So often, we calendar a deadline or an event and think either there’s not much that goes into it or we’ll just remember what do to for it. But when you actually write down everything that goes into it, it’s a surprising lot of stuff, takes up more time than we realize, and the sheer volume of things explains why we forget to do some of it every time.
Let’s talk workflows, their benefits, how to do them (simplicity is great!), and walk through an example relating to personal travel.
Resources mentioned:
- The travel checklist: https://kellynolan.com/travel-checklist
- The work travel podcast episode: ep. 46
- The article about how to check out of work for a vacation: https://kellynolan.com/vacation/ (please see the publish date – always cracks me up)
A full transcript will appear here within two weeks of the episode being published.
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Full Transcript
Ep 88. Personal Travel: An Example of a Workflow
[Upbeat Intro Music]
Kelly Nolan: Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up The Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all, personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in!
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Kelly Nolan: Hey, hey, and welcome back! All right, today we are gonna talk about something that you’ve probably heard me talk about a fair amount in other places like Instagram and newsletters, and that is personal travel. Now, before we dig into it too much, I do have an episode on work travel. And so, if you travel a lot for work, I highly recommend you check that one out. It’s a little bit more specific to that. That said, there are gonna be parts of this that you could pull for the type of thing we’re gonna talk about for work travel. And what I want to talk about specifically is essentially creating some sort of checklist that you go through every time you have some travel coming up. The reason I want to dig into this today is, one, I mean, it’s useful for personal travel. The utility is there for that. But also it is a wonderful example of a way to manage mental load and time and energy around things that we do frequently in our lives.
Applying This System to Other Areas of Your Life – 1:27
So before we dig into the nitty gritty of how you can help yourself when it comes to personal travel and the ways that we’re gonna talk about in a really practical way, I just want to emphasize that listen to this episode through the lens of not just personal travel but how could I do this for other parts of my life as well. Because it’s a great example of not just calendaring the trip or the flight times once you have them and things like that but all the steps that go into whatever a successful trip looks like for you, whatever a more relaxed, less stressful, less mental clutter, peace-of-mind-feeling trip looks like for you.
And along those lines, it’s a great example of something that sounds relatively straightforward. I mean, you’ve been doing it probably for years without this. So obviously you can do it without this system, and it might feel a little silly, almost, to create a checklist of things that you calendar for each and every trip when you’ve been doing it without it for this long and it’s probably fine. So we go in with a little bit of that feeling like, “This is simple enough,” which I think is how we approach a lot of time management things. But once we really start to unpack all the things that go into a trip that feels good to us, not just like, yes, we can do it without this, but we can do it in a way that maybe feels better and less stressful for us. If you really calendar out all the things and list out — to be calendared, I should say — but list out all the things that go into each trip, you’ll see that there’s a lot that goes into it.
A little bit of a side note here that’s a little bit less relevant for this context, because I think with personal travel there’s a lot that goes into it but it’s all really worth it for these fun trips that you get to do. In a different context, just keep in mind that sometimes we think, “Oh, there’s not that much that goes into it,” and we calendar all of it out, and we’re like, “Oh, there is a lot that goes into this.” And then the conclusion might be, “You know what? Now that I see that, I just don’t actually want to even do this, or I want to scale it down significantly.” And that’s a really, really great outcome and a great benefit of doing all this calendaring so that you realize it on the frontend before you do all the really heavy work and can avoid it and adapt and shift your plans in light of that beforehand instead of going through it and being like, “Why is this so hard? Why is this so much work? Why do I feel like this? This wasn’t fun,” and then regretting it later.
Again, that was a bit of a side note. I hope for your personal travel it’s still all worth it, and the goal here is less around maybe we don’t do personal travel and more around how do we do these things that actually require a lot, how do we do them in a way that is a lot less stressful.
And the final reason I think this is a great example to walk through is it’s a great example of a workflow. It’s something you do frequently enough and has enough steps that marks it complicated enough that it’s worth writing down, saving, referencing each time you have a personal trip, and then improving it, also putting in the work to improve it and think, “Man, this is something I wish I had done differently. Let me change it into this checklist,” which is essentially a workflow of the things that we’re gonna calendar. And this is a little confusing. I should have probably explained this.
Saving Checklists in Apple Notes – 4:41
What I have shared before in other areas and will share in the show notes of this today and in the episode is, essentially what I’m envisioning, and this is what I do. You can do it in a different format or a different place than you want. Essentially, I have an Apple Note that’s my travel checklist, and I actually put one of those green leaf emojis up front because that helps me know that it’s a note I want to keep. My Apple Notes tends to be mostly like a scratchpad place that I just copy and paste things into where it makes sense, so I often want to delete a lot of my Apple Notes because it gets pretty cluttered, but having that little green leaf emoji in the front — and I do this for multiple notes — just signals to me, “Don’t delete this note. This one’s one that is worth keeping.”
