Hey Insider, hope you’re having an awesome Monday so far! Personally, I’m packing up as I prep to move to Puerto Vallarta 🏝️ which will be my base until next spring.

What are your travel plans for the next few months? Respond to this email and let me know 😊

Today’s email is a bit lengthy at 7min 15sec, but we promise it’s a good one:

• 🎒 The popularity of digital nomadism is exploding

• 🏦 World Bank forgot about remote work

• 🇨🇦 Canadian workers reach a deal. Don’t secure remote work

• 🇷🇸 Why you shouldn’t sleep on Serbia

But first, even though we are quite possibly the biggest cheerleaders for remote work, it is easy to lose motivation when working from here. Here are 3 easy ways to deal with that…

💡 TIPS & TRICKS

How To Stay Motivated While Working From Home

While remote work comes with a huge bag of benefits, there are of course downsides. One of those is that it’s to become bored and lose motivation, especially if you don’t take steps to keep your life from becoming a Groundhog’s Day

Here are some easy tips to stay motivated and make the most of working remotely:

1. 🤪 Avoid monotony - like I just mentioned, creating a Groundhog’s scenario is the worst way to work remotely. Instead, spice things up a bit, go work at a coffee shop, or join a coworking space. When you’re not working, explore your home town and try to do something you’ve never done before.

2. ☕️ Set up virtual coffees - this is a great way to get to know your coworkers even if they’re on the other side of the world. But you don’t have to stop at team members, you can even reach out to other people in your industry to get to know them better and build a network.

3. 🏝️ Respect your time off - a recent study found tons of evidence that a lack of rest has a negative impact on your performance. When working remotely it’s easy to forget to take time off so make sure you protect your rest time and take it seriously.

🔬 DEEP DIVE

The 5 Different Types of Digital Nomads: Which One Are You?

What is a digital nomad?

It may seem like an odd question, but in a post-pandemic world where remote work is mainstream, it's actually a VERY important one.

The answer will help shape future laws around travel, work, and taxation.

Prior to 2020, the term digital nomad was used pretty loosely. It was a small niche community of people and it did not require a strong definition.

However, as the number of digital nomads has grown exponentially post-pandemic, governments have started paying closer attention to the movement as a way to increase tax revenue and plug talent gaps.

But how can governments create laws for something they don't have a definition for?

There's no better example of this than the emergence of the "digital nomad visa". Currently, there are around 50 countries that have launched digital nomad visas, but you would be hard-pressed to find one that is actually designed with nomads in mind.

Most of them are actually visas for remote workers that kickstart the immigration process.

Hardly a product for what we would normally define as a digital nomad.

📈 STATS

Despite Companies Trying To Force Employees Back to The Office, Digital Nomadism is Exploding

Recent research by MBO Partners found that in the US alone there are an estimated 72 million “armchair nomads” - people considering becoming digital nomads in the next 2-3 years.

If even a small percentage of those take the leap, the impacts could be massive.

🚨 WORD ON THE WEB

🟩 What the work-from-home era has done to office politics

• A survey of 800 US workers found that 50% of people feel like the negative effects of office politics have stuck around even when working remotely

• 25% of surveyed workers felt that office politics would actually get worse through remote work.

• The main culprit seems to be “office suck-ups”.

• In the absence of regular 1-to-1 interaction with company leaders, you find a higher rate of suck-ups who are trying to make a positive connection with their superiors but may turn off other coworkers.

🏦 The World Bank just published its World Development Report on migration and remote work is curiously missing from the conversation

• The 315-page report aims to outline global trends in migration and cross-border mobility but includes only 2 references to remote work.

• This is strange considering that even the report itself points out that the reduction in technological barriers could help companies hire “tele-migrants” in lower-wage countries.

• Not focusing on remote work is a missed opportunity in this context since remote work decentralizes access to well-paying jobs and will be critical for people in developing countries, including refugees & migrants.

⏰ The new 9-to-5 starts at 6pm, and many young professionals are ready to walk out on employers who don’t accommodate their schedule

• New research by Adobe found that 26% of Gen Zers claim to be most productive between 6pm and 3am, in stark contrast to just 6% of Boomers.

