The Pre-(Pre)Game.
(Figuring out the pre-requisites to something, is actually the game, to fro.)
In preparing for a trip, a funny game is the hankering down to the night before, and taking out the requisite amount of luggage: how much clothes do i bring? i wonder if i’ll need dancing shoes for night time socials? will people kayak or surf? does my size 6 swimmers still fit? where does my activity intersect with my very own abilities to suss out what to pack? why do we ask so many questions — and doesn’t this not signify actual simplifying?
Most of the need for worry come from the socials aspect, rather than the actual work or travelling bits — boring — and when that is sussed /what is figuring out/ then the half the organising is actually done, you can daydream about the puzzle that is your 3–4 day trips across what is the cover of actual work. Or even, as a mere aside to it. Hopefully, they assign you to somewhere more exciting and where you’ve actually never been to. Gaining that Peru travel passport page stamp (YES, YOU HAVE BEEN HERE!) is as precious (cliche, but true), and if you can do it while you work (some people frown at this, but as a former travelling exec myself, this is precious) then WHY NOT, you are the luckiest — mileage points AND tickets on the company? Holy mucker-abouter, batmen.
I employ the LIST method. I like jotting down everything — resulting in a three-to-four-inch diary at the end of every year (i kid you not), and probably need more notebooks than god.
I am not perpetrating the lazy buffooning of travelling lampoons, far from it. Merely to get organised and get over the stress of “oh my god, i have to travel for work” rather than actually realise the perspective that is — you travel for work! You get to see the sights — while on the cab to 30Rock, from say, India for a meeting with Time Warner’s investors, and while that may seem exciting in the first few times, what i realised was really tiring was merely the toil of the pre-game: planning (schedules, ITs), where to stay, packing & unpacking.
(I would hire a professional packer, seriously.) Or phone my mother to do it for me. Whichever is cheaper. I realise that while it may come from a very domestic perspective, i have in my younger years done this very thing, of travelling for a Food & Beverage company every week to launch products, and lug the requisite computer backpack, wear the uncomfortable oxfords, and proudly wearing what is the company logo’d <What is the ‘Escudo’> top, like a school uniform (ridiculous) to show we were from HQ or the Head Office, to every official trip. A very small price to pay by the way, to be able to see every state/ country/ brewery/ manufacturing plant/ place of product, that the company sends me to. It’s a fink’s life.
That is wonderful, now that i look back on the shadows of the stubble of what is a compression of what i always referred to as the prime-energy years. I look back with both longing, learning, and proper actualisation of achieving goals using the perspective on a relative stance of having done things my way.
Oh yeah, and i raised two young daughters as well. (So yay, woman power.) While working for the Marketing Directorate HQ, of a big beer company. (Like, totally hmmm... um, empowering in a seriously masculine way.)
Anyway, so to remain totally organised - you need to define where you are going, and pack accordingly. Bring what you need, and only what you need. And find out if they have tourist shops, or a competent concierge in-house for the occasional hotel emergency shop. They overprice, even the locals - so bringing it is a lot more economical.
While engendering the whole woman-roles are only the ones that might otherwise take a backseat to life, and organise children (and their very pressing lives of development), there is the worry that it might be taken as too masculine-forward to assert oneself in the workforce, and while it actually worked for a Marissa Meyer, and a Sheryl Sandberg in their respective milieus and continuous career paths in tech, to lean in is a dragon and a half mile up in the stratosphere of paths for someone like me - but, i’m sure they had to pack their own clothes, while driving their kids to and from school as well, on the climb up. And have now as they have stepped up as lead commands amongst peers, there is no culturally-correct recommendation in expatriate grids, where decisions are encompassed in a switched-role, parallel market, or even as an aside to being “assigned” growth tasks in non-HQ empowered environments - but, making it a module to a definitive automated (beta-mode) method of sweeping up luggage, and the argument of who takes up the lead on packing, included. All you need to input is the number of people, & go.
So the suss to this, mostly is having the efficiency of being mobile (or travelling) whether as a couple, or work assignment to another country, or migration to a different continent. There is the real issue of the mobile couple-being the traveller/anchor is the pushme-pullyou dance of eternal musical chairs of career-rota-to-now-accomodating-expatriate-assignments in coupledom, that most companies don’t have any real elegant insight to (which cause breakups, depending on culture mixes/ preference).
It is as standard as covering choice country role assignments, as the workforce evolves to cover a global command, as business expands exponentially to international grounds. It is regularly assumed (on any travel canvas known to appland): the men travel, & the women stay with raising the brood. But as it happens, it can (and it does occur) that women accompany the factor (of tourist/ bored useless tag along/ 20% life advisor) do too. And their children are better or thankful for the dad-figure/ influence where their points-of-view in efficient mobile/ life-driving are of a more masculine perspective - the way that menial task-assigning things that we can’t assign to siri, silly: say ‘tidy up or pack away’ isn’t something that’s going to ever be overlooked with an O/S designed with inputs from a woman-mom/ technologist as well, and a feminine perspective to round out the balance of remote-controlled-power. The app eliminates having to ever need 30 minutes to argue over something that occupies the indices of resident application, and siri-simplified lives, are overall, peaceful. (And you won’t ever forget to bring the sunblock.)
So, whatever your impact may ring on the proverbial corporate/ startup/ organisation ladder — we all travel, and experience what i call the “travelers’ anxiety” that escalates to unnecessary stress until the hours before, that multiplies a fair factor to the number of people along. And when you have that pre-meditated disorganisation : as you rollout a higher number of things in your list to juggle, turns out a higher incidence rates of stress, incapacity for appropriate real-time response, and medicated at-parity prep on partying (a wine or two to head off the now-jumbled adrenals) & to level it off with the requisite vacation socials, and the capacity to overdose on leveraged sign-off on the health, environment, and utopic (or dystopic, depending on your INTJ squad’s nature-to-preference ratio at the time, as its own unsaid pre-requisite for agreement) isolation, or possibly qualifying for minor indifference. And having to find that the din outside your window, is real life. Clamouring you to spend your time not tarrying and actually enjoying life, and travel (even) without an expense/claim account (GASP!!! wtf, no way, holy shit, omg.) Yep, if you dare. Just realise that as with everything in life, just remain diligently organised. Get a diary. And write everything down with heat, glorious punctuated signalling to what will drive you to enjoy this time very passionately, and edit with cool un-pressed dignity.
Because, it’s like entropy. Organising takes massive energy.
*(Also, hailing a taxi!) At time of print, Uber has now officially pulled out of Asia.