So, essentially, I really like having an Apple Note, and under it I list out all the things I calendar whenever I’m getting close to a trip. You could do it when you schedule a trip. If it feels good to do it right then and you have the time, great. As soon as you book flights, scheduling all this stuff out. Life doesn’t usually allow for that. And so, for me, during my Clean Slate Session, which is my weekly planning session, I look ahead at the next couple months and that’s when I see, “Oh, I’ve got a trip coming up,” and as soon as I start getting that twinge of anxiety around the trip of, like, “Oh, gosh, there’s gonna be a lot to do around that.” That’s when I can pull out that checklist and calendar it out and it really helps ease my mind because instead of knowing there’s a lot to do but not really knowing when I’m gonna do it, if I’m gonna remember to do it, if I’m gonna have time to do it, now I can see it all laid out. Future me will be reminded to do it, and I will protect time to do it on that front.
And so, that’s what I mean by a checklist. It’s essentially a workflow. Every time I go through this type of thing, these are the steps I take, and then I calendar those things out. Personal travel is a great example of an activity that you can do that for. I do not recommend creating workflows and checklists for every type of thing you do in your life. I just don’t think the ROI is there on it. I do just think that there are things that we do often enough that make it worth writing out all the things. I should say that they’re often enough and they’re complicated enough that writing down all these things, and as I said, saving them and referencing them and improving them over time is a great ROI on your time, and I think sometimes organization stuff can lend itself to over-engineering some things. Here I don’t think that qualifies just because the benefit is really, really there, and I think it’ll become more clear to you as we keep talking about it because there are just so many things that go into this stuff.
The Value of Having a Workflow – 7:29
And I just want to share other examples. For me, in my lawyer days, there was a lot I did that I did not have a workflow for, but sometimes you can have a workflow of what you do, let’s say, every time you have to respond to a complaint. There might be things that you kind of intuitively know but sometimes you forget those intuitive steps. And so, this has been so long since I practiced but some ideas are I always really liked pulling treatise sections for every cause of action filed and really reviewing the elements and comparing them to the complaint so that as I was writing a response and thinking about maybe any motions we would want to file, I’m looking at the elements and really just bringing myself back to the basics of the elements of causes of action from a treatise, comparing them to the claims made. I might also pull out damages, like the treatise section on the damages in play for each cause of action just to remind myself of that. “Are we dealing with liquidated damages? What are we looking at here?” I would also maybe pull the statute of limitations in play and review that jurisdiction, things that we sometimes get sucked into the substance of what we’re doing and have to remind our self what are the procedural issues that we want to make sure.
These are just examples, but I’m just sharing if you get a compliant and you need to respond to it, having a checklist or, in a sense, a workflow of the things that you want to dig into to make sure that you’re in good shape and you cross your T’s and dot your I’s on all that stuff, can be really, really valuable and stuff that I forgot to do earlier on in my career before I started thinking about this stuff. So that’s an example.
Another example of this type of thing is in some ways my planning session agenda is, in short, the workflow of how I work through a planning session each week. And it’s a way for me to say, “Hey, there are a lot of things I want to do in a planning session. I’m not gonna remember to do them all.” I have been doing this planning session for years, and I still use it, and I modify it over time to mold to fit to my life. And so, that’s another example of a repetitive thing that’s complicated enough that is worth creating a workflow for. In my business now, I don’t have a ton of workflows, but when I open up any program, like each of the programs that I typically run twice a year (in the past three times a year), I have a whole workflow that’s in a project management board, because it’s pretty complicated at this point, of everything I do before, just gearing up on the backend for a program to testing it out to what I do once enrollment’s open, to what I do once it’s closed, what I do during the program, what I do after the program. And again, it’s just something that I repeat enough in my business, two-to-three times a year, and it’s complicated enough that there’s ROI worth developing that and improving it over time so that I’m not reinventing the wheel every time.
Viewing Personal Travel Through The Lens of Workflows – 10:18
So again, we’re gonna talk about personal travel today but look at it through the lens of all workflows. For me, contenders are those repetitive things that are complicated enough that make this worth it. One random tip on that that I wanted to throw in is I’m a big fan of creating these pretty much in real time or right after you do a project, and I say that because sometimes I think we’re like, cool, actually I can think of a couple, let’s say five, contenders for workflows. And I’m just gonna carve out a couple hours and create those a little bit in a vacuum.
