How to make work travel a bit easier

Plus a recent travel story in which I resist the urge to identify an airline by name.

Hello and welcome to Academia Made Easier. I am so glad that you are here.

Winter travel within Canada is always unpredictable and recent events reminded me of this. I was in Ottawa with a Friday return flight scheduled. On Wednesday, the airline contacted me to warn me of potential winter weather delays for my return trip. Cue low-level stress. On Thursday, I got an email informing me of an itinerary change: due to a big winter storm in Toronto, my flight home to Saskatoon would be delayed. Specifically, my new itinerary had me flying from Ottawa to Toronto as scheduled and staying there for eight days before returning home. 

That was a fun day on the phone with the airline and university travel agent, I can assure you.  

It all worked out (I got home on the Friday by switching airlines). Importantly, my stress was a lot lower than it might have been due to a personal system I have developed over the years - most from things I have learned the hard way. And this system is what today’s small thing to try immediately is about.

One Small Thing to Try Immediately: Reduce travel-related decisions

Planning work travel can be stressful. You need to worry about how you will get there, where you will stay, what you will wear each day, what things you will need for your various events, and how you will stay active during your trip (if that is your thing). Increasingly, you also need to worry about what you will need if your flight is canceled and your trip out is delayed by half a day and your return trip is delayed by multiple days. Oh, and hopefully your luggage shows up… 

You can’t control all elements of work travel, but you can reduce a fair bit of stress by applying the “decide once” idea. Here is how:

1. Establish personal rules about travel dates and times. I live in a beautiful city with non-excellent airline service. My flight choices are often between shitty (6 am departure; be at the airport around 4 am), shitty (early evening departure; arrive at destination around 1 am), and shitty (mid-day departure, multiple stops). But the differences still matter to me. Protecting my personal energy is critical to my well-being, so I have decided that I would rather take more time to get somewhere than cut my sleep short. If the choice is between an early morning flight or going a day early, I go a day early. (Bonus writing time, as I discussed in the past.) Life has taught me to assume that there will be a flight disruption of some sort and avoid planning anything important for my arrival day. And I have discovered it is less stressful to plan to arrive at the airport with ample time for slow security lines and gate changes to another terminal than it is to run through the airport and then literally sweat through the first half of a flight. (Trust me on that one!)

2. Establish your personal criteria for accommodations. Know your needs before you look for accommodations. Here is my list:

• I need to keep within university expense guidelines and be able to cancel my reservation.

• I insist on safe locations and clean hotels. I like to stay close to the locations where my meetings are so that I don’t waste time in taxis.

• I like to stay close to good running paths. If the weather and/or location are not running-friendly, I like a good hotel gym that is not attached to a pool area (too hot!).

• If I am traveling by vehicle, I need safe parking.

If I visit a city regularly and I find a hotel that meets all or most of these criteria, I stay at it repeatedly.

3.  Carry on your luggage. Past checked luggage trauma means I avoid checking my luggage even for extended trips. I have had airlines lose my luggage. I have had an airline not lose my luggage but received my luggage (and thus clothes) soaked in the Grand Marnier broken in another passenger’s luggage. Never again! 

4. Create a packing list. Packing for travel sucks but checklists save the day. Create a regular packing list (you can make a copy of my own work travel packing list and adapt it if that is helpful to you). After each trip, update it as needed. Over time, the updates become fewer and you will start to have a personal travel wardrobe that you rely on. This removes considerable stress, in my experience.

If you take my suggestion regarding carry-on, you will need to make good use of limited space. I wear work clothes on the plane. (I love Sophie Grace clothes with their forgiving machine-washable fabrics for travel; please use the code AcademiaMadeEasier to get 15% off if they fit your own style.) I keep my wardrobe choices simple and (if possible) organized around a single footwear choice. I use packing cubes (pro-tip: get a different coloured set for everyone in your household) and ziplock bags to keep everything organized and contained.

5. Keep most of your packing list pre-packed. My packing list has several categories (liquids, makeup, chargers, personal items) that I keep packed and ready. This requires having multiple of certain personal items (e.g., toothbrush, hairbrush, makeup bag, robe, charging cords) so that they are not going back and forth between my travel and my day-to-day life. I store all of these items in my carry-on suitcase along with the packing cubes. All of this makes the actual packing process easier: I just need to add my clothes to the packing cubes, ensure my travel-sized toiletries are filled, and double-check my list.

6. Create a system to make expense claims as easy as possible. Universities vary in their travel expense policies so the work involved here will vary. Here is what works for me in my specific context:

• I have an email signature option for travel expense claims that allows me to simply pull it up, plug in the information, delete what is irrelevant, and attach whatever is needed. Here is the text:

Hello,

I would like to submit the attached expenses to be covered from [Account Information]. The approver is [Name]. The approved travel request ID is: [code]

Plane: receipt attached

Hotel: X nights, receipt attached

Meal per diems for X days 

Taxis: receipts attached

Parking: receipts attached

Other [identify]: receipts attached

Conference registration: receipt attached

Conference program: attached

Thanks for your help!

Loleen Berdahl

• I take photos of receipts as I go (or every evening in the hotel).

• I submit expense claims ASAP.  I often organize these while at the airport (since I get there early due to security line paranoia).

These steps have made travel infinitely easier for me. I hope you find them helpful as well!

Until next time…

Do you have other tips to make work travel a bit less stressful? I would love to hear your ideas. Please comment and let me know! And if you have work travel disaster stories, I would love to hear those as well. :-)  

Stay well, my colleagues. 

P.S. Another travel tip: allow yourself the option of not working on the plane. I often find planes to be great places to get work done. But sometimes the seats are more squishy than desired and the person in front of me reclines their seat, shoving my laptop into my face, and it is all just really ugh. Watching a tiny movie on my phone or listening to a podcast is a better use of time in these circumstances. There is no rule that one needs to work on planes. Only do so if you want to.

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Loleen Berdahl, Ph.D.: I am a twin mother, wife, runner, cat lover, and chocolate enthusiast. I spend far too much time binge-watching television and my house could be a lot cleaner. During work hours, I am the Executive Director of the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy. I am the author of University Affair’s Skills Agenda column and my most recent books are  Work Your Career: Get What You Want from Your Social Sciences or Humanities PhD and Explorations: Conducting Empirical Research in Canadian Political Science.

Note: some of the links in this newsletter may be affiliate links, which means that if you use the link and then make a purchase, I may make a small commission that I will use to buy toys for my cats. They appreciate it. Most recent purchase: a catnip-filled banana.