Keep Organization While Traveling
How to stay organized when you’re traveling or sick.
Today’s topic is how to stay organized even though you travel.
Ross writes:
At my office I’m a marvel of organization and efficiency, a well oiled machine. But when I travel, chaos ensues. Email piles up in my inbox, notes pile up, I fall behind on my podcasts, and my anchor, waking up at 6 am, gets mangled and spat out like so much mulch. So the question is how do you keep things on track when traveling?
Funny you should ask… Just last week, I was cruelly and unexpectedly taken out by a norovirus that left me unable to work for four days. The little biology-enforced vacation was wonderful!
Let’s start with your sleep schedule. It’s the anchor of your schedule. And sadly, I don’t know any magical remedies for lack of sleep. You can lose sleep because of travel schedules, meeting schedules once you arrive, jet lag, or being kidnapped by malevolent clowns. I’ve tried everything to keep my sleep cycle on track: self-hypnosis, acupressure, and Melatonin, the amino acid which is supposed to reset your body’s internal clock. Different things work at different times, or maybe it’s just the placebo effect (click here for more information for my Quick Tip on getting sleep while traveling). That’s when your belief in a fake treatment gives you the same effects as the real treatment would give. I keep believing I’ll spontaneously develop a square jaw and striking Mediterranean features… apparently, the placebo effect doesn’t extend to plastic surgery.
Build Slack Into Your Schedule
Your daily routine at the office gives time to do your filing and sorting. If you’re traveling, set aside daily time to do your on-the-road filing. You make time to brush your teeth while traveling, you can do the same for keeping up on email. And if you don’t brush your teeth while traveling, it might explain why your friends send so much email rather than traveling with you. Brush and floss, daily.
You can get through your daily routine more quickly with some help. I always travel with a folder for tossing in all my daily receipts, notes, and to-do items. Before bed, I sort them out and update my to-do list. The receipts get bundled and sent to my bookkeeper at the end of the trip.
Schedule Catch-up Days
Whenever you’re traveling, schedule a catch-up day at the end of your trip. If you will be back in the office on the 20th, say you won’t be back until the 21st or 22nd on your vacation message and voicemail greeting. Do come in to work on those days, but don’t schedule any meetings. Use those catch-up days to work through your inboxes, triage, and catch up on what’s happened while you’ve been gone. Never, ever catch up on your own private time. It’s immoral for your company to give you so much to do that you can’t get caught up at work. And besides, it sets a lifelong precedent, just like serving your sweetie breakfast in bed the morning after you get married, civil union’d, or otherwise make a lifelong commitment.
Let Stuff Drop
Finally, my favorite technique is simply letting stuff drop. Life throws stuff at you as fast as ever, whether you’re traveling, or you’re sick, or you’re on vacation. Unless you have an unreal amount of free time (and it sounds like you don’t), you’re fooling yourself to think you can stay on top of it all. The math is brutal: if you leave work for one week, it will take one month of 25% overtime to catch up. It isn’t going to happen. For sickness or unplanned disruptions, you don’t have the option of building in slack time or catch-up days.
So let stuff drop. Delegate what you can, and ignore the rest. If you give yourself exactly one hour of chaos control before bed, hold yourself to the time limit, and drop anything that isn’t done at the end of the hour. You’ll find the time limit is a great way to force you to pick and choose only what’s most important and leave the rest.
The same goes for podcasts. You listen to them because they’re enjoyable. Feeling pressure to catch up or to keep up is silly. Just skip the episodes that you don’t have time to listen to. Except mine, of course. Or even better, have everyone in your office listen to mine while you’re traveling, and they can bring you up to speed when you return.
You might also want to listen to my episode on email vacation autoresponders. In it, I basically discuss a creative way of “letting stuff drop” while you’re traveling.
To recap: get enough sleep, build in daily slack to organize your notes and receipts from the day. Schedule catch-up days and let stuff drop. Except my podcast, which you’ll recommend to your colleagues, friends, relatives, and that nice neighbor down the street who you think has a glass eye, but you’re too embarrassed to ask.
RESOURCE:
/tech/computers/e-mail-backlogs , episode on email backlogs, including a comment on vacation autoresponders
This is Stever Robbins. E-mail questions to getitdone@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email or leave voicemail at 866-WRK-LESS.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
