My 17 Tips for Peaceful Travel Experiences ✈️
Issue #91: My guide for a better flight experience. New ChatGPT-4o. Seven Habits of High Performers.
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💡 Here are 3-tips to help you learn, grow, and be inspired this week!
🎓 Learn
Until I was 26, I had never traveled internationally or even been on an airplane.
Over the last decade, I’ve taken over 50 trips and flown more than 100 times.
I love traveling (as I'm sure many of you do), but packing, planning, and managing the time from home to the airport and time spent on the airplane isn't always easy or peaceful.
Peace is my goal in everything I do, especially when traveling.
Each trip brought its own stressful and frustrating experiences:
I've lost items on airplanes.
I've spent three hours in passport control lines.
I've forgotten to pack important items.
Sound familiar?
After learning from these experiences and mistakes, I started creating my own system, checklist, and guides for traveling.
This guide has significantly improved my travel experience, and I hope it will do the same for you:
1: Don't leave belongings like phones or wallets in airplane seat pockets; keep them in your pockets or backpack instead. It’s very easy to forget them when you are trying to get out.
2: Consider getting TSA PreCheck or Global Entry. It costs around $100, takes a few hours to apply, and a few months to get approved. It saves a lot of time at the airport and makes travel more peaceful and relaxed. You’ll thank me later. [Learn more and check if you qualify]
3: Packing can be stressful. But with a system like this, it can be a little better. Create a packing list (like this one) and add all the items you need for your travels.
4: A good (functional) backpack with multiple pockets is an absolute timesaver. I’ve tried many, and this backpack has been my favorite travel (and everyday) backpack for the last 7 years.
5: Always pack some snacks in your backpack. You never know what food options will be available, especially if you have dietary restrictions.
6: Noise-canceling headphones are affordable nowadays, and they do wonders for helping you sleep or focus amid loud airplane noise.
7: Always carry a pen and notebook to jot down creative ideas that usually start flowing when there is no internet connection and digital distractions up in the air.
8: Pack hand sanitizer and antibacterial wipes – airplanes can be quite unhygienic.
9: If you need to nap on the plane, do it as soon as you take your seat. It often takes a while to taxi, and by the time they start serving drinks, you’ll be up.
10: Airplane cabins can be very cold, so be sure to wear or bring warm layered clothing (even if) it’s hot in your home town or destination.
11: Download podcasts, music, or audiobooks beforehand. I have a reminder in my packing list for this.
12: Wear sweatpants with zipper pockets. This saves you the hassle of removing a belt at security and prevents items from falling out of your pockets. I’ve learned this the hard way by losing my wallet and AirPods in an airplane.
13: When traveling, you often don’t need all the cards in your wallet. I put unnecessary items, like my Tesla key and extra credit cards, in a second wallet that I keep in my backpack. This way, if I lose my main wallet, I lose fewer important items.
14: Jet Lag is one of my biggest travel stressors. It’s unproductive and unhealthy. But I found a solution. The Timeshifter app helps significantly reduce Jet Lag's effect. It reduced my jet lag from 6 days to 1 day during my last trip from the USA → Bali.
15: Some credit cards charge a foreign transaction fee. Make sure to travel with a credit card that doesn’t have any foreign transaction fees.
16: Many airports have wellness studios, and if you have a longer connection time, you can do yoga at the airport. Just 15 mins of yoga makes a very big difference in how you feel inside the airplane and after. Here is my favorite travel yoga mat and 15-minute travel yoga practice.
17: Use the Citymapper app; it’s like a Google map for public transportation. It’s one of the best apps for finding public transportation like buses, trains, and metros in a foreign country or city. It also shows the exact cost and total time (and a lot more) to help you navigate a new city.
Do you have your own travel tips or hacks? Please share them in the comments below.
🚀 Growth Tip
The ChatGPT, our favorite AI tool, just got an upgrade. Now, it’s even more powerful and can help us be more productive and faster in getting things done.
Watch the demo of GPT-4o to learn the new vision and voice capabilities to interact with ChatGPT.
🤩 Inspiration
The book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” is one of the most recommended read for personal growth.
For me, the most effective habit mentioned in this book is “Put first thing first.” In other words, create a structured growth routine with the right priorities.
Here is a tiny summary to inspire you to read this book.
Anil
May the Peaceful Growth be with you! 🪴
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