When you’re a digital nomad freelancer or business owner, you have to learn to be your own manager.
There’s no one to notice that you’ve been “working” for three hours but spent most of it reorganising your task list and reading an article about productivity.
The freedom of the digital nomad lifestyle has a less-discussed side effect: without any external structure, the work of managing yourself falls entirely on you.
It involves setting priorities, setting deadlines, and conducting an honest performance review from time to time.
That’s already a lot. Now add the nomad layer: new city logistics, visa admin, finding accommodation, meeting new people in a new place.
When I decided to become a digital nomad, I’d already been freelancing for a while. But it was during my first couple of years as a nomad that I really learnt how to be my own manager.
To thrive long-term as a digital nomad, you need to learn some management skills.
Table of contents
The lessons I learnt about being a business owner and not a worker
There are two very different jobs involved in running a freelance business or working for yourself.
The first is doing the work: writing, designing, building, consulting, etc.
The second is running the business: finding clients, setting rates, data analysis, and so on.
The worker brain is heads-down, task-focused, responsive. It answers emails, meets deadlines, gets things done.
The owner brain is slower. It asks the hard questions about your earnings and your budget. It looks at the months ahead.
The problem for nomad freelancers is that worker brain is almost always easier to inhabit.
I started my nomadic life as a freelance translator and dedicated 90% of my energy to completing my work on time.
It was much easier than seeking new clients and promoting myself.
When you’re also navigating a new city and managing the general logistics of nomad life, the appeal of just keeping your head down and meeting your deadlines is entirely understandable.
That’s partly why I hit a plateau as a freelance translator.
With fewer clients and revenue streams than I could have had, if only I’d given priority once in a while to developing the business itself.
Set your own standards
Without a manager, it’s worth spending a bit of time actually defining what “doing well” means for your business.
Not in terms of hours logged, but outcomes: revenue targets, projects shipped, clients retained, and even skills developed.
You need to measure these yourself on a regular basis.
From time to time, I found myself doing the bare minimum to make an income, but I was much more interested in the travel side of nomad life.
This is true especially in cities that offer way too many things to do (London…)
Working for yourself often means you can work less and travel more for a certain period of time, if you’ve saved up enough money for that.
I love how the pressure doesn’t have to be high all the time when you’re your own manager.
At times when I feel I’m behind on my targets and performance standards, I plan it so I have more time to work.
To do that, I intentionally pick a smaller city that’s calmer, with fewer things to do and fewer challenges to my self-discipline. It works every time. When I pick the right small city, life slows down and I get a boost of motivation.
Teach yourself to plan ahead
Even if you have some version of a to-do list, you still need an actual planning practice.
Lack of planning often leads to too many tasks accumulating and suddenly everything feels urgent.
I experienced this in my early days as a freelancer and it was one of the reasons I had to teach myself time management skills.
A weekly or monthly review is part of some popular productivity systems.
I prefer a weekly session as it’s easier to make short-term plans, especially when you’re travelling.
Take about 30 minutes each week to review and plan your work:
- Review your achievements.
- Know where you stand.
- Look at what’s coming up.
- Decide your top priorities: Select the genuinely important things to get done. The rest can wait, be delegated, or dropped.
- Check that your calendar reflects those priorities.
I also include travel plans and logistics when necessary. It’s convenient to add travel planning to this session, as you’re already focused and in the right state of mind for this kind of task.
Treat the weekly session as a meeting with yourself.
Ideally, this would be a non-negotiable meeting that you can’t cancel, at the same time each week.
However, in my experience, when you’re nomadic it isn’t always practical to keep a regular schedule.
At times, nomadic life moves too fast, so it’s OK to make those bigger picture reviews at different intervals if you need to.
Meet deadlines without a boss
When you work for clients, it’s easy to find the self-discipline to meet their deadlines, simply because if you miss them, there will be consequences.
The same goes for travel plans. If I don’t book a flight or a train on time, I could overstay my visa. If I don’t book accommodation on time, all the good places will be taken.
Self-imposed deadlines are different.
These are usually tasks related to my own business, such as updating my website or LinkedIn, searching for new promotion opportunities, launching pricing updates, and so on.
There are usually no real consequences if I don’t finish those tasks on time, so those self-imposed deadlines often get pushed to the following week.
In cases like these, external accountability is a good way to motivate yourself.
You can do it by publicly announcing on social media or on any peer group that you’re going to, say, update your website by next Thursday.
Nobody’s actually going to put pressure on you, but just knowing that other people are aware of your commitment will help you do it.
If you don’t want to announce things publicly, just pick one person as an accountability partner.
This accountability can be mutual, so you report to them when you meet your deadline, and they report to you when they meet theirs.
It should be someone who will actually ask what happened if you fail to report and expect a real answer.
Another aspect of the self-imposed deadlines problem is that most people set too many of them.
An overly ambitious list is just what you want to avoid.
Stay realistic by under-promising to yourself and be honest about your own capacity.
How to give yourself feedback
In a normal job you have many kinds of feedback, such as performance reviews, client sign-offs, or a manager who tells you where you stand.
When you work for yourself, that feedback loop disappears unless you deliberately rebuild it. You need a genuine check-in with yourself as a professional.
Honestly assessing how you’re doing is hard and uncomfortable .Self-assessment requires a particular kind of stillness that nomad life doesn’t naturally provide.
To make sure you’re consistent in giving yourself feedback, you need to set aside some time for it. It may be weekly or monthly, or whenever you feel it’s necessary.
I suppose a monthly review would be ideal, but personally I only do it every couple of months.
In that session, you simply answer a few questions, such as:
- Am I charging what my work is worth?
- Is there anything that interferes with my progress?
- Do I have the energy levels to continue working while travelling?
- What did I avoid this month that I shouldn’t have?
- What’s one thing I’d tell myself to do differently next month?
You can add or omit questions as you like.
Create enough space to hear your own honest answers rather than the ones that are easiest to give.
A good manager gives feedback that is specific, fair, and oriented towards improvement rather than judgement.
Treat yourself with the same basic professionalism you’d extend to someone else.
Do you have any tips on how to be your own manager as a digital nomad? Share them in the comments.