Business travel is a skill, one that’s usually honed through multiple trips over the course of your career. If you want to speed up the learning curve a little, we’ll look at the four essential tips that you’ll need to skate by.
1. Prepare Your Schedule
In a normal workday, you likely won’t need to map out your tasks in detail. If you’re on a business trip, the rules change. If you don’t know where your meetings are, you won’t know how long it will take to get there. If you don’t know that there’s construction on the road right outside your hotel, you can end up losing whole hours of productivity. The first few times you travel, it’s best to work these things out down to the last detail. It will train you for future trips, so you’re not always caught on the fly.
2. Make Healthier Choices
If a fellow business traveler tells you not to overdo it at cocktail hour with the clients, it’s likely not because they have a vested interest in your liver health. Drinking plenty of water, eating a healthy diet, and maintaining a consistent sleep schedule (even with a 15-hour time change) is one of the best ways that you can maintain your sanity and productivity from start to finish.
3. Pick the Right Travel Dress Shoes (and Pack More Efficiently)
One of the most confounding questions for a business traveler is how to pack more efficiently without sacrificing necessary items. OAKA makes travel dress shoes for businessmen who want to be as comfortable as they are stylish.
Plus, OAKA has made these shoes easily adaptable to everything from duffle bags to briefcases. It’s made of flexible materials, so it won’t be dented by other items in your bag. It allows you to consolidate far easier if you need to pack several other big items. The shoe looks like a standard dress shoe, but the heel is actually an optical illusion and zero drop. In reality, OAKA’s keep your feet flat to the ground, as if you were walking barefoot.
4. Consider Your Environments
There are certain times when you take risks, and it works out, but business travel is not necessarily a time to hope for the best. From the hotel to the offices, you should know what you need from each location. If you’re going to work from another location of your parent company, do you know what type of equipment and support you’ll have before you get there? When you book the hotel, do you know if it will be quiet enough to allow you time to rest and refuel? These are just a few questions that can help you rule out certain options.
Business travel can feel like a crapshoot due to all the variables, but it comes down to practice. From travel dress shoes to scheduling, use these tips for a leg up on your next trip.
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