Reduce Travel Stress by Emailing Yourself a Checklist
Traveling should be fun and exciting, but the excruciating feeling of forgetting something can add unnecessary stress to your preparations. If you want to get rid of that feeling from the moment you start packing to walking out the door with your suitcase, you will need this checklist.
Chelsea Fagan explains in The Financial Diet the list she makes and e-mails to herself to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anything. This checklist is for a trip to visit your relatives in France:
- See the attached table above to review right before I leave and make sure I have everything I need in my bag.
- A to-do list, from friend requests to parenting gifts.
- Arrival time and terminal of my aircraft with an attached electronic boarding pass.
- Exact travel plans by bus from the airport to the city and then by taxi (this included a bus schedule app).
- Driving directions to my first owner’s apartment (screenshot from the outside of her house, her codes, where to find her key, etc.).
- Her French phone number.
- Preset alarm for 4 a.m. on the day I had to take the train south.
- Attached e-tickets for the round trip.
- My relatives’ phone numbers already added to WhatsApp.
- An entrance scheme for my third owner, who, like the first, will not be there upon arrival – a code, instructions for finding a key, etc.
- Customer service numbers for my US credit cards in case they have been blocked for fraud or lost.
- Information about my French debit card borrowed from Mark in case I need to collect cash without paying any commission.
- A list of good places to work with reliable Wi-Fi where I can always take a quiet spot.
Your list may be slightly different – for example, if you’re really on vacation, you don’t need a list of places to work. Email may also not be the best way to keep this list if you don’t have easy access to data or Wi-Fi. Evernote, the native note-taking app on your phone or tablet, or a good old journal (with hard copies of things like train tickets) are all reliable ways to keep your checklist at your fingertips.