Is Now the Time to Do that Thing You’ve Always Wanted to Do?

Hello, fellow Anywhereists,

A while back I recognized that I was feeling stuck and overwhelmed and needed to step back for a bit, take some space to breathe, and reevaluate.

Since then, I’ve made two big changes.

First, I started traveling again, just on a small scale, and life is looking rosier. Today I’m writing this from the dining room table at my son’s house. We arrived last night, and we’re staying for a few days, to help him celebrate his birthday.

In May, I flew — for the first time since the pandemic started — up to New England to celebrate my youngest daughter’s birthday with her. That’s more traveling in two months than I did in the previous two years!

I’ve also booked my flights and my lodging to spend the winter months next year in Panama, where I’ll have a chance to visit friends and enjoy living at the beach for a while.

Second, I started something I’ve been telling myself all my life I wanted to do. I’m happy to tell you I’ve just completed the first draft of my first novel (a lot of firsts there). After many years of writing content and copy, it’s my first ever attempt at writing fiction, and if you’re a fiction writer you know it’s an entirely different beast. So I’ve been learning as I go, figuring things out, and loving it.

To make room for the novel, I’ve cut way back on my WordPress business, and I’ve decided not to take on any new website design projects. (I’ll still be delighted to do a site audit for you, especially if you’re an author.) That’s one of the beauties of living the Anywhereist life – I get to decide how and where I allocate my time.

So that’s how I’m spending my summer, how about you? Are you traveling again? Making changes in your business? Starting a business? I’d love to know – just hit reply.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. . .

Tips & Tools

Location

How to Choose the Right Digital Nomad Visa

If you’re thinking about living in another country as a digital nomad, how do you choose where to go? The list of digital nomad visas is steadily getting longer, but here are 9 important things to consider before you make your choice.

Read: How to Choose a Digital Nomad Visa

And if you need any help getting that visa, check out iVisa, where they’ll expedite all sorts of travel paperwork for you and take a load of administrative paperwork off your plate.

What’s Wrong with That Map?

Does the world really look like you were taught in school?

I was fascinated recently to see these series of maps. Some of them highlight interesting facts, like an overlay that shows the 7,000 rivers that feed into the Mighty Mississippi.

Others show land masses superimposed on others, drawn to scale, which make it very clear that Greenland is not, in fact, bigger than South America, highlighting how far wrong in scale are the world maps we grew up with.

Check out these maps here.

Tools

A Simple Tool to Help you Speed Through Airports

If you travel internationally, you probably know about services like Global Entry, which can get you through security, customs, and immigration faster. There’s a fee, and it requires filling out a detailed questionnaire and undergoing a personal interview.

Did you know there’s another way to speed through those lines that requires none of the above?

It’s a free app on your smartphone, called Mobile Passport. Here are the details.

Some of the links on this page may be affiliate links. That means, if you click and purchase, you pay exactly the same amount and I’ll earn a small commission. These fees help me to keep the free information flowing.

In Case You Missed It. . .

Are You a Professional Creative? Here’s Why You Should Use Milanote

One of the tools I’ve been using as I’ve been writing my novel is Milanote. It’s an app I wrote about a while ago, and it calls itself “the tool for organizing creative projects.”

I’ve been putting it to the test, and I’m very happy with it.

If you’re a professional creative, here’s a planning and productivity tool designed with you in mind. Milanote bills itself as “the tool for organizing creative projects.”

At its most basic, it’s a note-taking app, but where something like Evernote or OneNote is designed to be read, Milanote is designed to be seen.

It’s the difference between viewing a list of ingredients (eggs, butter, flour) and a picture of the mouthwatering finished product.

Read More. . .

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