Not every Digital Nomad secretly harbours dreams of being a full-time traveller, working from wherever they lay their laptop. However, some do, and the Digital Nomad workstyle does make that more feasible than most other ways of working.

Freelance Web designer Nathan Swartz wrote about taking your career on the road as a full-time traveller, offering these five key steps:

1. Organize Your Accomodations
2. Rediscover the Internet
3. Set Yourself Up for a Digital Lifestyle
4. Inform Existing Clients of Your New Hours and Availability
5. See the World!

Read the full article here.

If you’re travelling for business or because you’re living the life of a digital nomad, it’s useful to know what you need to take in order to be productive on the road. Everybody has their own list of essentials; here’s one from Lifehacker:

1. Powerboard
2. The right device(s)
3. The appropriate chargers
4. Universal USB cord
5. Wi-Fi hotspot
6. International power adaptor
7. Bootable USB stick with key documents
8. Headphones
9. Screen wipes
10. Portable phone battery

Read more in the Lifehacker blog post here.

Apart from all the technology you carry around with you, what else do you need to be able to live a Digital Nomad’s work day? Susan Murphy has some suggestions in her post, “The Workshifter’s Non-Tech Toolkit”. My list doesn’t match Susan’s exactly, but it was well worth reading anyway – if only to trigger some ideas for me.

The following is a quote from Tim Kreidler’s opinion piece The Busy Trap in the New York Times:

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

Out of Office workers are particularly prone to the “Busy Trap” because our homes are often our workplaces. This makes it all too easy to spend all our waking hours working.

In the “Finally Free” chapter of the book we offer a few tips on how Out of Office workers can separate work from play. These include taking short breaks during the working day, planning social appointments at the end of the day, and, as Tim Kreidler suggests, unwinding and letting our batteries recharge.

There’s been some debate whether sharing your location on social media platforms really does increase your risk of getting burgled because the baddies know you’re not at home. Some say it does; others say it’s really no different than most office workers leaving their home empty on most weekdays.

How can you find out the truth? Well, one U.K. survey went to the source: They surveyed ex-burglars, who estimated that their nimble-fingered colleagues were in fact using social media to find vulnerable homes.

Here’s an infographic with some stats and tips (click for a full-size version):

Social Media Infographic Provided by CreditSesame.com

If you’re regularly working in a coffee shop, you might have asked yourself these questions:

• How long should you linger over a single cup of coffee?
• How much should you spend?
• Is it OK to take phone calls while sitting there?
• What about inviting other people to meet me there for meetings?

Of course, there’s no right answer that suits every situation, but Mashable has attempted to answer the most common questions in the extremely useful post, “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Coffee Shop Etiquette”.

If you’re a Digital Nomad, you have the flexibility of working from anywhere. In our “Freedom” chapter, we suggest an inventory or essential equipment and accessories for your mobile office (a.k.a. backpack!). PC World adds to this with its list “Cool Mobile Accessories to Add to Your Travel Toolkit”.

If you’re thinking of moving more of your business services on-line, Angus Kidman at Lifehacker lists five good reasons why:

1. You avoid large up-front capital expenses
2. You don’t need to maintain your own server
3. You don’t have to grapple with unfamiliar interfaces
4. Your software is accessible from anywhere
5. Your data is backed up automatically

Read the full article here.

One of Gihan’s clients, exercise physiologist David Beard, reports on a study that suggests physical exercise during work hours boosts productivity. According to the study, the increased productivity came from people being more efficient and from lower absenteeism due to sickness.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, of course, as healthy people are generally more productive in most areas of their life. But it’s nice to some science backing it!

As an Out of Office worker, you might have more flexibility in your working hours than most office-bound workers. So take the opportunity to add some regular exercise to your schedule – and we hope your productivity will soar.