The first thing is you can always have other people on your team create them for you. Just to be clear, I think that that’s a really good thing to delegate out sometimes, even to get a rough draft and then you can bounce off it, and your creativity will almost be sparked by things. Even if you totally disagree with what’s in the workflow, it’ll help you tease out those things. But my main point was gonna be try not to do them in a vacuum. Create them as you’re doing a project or right after, if that’s not realistic. Don’t try and bang out, like, ten workflows in a vacuum because you’ll just forget all the steps you do in real life when you’re going through a project. And so, as you dig into something, at the front end, I would create a rough shot of what you’re gonna have to do and then tweak it as you go through it to make sure that you’re getting all the things that you want.
And then I always love the last step of calendar out a few days after anything and just think, “What worked? What didn’t? What do I improve?” And that is really helpful because, as I’ve talked about a lot before, often I think we beat ourselves up for things going wrong or mistakes we made and, “Why didn’t I do this earlier?” all that kind of stuff. And if we can just take the judgment out of that and say, “How do I avoid that going forward,” a workflow is a wonderful way to avoid things going forward for those things you’re gonna see frequently enough. Again, if it’s something that you might not even see again, just try and take the lesson you can from it. Don’t spend the time creating a workflow for something you’re likely not gonna see again or very often. But for those things you know you’re gonna see again, do that.
Another actually mini example I have, I think I’ve shared this before, is when I was polishing up briefs. That was another thing that I basically had a mini checklist workflow of how do I polish a brief at the end because there are just so many little things that you kind of forget to do. And so, for me, it would be obviously proofreading it but checking the citations, checking the cases one last time to see if they’re all still good law, making sure no bad cases come between two weeks ago when I read it to now. You know, the Supreme Court ruling on something or an appellate court, things like that. Checking spaces, checking the pin cites, all that kind of stuff are things that you could just have a little checklist for. Any time you polish any sort of brief, that’s what you do. I know these are all a lot of law-related examples. It’s just where my brain goes. But hopefully teasing them out gives you some examples of your own life. If you are in corporate and you create decks or things like that, how do you polish that up at the end, things like that.
Okay, so I know I went into a lot about workflows there, but just to reiterate, I want to talk about personal travel today just because I think it’s valuable in and of itself, but it’s also a great example of not just calendaring the deadline, the trip, the flight, whatever it is, but all the steps that go into it to making that a success. And when I say success, I mean also a successful way of how you feel. You want to feel a certain way around personal travel. Can we get you closer to that using the things we’re gonna talk about today. It’s also a great example of something that sounds straightforward enough. You’ve done it, historically, by yourself, why you need to do this, but when you unpack it, it might be more clear of, “Hey, there’s a lot that goes into this, and if I could help myself kind of baby step through this, then I might actually feel the way I want to feel, like prepared, self-confident, have peace of mind around these trips, which ups my ability to relax around them, which is great.”
And finally, it’s a great example of a workflow in a sense, and I use workflow — I mean, checklist/workflow in this scenario is a little bit interchangeable. It’s a list of action items you want to take, and then you calendar them. And the reason that I’m advising a checklist here is — it’s a little obvious but I think that sometimes I’m always like, “No to-do list. Use your calendar, and anything that you can put in your calendar and repeat each week, awesome.” So as I was talking about my planning session agenda, I don’t have that in an Apple Note, although you totally could. For me, that’s just in my calendar. In the notes section of that calendar entry is the agenda that I go through. But things like personal travel, you can’t repeat that annually and have it make sense. So it’s more one of those things of here are all the things that I calendar when I have a trip coming up. When I see a trip coming up in my calendar, I go to this list, pull out all those things, and calendar them from there.
Personal Travel Checklist – 15:14
Okay, turning to that personal travel checklist, workflow, whatever you want to call it, I’m gonna just quickly pop through them but I’m gonna put a link in the show notes where you can get your hands on this in text format and copy and paste it and personalize it for yourself. But I want to pop through them mainly just to show you how much there is because, again, we might be like, “You know, personal travel we do that all the time. It’s fine. We know there’s a lot that goes into it, but it’s fine. I can do it. I can wing it a little bit.” And you might. And if you do, great! But I do just want to highlight all the things that go into a trip or that you might want to go into a trip. I mean, some of these things are not necessities, but you’re like, “Yeah, that would be pretty awesome if I did that. And so, let me put it in my calendar at a time to remind myself when it makes sense to do it so that I remember to do it so that I get those benefits.” And I just want you to see that because it is actually quite a lot. As with anything, I think especially that we handle as women, I think we’re almost dismissive of how much it is, and when we see it all spelled out, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, okay. That’s a lot that goes into this.”
