Digital Nomads are a type of people who use telecommunications technologies to earn a living and, more generally, conduct their lives in a nomadic manner.”1
My Digital Workflow
This document lays out my workflow for conducting my business activities in a completely digital manner. My business endeavors are heavily dependent on conducting research on a variety of topics, taking notes, organizing disparate thoughts into a cohesive thesis, and finally writing marketing papers with an academic slant as well as contract proposals. Supporting these activities, I need a robust and repeatable workflow to minimize any friction in accomplishing the myriad of time sensitive tasks I will face. Ultimately, I intend to use the same process as the basis for my genealogical research, family history writing, and fantasy novel.
Mobile First Strategy
I am employing a mobile first strategy for this workflow since I truly want to live the minimalist digital nomadic lifestyle. Creating this environment now establishes the path for my passion for wanting be the genealogist, family historian, and author. Therefore, the processes and tools I employ must have a robust iPad presence. Some of my initial capabilities may focus on macOS in order to get up and working right away; but I will ensure the mobility of the workflow. Another key aspect of the workflow is to minimize the number of applications used and custom scripts I need to develop. The workflow and associated processes must be repeatable and flexible to handle unforeseen circumstances. Crafting the workflow and process in a mobile first strategy enables me to conduct my work anywhere and at anytime. This affords me opportunities to travel and still generate income. A welcome addition to my life.
Overview
My workflow needs to support several fundamental tasks or activities. These include:
- Overhead and Reporting
- Task Assignment and Scoping
- Research and Writing
- Publication
Overhead Tasks include many of the financial activities such as bank account reconciliation, billable time collection, client invoicing, and executing payroll. Most of these tasks will be done using dedicated applications such as QuickBooks and RunADP; which have iOS applications. As with every job, I need to keep my clients informed of my progress, challenges, and accomplishments. While simple email and text messages will form the backbone of these activities, I intend to capture these correspondences in my document and records management tool, for my permanent records as well incorporate key actions in my task manager.
The Task Assignment and Scoping activities include reviewing client agreements, building estimates for either new clients, and scoping projects and developing project plans for exiting clients. These tasks generally include a simple document with a spreadsheet reflecting effort and costs. I intend to create templates in both Pages and Numbers to streamline the process and deliver a professional product in a efficient and repeatable manner. Final signed products will be stored in the document management tool.
The largest part of my workflow supports my primary activity of Research and Writing. Most of my research consists of scouring the Internet for relevant papers, articles, and news clippings on specific topics. My intent is work off PDF formatted documents as much as possible. Therefore, I plan to capture the documents, web pages and articles in PDF, then have document manager either import or index these files for reading and annotations in a dedicated tool. Note taking will be done within these applications as well. Once the collection, consumption, and analysis of individual documents is done, I will start to assembling my thoughts using outlines, mind maps, fish-bone diagrams, or other related methods. Finally once I get the basis of my thesis, the writing begins. I plan to use a distraction free tool to focus on the content. Initial reviews (my internal editorial reviews) are done within the primary writing tool, but external review will be done in the clients tool of choice; most likely Microsoft Word. When the document is deemed ready for wider reviews, I will import into Word, apply formatting and arrange for graphic images. Final edits will be done in Word’s track changes. While I can incorporate simple graphics into the review-ready documents, I anticipate requiring the client’s support to finalize publication ready images. My goal is to provide rough sketches of the ideas and submit them to the client for final graphic development.
Final publication will be done in PDF, Word, HTML or other platforms as the client requires. I expect the client to publish to their web sites as well as distribution to their business development teams, engineers, and their clients.
- Wikipedia ↩