Blurry Lines between Work & Play: A Reminder about the Intentions of Technomadia

We live some intentionally blurry lines in our lives. Especially between work and play – we are self employed after all. And we know that can be confusing to you, our readers, as to just what Technomadia is and isn’t.

So, we wanted to take a moment and maybe add a touch of definition to where the lines are. Particularly for newer readers to the blog who may not have followed along in how our current business endeavors evolved over the years.

A little history

When Chris and I met online back in 2006, we were both active social bloggers (anyone remember LiveJournal?). It’s how we met, got to know each other from thousands of miles away and knew instantly our lives where aligned when we first met in person.

Blogging is just part of who we are. We’ve tried stopping. We just can’t. It’s part of our process of creating memories and analyzing our experiences.

As we were rushing to pack up my house and get moved into a tiny 16′ trailer to go try out life on the road together in 2007, we figured it might be good to have a joint blog space for our friends and family to follow along.

Chris quickly registered the domain name ‘Technomadia’ – pretty much on a whim. It was the name of the shared music directory he shared with his buddy & nomadic inspiration Steve Roberts, the original ‘technomad’.  (Technomad meaning, of course – technology enabled nomad.)

Technomadia started out as just a continuation of our personal blogging, infact it was just a syndicated merging of our two personal blogs initially. The moniker stuck, and now, we’re known as Technomadia. For better or worse.

Even as our community of friends and family has grown beyond anything we’ve ever imaged, it’s our intention to keep it personal here. At least as best we can.

What is the Technomadia Blog?

It just so happens, we love to write. We love to share. We love to create helpful content.

We while some of our writings here on Technomadia may seem like ‘work’ – whether sharing about our electronics, our toys, our lifestyle – we consider it our hobby.

We were just at the right place and time when the economy changed and technology made it easier for more people to hit the road. We were one of the few already sharing online when digital nomadism became a ‘thing’. And that picked up a bit of traffic here.

If we were launching this blog today, I seriously doubt you’d even know who we are – two middle aged geeks whose lives revolve around a cat really can’t be that interesting. And we certainly wouldn’t have the social media momentum to sustain ‘making it’ in today’s saturated online world.

And, you might notice we’re not heavily monetized here.

Sure, some Amazon affiliate links that might kick us back a few bucks. And we have a ‘Leave a Tip’ option for those who wish to thank us with a special indulgence.

But we’re not littered with Google Ads, paid product placements, no membership fee to get premium access. We don’t lure you in with ‘free eBooks’ to build an e-mail list to market to you in the future. (We do have a ‘Pay as you Wish’ eBook, but you can get all the content in the No Excuses: Go Nomadic series for free online too.)

Our goal here has never been to generate income that we earmark for living expenses. We never want to have to blog about our lives just to afford our lives.

Frankly, most the funds generated by this site go right back into the site – we’re paying well over $200/month these days to host the traffic, deliver posts via e-mail and keep a developer on staff for general maintenance.

We’re happy to do it, because Technomadia is one heck of a fun hobby for us and has many other benefits that don’t have price tags. (Like meeting you!).

Our Work Life

We have full time jobs (well, sometimes more than full time).

Over the years that has ranged from custom software development, technical consulting, writing and mobile app development. We’ve even packed boxes at Amazon during peak season.

It used to be pretty easy to keep the line between ‘play’ here at Technomadia and our work – there was little cross over.

But that line has gotten blurrier as our live’s passions have naturally intersected with our work life.

In the past two years, much to our own surprise, sharing about mobile internet with RVers has become our full time job. The confusion comes because this was a topic we used to share about regularly here in our own personal journey of assembling a mobile connectivity setup that kept us online enough to run our careers remotely.

As I shut down the business I ran with my father (software development) after his passing in 2013, we put together all of our blog posts about mobile internet into a little book we called The Mobile Internet Handbook. This was mostly out of survival, our inbox was staying way too full answering reader questions about their own mobile internet setups. As soon as it was done, we went back to our ‘real jobs’.

A year later, with the help of a crowd funding campaign – we also launched RVMobileInternet.com along with a massive re-write of the book. We figured if we could get a couple folks a month to join a premium site, we could afford to post an occasional industry update, answer questions and send out alert newsletters.

And that site has grown and grown and grown – both in content, and in membership. It has solidly become our primary work focus, sometimes requiring 12-15 hours a day to keep on top of.

We love what we do – we’re combining our passions for technology, travel, writing and helping people. And we’re thrilled that it’s all funded by the very people we’re helping (RVers who rely on mobile internet) via our premium membership component. We like being accountable to those we’re serving, not to corporate sponsorships.

And as we happen to be personally sharing about full time RVing on this blog, of course, many of our members also happen to be Technomadia friends.

Why am I sharing this today?

We occasionally catch wind that there’s confusion out there about our lines between business and play. Hey, we get confused sometimes too.

So I share this as much to help us keep our lines clear, and hopefully clear up some of it up for you.

That confusion was strongly evidenced over the weekend when we had a well-intentioned reader write offering us unsolicited lengthy ‘customer feedback’ on our content here on Technomadia.

Honestly, the feedback kinda hurt. It felt like being slapped by someone we gifted a free meal, because the portions weren’t big enough.

It hurt not just because it was being very critical of what we put so much effort into sharing here (and had they taken a moment to actually read our site, they would have found most the topics they were seeking in dedicated posts & videos posted on our RVing Page.), but also that the reader was approaching us as a business (even reprimanding us on our terrible customer service) and not people with real feelings.

 

But we’re shaking it off, and keeping our course. We know there’s many more of you who love what we do here than the occasional complainer.

But in case there’s any lingering confusion out there… let’s be clear here. You’re not a ‘customer’ of Technomadia. You’re part of our community, virtual friends and perhaps future real friends

You may very well be a customer of RVMobileInternet (from being a reader or a member) or our apps too. And for that, we’re deeply appreciative. And if you have customer feedback on those, it’s welcomed in the places we’ve made for that.

But when you’re visiting this site, reading this content, joining in on one of our Technomadia branded livestreams, following us on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, RVillage or Facebook – it’s more like you’re being invited to hang out with us in our virtual living room to share a glass of wine AFTER work.

And just like a happy hour, we might talk about what we did at work – that’s part of being social with friends, after all.

But don’t be surprised if you approach us in one of our social hang out locations with questions on mobile internet that we politely redirect you to our place of business. Much like a doctor might recommend you make an appointment with their office if you start asking them for medical advice at a party.

For our own sanity, we simply must put up some boundaries between work and play.

What we share here is done in our off-hours. It’s a gift to you, and a gift to us that you follow along. And we LOVE hearing your gratitude for it – seriously, it keeps us inspired to continue to make the time to create it.

But we do it at our own pace, as we have time and inspiration. That’s part of the intentions we had to set after we returned from our hiatus after last year’s social media burn out.

If you have ‘helpful suggestions’ on how we can improve our content here at Technomadia – we respectfully request you keep it to yourself. If we ever are seeking constructive feedback, we’ll ask for it. Trust us, we have no limits to the content we wish we had time to create, we just have to accept reality that we can’t do it all and have a life worth sharing about.

Thanks 🙂

Some related articles:

• Our ‘About Us’ Page – with our full story, and more about our mobile income
• Our RVing Resource Center – our ‘menu’ to all our topical content about RVing.
• Our Video Archives – Archives of our hour long video chats on various lifestyle topics