So just quickly, and again, I actually share this in more of a word format so that you can copy and paste it and make it your own versus a pretty PDF that you have to type out again if you want it. And I just want to go through these quickly.
For me, this doesn’t even come up with the, “Where do we want to go? What dates are we going,” that type of stuff. We’re assuming the trip is planned at this point. These are all the things that still flow out of it.
Creating a packing list if you want to — I have really leaned on these over the years. I just realized I was reinventing the wheel every single time I traveled, and so, I have packing lists for me, I have packing lists for my kids, and it really, really helps just make sure that I get the 5,000 things we need, especially when we travel with the kids, and don’t forget the important things.
The next line item is, if you have pets, booking pet care for the trip. That could be staying at your parents. If the pet’s gonna stay at a family member’s or boarding them, whatever it is, but figuring that out. Along those lines, you also want to schedule time to check vaccinations just to make sure they’re all good before the trip and not have an uncomfortable discovery when you’re dropping your dog off right before a flight and find out they can’t stay because of vaccinations. Making sure you have enough food. That’s one for me. If we’re leaving for a while and we need to leave a week of food for my dog and we’re low on food, that’s something I don’t want to discover at nine o’clock at night before we’re supposed to leave. And also time to pack up the food, along those lines. So I like to pack it up earlier in the day because I know the night before a trip I’m usually kind of scrambling to do the packing for my own family, and if I can have all that stuff packed up before, that’s really, really valuable.
Airport times for both legs. When do you want to be at the airport, backing that out. Then based on that, when are you driving to the airport. If you’re parking, factoring in parking time, reminding yourself to take a photo of where you parked. If you’re Uber or Lyfting, time to check when you want to check wait times. You can also schedule it. Calendar that. All that kind of stuff. If you’re gonna have a rental car, on the way home, time to fill it up with gas and return it and then figure out how to get back to the airport from the return place. Sometimes that’s not an issue. Sometimes it can be. My last trip in Florida, I mean, it was like 20 minutes from the rental to the airport, and if you’re cutting that close, that was 20 minutes that we kind of needed.
Another thing is packing up the car for the trip to the airport. If you’re traveling with kids, that actually can take a fair amount of time to get all the stuff and pack it all up and then get the kids in. Packing times, like actually doing the packing, and for me I really think of this as the main packing window when I’m gonna be doing the bulk of it. But also the morning of, and there’s plenty that I often have to pack up that has to wait until the morning of, and that’s kind of when I also need to factor that into my morning plans before a flight.
Along those lines, you might want to look at weather for what you’re packing. Time to pack up snacks. That’s almost like something I forget to do, and that’s separate from the clothing and that kind of stuff. And then also for the way home, if you have little, little kids with diapers and wipes or pull-ups and that kind of stuff is refreshing your airplane bag so that you actually have those things and they haven’t been used up throughout the trip and then you forget to refresh it, which I have done.
Some other things are shopping for snacks or games at Target, if you do that. When you’re gonna do laundry so you’re ready to pack. You can see that I’m kind of like some of these things are in no particular order, but the way my brain works of backing out what are all the things I need to do, starting from the flight. You know, “When am I getting to the airport? When am I driving? When am I packing? When am I doing laundry?” It just kind of backs it out from there.
Now, we’re gonna jump into a little more miscellaneous. I really like to order Instacart on the way home. That’s one. Scheduling mail holds, that’s gonna be before your trip by maybe a week. Scheduling mail holds if you’re gone for a while. Thermostats, if you have smart thermostats, obviously, turning them down but then turning them back up. Charging iPads and putting shows and games on them. That can actually take me, weirdly, a lot of time to make sure that there’s enough on each iPad for each girl, that they’re gonna be happy. So that’s one that I do and make sure that I charge it, and it’s something that you need to remember to do for both legs of the trip is recharging them the night before on the way home.
Scheduling when you want to check in on both legs. Prebooking airport parking, if you do that. Blocking your work calendar. So blocking your travel days and your vacation days but also maybe your last day of work and your first day back so that you can wrap things up and settle back in. You can’t do full days. Even two to four hours is really, really valuable.
Other random, little things are downloading offline maps. If you’re going somewhere with not-great service, it’s awesome to have offline maps on your phone and thinking through does anybody need access to the house. We have a house alarm system, like a security system, so I have to calendar reminders to turn the system on and off if, for example, cleaners are coming while we’re gone.
Along those lines, and this is something I should add to the list, is if cleaners are coming while you’re gone is reminding yourself to leave the house in good shape for the cleaners. So it’s always that cleaning for the cleaners thing, and you have to do it earlier than obviously you’d think to, and in the chaos of packing and leaving is just leaving the house in decent enough shape if that’s the thing.