• By 2025 Gen Z is expected to make up ¼ of the US workforce and highly value schedule flexibility and are willing to quit if an employer is not flexible

• This will likely force many companies to accommodate Gen Zs preferred work schedule and may further force the adoption of async work

🇨🇦 Canadian workers reach a deal with the government and end strike. Right to remote work NOT enshrined!

• Just in time for Labour Day, Canada reached a consensus with more than 120,000 federal workers that have been on strike for the last 2 weeks

• The workers were able to secure a 12.6% salary increase over the next 4 years

• However, the workers weren’t able to “enshrine” remote work as a worker right, but have secured an agreement to review remote work proposals on an individual basis, instead of forcing an outright return to office.

📆 UPCOMING EVENTS:

May 24-28: Vivel [📍 Multiple Locations, Turkey] - networking meets music at this one-of-a-kind conference for location-independent professionals

May 28th-June 3: Nomad Cruise 11 [📍 Mediterranean Sea] - The original conference at sea is back! Join 250 digital nomads on board a cruise ship in the Med to discuss remote work, business, and personal growth

May 28-June 4: Porto Santo Nomad Fest [📍 Porto Santo, Portugal] - A festival celebrating the digital nomad community, on a beautiful island off the coast of Madeira. Limited attendance.

June 16-19: Camp Indie [📍 Kent, Connecticut] - adult summer camp & conference for digital nomads & those living an unconventional life

June 25-July 2: Bansko Nomad Fest [📍 Bansko, Bulgaria] - for digital nomads, freelancers, and founders in the mountains of Bulgaria

🗺️ TRAVEL

Why Serbia Is A Perfect Country For Digital Nomads

If you’ve never considered this Balkan country as a digital nomad homebase then you’re missing out, because it has a lot of benefits that could make a nomad darling:

• Outside of the EU meaning your time spent in Serbia does not count towards your 90 days in the rest of Europe

• Low cost of living. The average rent price for 1 bedroom apartment in Belgrade is only $850

• High-speed internet, high level of English, and a growing expat community

• While there is no digital nomad/remote work visa it has easy tourist access for most Western passport holders

Learn more about why Serbia is a great digital nomad destination

🌍 WFA JOBS:

Looking for a job that’s not just remote, but that you can work from anywhere in the world? We’ve done the heavy lifting for you. Check out these awesome WFA positions 👇

⭐️ Freelance Data Storyteller @ Move.org

⭐️ Graphic Designer @ Ellipsis

⭐️ Design Director @ The Vaan Group

📊 POLLS

On Friday we covered a Business Insider article that floated the idea that the recent tech layoffs are of jobs that are never coming back. And you had a lot of thoughts on the topic:

While the majority of people agreed with the view that AI will likely take over a lot of the work done by these tech workers, many of you disagreed and raised some really good points:

🚫 B.S: “Current layoffs have nothing to do with the AI hype. Until AI can really boost productivity significantly for developers there is still a lot of more progress required. It can probably already help a developer to faster find solutions to a problem but coding is only one aspect of a developers workday. planning, time estimation, testing, profiling, navigating complex code architectures are all tasks which cannot be handled by AI (yet). But I agree that the impact of AI on tech jobs will be immense. Not worried that tech jobs will go extinct. The required skills might change. For all the (tedious) work AI will take over there will be new work created which cannot be handled by AI.“

🚫 H.: “What tech job extinction? Those 250000 are not unemployed nor did they all become gardeners since then and they did not get replaced by AI either. We currently see a shift in industries. From bloated ad and social media companies that over hired to areas where people are desperately needed and where good tech engineers are still desperately needed. At least in near term AI will increase productivity and accelerate technological progress. Then the nature of many tech jobs will indeed start to change, going away from wasting a lot of time on mundane tasks.”

These are both good points that I personally agree with. Technology historically does not kill jobs, in the long term, it creates more jobs as new areas of work are created.

Many of the most coveted tech jobs did not exist 10 years ago. It’s very likely that the same thing will happen with AI, but there will be a few years of turmoil as the market adjusts.

🙏 Thank you all for the amazing conversation… this is what lights me up about running this newsletter!

Tune in on Wednesday when we will share the results from the other poll - 🏡 if you’ve ever been deceived by an Airbnb!

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That's it from us today, hope you have an amazing day and see you Wednesday!