Making travel less stressful

Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Making Travel Less Stressful

This post was written just after returning from a fall trip back to Canada, to see friends and care for loved ones. We realised that the thoughts I was having about travel might help you too…

I (Jo) have just got back from my holiday.

This was a “visiting people” holiday, something I’m sure is familiar to many of you who live a long way from important people in your life.

I think we got the right balance between seeing people we wanted to see and relaxing. Of course there were people we didn’t see. However, I’ve returned not feeling like I need a holiday to recover from my holiday (apart from the inevitable effects of jet lag).

In case it helps you manage travel better, I’ll share a bit about how we did this.

The principles in Two Questions to Prevent Burnout come in handy on the smaller scale of preventing “needing a holiday to recover from your holiday”.

What is the minimum?
How can I make this easier?

We identified the most important people we wanted to see. Those people got more of our time than others. We then thought about other people who would be easy to fit in.
We identified enjoyable and restful activities that we could do with some of the people we wanted to see.

One of our priority people is going through cancer treatment so just spending time hanging out makes sense. We also fit in a walk with one of their teen kids, some gardening (restful for my partner), and catching them up on laundry (which I do not find stressful and is easy to combine with sitting on the sofa chilling). We went out for dinner, and played some board games, too.

Another of our priorities was my elderly mom. She loves playing cards so we spent an afternoon doing that. We also took her for a longish scenic drive, another thing she enjoys.

On a day when those people were otherwise occupied, we went for a long walk with another friend.

It’s easy to think of travel between cities as wasted time and try to do it as quickly as possible. We resisted this temptation and stopped for a picnic and long walk to break up a long drive.

We didn’t fill all our days, so we had a morning sitting around reading books, drinking coffee, and chatting with a friend we were staying with before going out to see other people.

In other words, we did more than the minimum, but by starting with the minimum and focusing on ease we ended up with a good balance.

You can do this for work travel, too.

I have had some conversations with coaching clients about applying this process of prioritisation to work travel.

There can be a tendency to think you need to be away for the shortest amount of time, and maximise the amount of work you do while you are away. This is not true!

I’m here to tell you that it’s okay to take the maximum number of hotel nights allowed by your reimbursement policy, especially if that allows you to arrive the night before and leave the morning after.

Sometimes you don’t have a choice, but when you do, you can choose not to get up at 4-letter f-word o’clock to catch an early train/flight.

What if your first day of meetings starts after lunch?
What if your last day ends with lunch, so you can get home at a reasonable time too?

Travel time to a work event counts as work time, even if you don’t do work on the train/plane.

You don’t have to pack your days with work events. Take a proper lunch break and go for a walk, or visit a museum, or have a nap. Schedule your work events to include ease.

And if one of the attractions of this work trip is the location, book a day or 2 of annual leave and have an actual short-break holiday before or after your work events. Yes, you’ll need to pay for accommodation, but it will still be cheaper than booking the whole trip as a holiday.

If a particular work trip does need to be more intense, make sure you have recovery time planned when you return. That might be an extra day off, or a more spacious work schedule for several days on your return.

Communicate this to others in advance, either in person or in your out-of-office message to make sure you’re not returning to urgent requests that makes this slow return impossible.