And then the last thing I have is any beauty stuff. Obviously, this is completely optional, but I really love a spray tan, and so, it’s just a nice way — I do it very light, but it’s a way to feel healthy if I’m going somewhere warm out of a Minnesota winter and my skin is translucent and all my spider veins are on display. It’s just a nice way to get a little jolt of confidence. And so, just sharing. Take it or leave it. Some people get eyebrows done, all sorts of things that it can just be nice to think about that ahead of time so that you have time to book those appointments at a time that actually works for you.
So I share all this — again, you can download this. You can get this all in a download, so you don’t have to be scrambling and writing little notes right now. But I share it right now instead of just directing you to go do it just to highlight how much there is. And then going back to this is a great example of if you just calendared your flights, then you’re doing a lot of this. You’re still doing it. But you’re doing it just in your brain and hoping you remember all the things and you remember to do them on time. Where instead, if we lay them all out and then actually calendar when we’ll do them in relation to the trip but also in light of everything else we’ve got going on, then we can really understand, okay, we now have a realistic plan to get all of this stuff done. Okay?
So, again, a link will be in the show notes that you can get your hands on this if you would like it so that you can actually take this workflow and personalize it into your own and then use it for every trip going forward.
Why Creating a Personal Travel Workflow/Checklist is So Beneficial – 23:09
Just to highlight again why I think this is so valuable, because my guess is if you’re listening to this you get it, but to some it might feel — and even you might catch yourself being like, “Oh, I really need to do this. This feels like a little bit too micro-managey almost for my own life.” And, I mean, you could argue that. To me, it really just comes down to this is all stuff I want to do to set myself up for a trip that feels less stressful and good and one that I can actually enjoy. A lot of it is stuff that normally would live in my head. So if I want to do it but not be weighed down by the mental load and have that kind of anxious unease knowing how much there is to manage and will I remember to do it, will I remember in time, all that kind of stuff, it just is really beneficial. It really lightens that mental load. Again, you’re probably doing all of it already, or at least parts of it, or you want to do parts of it. And so, let’s just lay it all out for yourself and then allow you to bridge it into your calendar to bring it all to life. Once you do that, future you is reminded in time when it’s not scrambly and it’s at a time when it works for you to do all of this stuff.
I will note, I calendar all of this. There are times that I still use alarms on top of these things. In addition, I don’t do it for everything, by any means. But for example, if we need to leave for the airport at a certain time, I’m gonna set an alarm for when we need to start heading to the car and when we need to really be leaving, and it just helps because I know I’m gonna be moving a lot. I might be away from my phone and also there are gonna be a lot of moving pieces with kids running around and bags and things like that, that it’s really, really valuable to sometimes have these alarms going off to keep me on track on top of just the calendar for this part.
Use Your Calendar – 24:55
And another benefit of this that I haven’t even talked about is you can do this in your calendar. If you use your calendar in a way to communicate with your partner, if you have a partner at home, if you use your calendar in the way that I talk about in The Bright Method to coordinate and communicate with your partner, laying all of this out brings you both onto the same page of what the plan is, and you don’t have to keep repeating what the plan is and what time you’re leaving and all that kind of stuff. It’s in the calendar. The person can also be on board with that and check it out, and then you can also communicate around it to make sure it’s a plan that works for both of you.
All right, so I hope that’s helpful both from a personal travel perspective but also just really understanding that for a lot of things that we typically calendar the deadline for, there’s so much that actually goes into it, and if we really want to get an understanding of what is the workload that goes with this, what’s a realistic game plan to allow me to do it, let me get it all out of my head and have less mental load, this is a great example of how to do that in this context. And on the related note, you know, if you travel a lot for work or personal or almost sometimes if you travel less, and so, you’re out of practice and you just need more help on that front, which is totally valid, I have an episode on work travel that I’ll call out in the show notes, as I mentioned. It’s more geared towards traveling for work and how to handle that. I also have some blog articles that are relevant, including one that’s like how to really check out and enjoy a vacation, and it goes into more of the work details of how to manage the work front — if you go on a week vacation, what you might want to do to put yourself in a position to really be able to check out of work as much as you can in a great way. And that was a crowdsourced one. And so, I’ll also link that in the show notes and any other blog articles that I think are relevant, I’ll throw in there as well.
All right, I hope that was helpful! Please feel free to share with a friend, and if you find this podcast useful, I would so appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts. It really means a lot to me. It really helps other people find the podcast. It helps me grow this business, and I really appreciate it. Thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next episode!
[Upbeat Outro Music]
