6 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Combat Business-Travel Blues

The idea of traveling around the world for work sounds amazing when you’re still in school. Meeting with clients from coast to coast while getting paid to do it seems like nothing short of a dream. Unfortunately, business travel loses its charm rather quickly when you do it for a living.

New business owners are often tasked with traveling to meet current and potential clients, attend industry events, and frequent trade shows and seminars. But after doing this for a month or two, business travel can start to feel pretty old.

The good news is there are many ways to make the most of your travels, even if they’re strictly for business. Here are six ways you can beat the business-travel blues as an entrepreneur working to build and grow your company.

1. Establish a routine for at-home responsibilities.

One of the most frustrating things about frequently leaving home is that you are constantly planning who will carry out your daily responsibilities while you’re away. Things like feeding the cat, taking the children to school, or checking the mail can be tricky to handle when you’re hundreds or thousands of miles away—this is where a routine can help.

Setting routines for assigning family members, friends, or professionals to help while you’re away will make leaving home exponentially easier. If you don’t have family and friends willing to commit to a regular schedule, hiring a house sitter or temporary nanny through services like Care.com or Mind My House might be the best route.

If the idea of hiring strangers to take care of things seems a bit odd, you could enlist a little help from the tech world by installing a home security system that includes a camera so you can keep an eye on things while you’re away. You can check out a few of 2017’s top systems and compare their monitoring features in this guide.

2. Create a system for efficient travel.

Staying sane while traveling requires some serious organization skills. Not only do your at-home responsibilities need to be in order, but you also need to have everything ready to go for whenever work requires you to travel. Think of everything you need to travel on a regular basis and find ways to put each item into a system—you can even use a tech tool or two to help you out.

Justin Harnish, co-founder of Women of the World, says “I use Evernote or its partner app Scannable to photograph my passport, driver's license, prescription medications, and other important documents—tagging them all as "Vital Travel Docs" for quick access.” Harnish also uses this app combo to track business expenses for tax purposes. “In addition to saving my tickets and boarding passes in the iOS wallet, I use Evernote Web Clipper or the iOS Evernote Share Service to add tickets and boarding passes into Evernote under the ‘Travel’ folder,” he says. “Once the business trip is done, all of my receipts, including my airline tickets, get moved from the ‘Travel’ folder to ‘Current Year Taxes.’”

3. Swap out dinners with clients for activities.

It’s hard to keep a regular exercise routine when you’re traveling constantly. Although it would be ideal to use the hotel gym each morning, this probably won’t happen. Stay active on your trip by swapping out your standard client dinners and happy hours for activities.

You could start by asking your client if there are any local hikes, biking trails, or lakes for paddle boarding in the area. If your client’s team is willing, you could ask them to take you on a fun outdoors activity to get to know one another.

4. Eat familiar meals.

Sometimes all you need is a little bit of home to make you feel welcome in a strange place. If you find that you’re getting a little homesick on the road, try booking a hotel that includes a kitchen. You can run to the store when you have some downtime and pick up the fixings you need for a home-cooked meal. This will help you feel more at home in a strange city and give you the opportunity to build a healthier and more cost-effective menu for your trip.

5. Make quality sleep a priority.

The unfortunate irony of business travel is that you need more sleep to power through day-long meetings and maintain balanced moods, yet sleeping is a bit more difficult on the road. lt might feel impossible, but arranging for the best sleep situation possible before you travel can help you fall asleep and stay asleep once you get there.

Lewis Swingrover, CEO of TripleNet Gateway says, “One of the best tips I can give fellow business travels looking to get decent sleep during their trips is to not be afraid to ask for a room that’s situated away from all the noise. For example, requesting a room on a higher floor that doesn’t face a road or highway will help you cut out noise and distractions that could make it difficult to sleep each night.”

6. Ditch social media and explore your surroundings.

Whenever we feel bored, lonely, or uncomfortable, we tend to reach for our phones to check Facebook and other social media platforms. Although this coping mechanism might work for temporary moments of discomfort, it’s not going to help you when you’re stuck in a hotel each evening for a three-day stretch. Ditch social media and explore the city instead. Getting to know the city will keep your mind off any feelings of homesickness.

If you’re not sure where to start your out-of-town adventure, check out Like A Local for a few pointers. This app allows you to search popular locations around town and read comments from city residents who are currently there to give you a feel for whether it’s a good time to visit.

When the shine of business travel wears off, it’s hard to stay motivated to leave town to meet your entrepreneurial duties. The next time you’re feeling burnt out, try some of these tips to develop habits to make your business travel both easy and exciting.