coast, and wow, what an experience.

When Ben’s cousins asked us to house-sit their property — (and look after their 2 x birds, a bearded dragon called Pascal (after Pedro, ofc), and 4 x skittish guinea pigs) — we snapped up the opportunity immediately.

The idea of packing up our lives to travel and work has been the topic of many late-night conversations and long car rides between Ben and I.

But it’s one thing to dream about it, and another entirely, to live it.

So when this invitation landed in our laps, we saw it as a way to dip our toes in the digital nomad pool to see if we’d actually like the lifestyle we’ve romanticised.

And safe to say, we’re hooked!

Here’s a snapshot of our week:

Some mornings, we’d dive into work for 3-6 hours before washing our worries away in the ocean. Other mornings, the beach called us first, and we’d fish or swim before cracking open our laptops to chip away at client deliverables or work on side projects.

The change of pace and shift in scenery gave me the headspace to finally finish creating a Tripwire product I’d been dragging my feet on for ages.

It got my creative juices bubbling again…

And reminded me WHY I started my business in the first place — to create something that gives me the freedom (and disposable income) to go on more adventures, soak up new experiences, and then come back to the keyboard to write all about it.

But to be as crystal clear as the blue waters I got to swim in every day — I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the experience if I hadn’t invested in support beforehand.

After months of searching, I finally onboarded a great VA to join my team.

Finding the right people to help with my business has been a daunting challenge I’ve spent most of the year wrestling with…

But having her expertise meant I could focus on the creative, CEO-tasks while trusting she had my back with the techy stuff.

I also teamed up with another copywriter to ensure the timelines for my hefty client-focused launch projects were still on track.

Which meant I could dedicate my best creative and strategic juices to polishing up the deliverables so it was in tip-top shape. On average, I spent about 7 hours on client work.

To top it off, the evergreen funnel I’d finally set in motion also led to a couple of sales trickling in!

It’s not the effortless “passive income machine” many online gurus rave about (because those truly take hard work and time), but it was a promising step in the right direction.

A couple of reflections from the working holiday:

Juggling “work” and “play” required a tremendous amount of discipline. Especially when the pool was tempting me from the backyard and the beach was only a hop, skip, and a jump away from the front doorI had to be laser-focused during work hours and resist my usual habit of wandering from the fridge to the pantry and back to the fridge again. It also meant I had to wake up far earlier than I normally would to get everything done.

The working holiday was a reminder that solid systems and processes are essential.

It’s something that’s been on my To-Do list for the last *checks notes* year and a half. But this experience has reignited my drive to work on them so everything in the backend can work seamlessly.

Thankfully, when it came to client work, things ticked along perfectly.

Having spent years developing friendly, but firm boundaries, attracting dream clients who trust me to take charge of their projects, and developing a thorough process that doesn’t require endless meetings — I didn’t have to stress about client emergencies at all.

I know I still have a boatload of things to learn and many, many logistics to work out before we can uproot our lives and travel extensively —

But this experience has definitely lit a fire under my 🍑 to make it happen for us one day.

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