Increasing Your Productivity While On the Road

If you travel often for business, you know the imperative nature of staying productive even in strange environments and atmospheres. The stresses of juggling meetings, deadlines, and business dinners, however, can produce a recipe for productivity disaster—stress can produce muscle tension, low energy levels, and diminished focus when you need your concentration the most. We’ve formulated a list of ideas for increasing productivity on the road, from finding time to relax to utilizing productivity-enhancing apps.

Get Better Sleep

Getting adequate, quality sleep during corporate travel is one way to increase productivity in business meetings and in your downtime. The easiest and most obvious step to better sleep on the road is to find the best hotels with the best beds. Getting a bed that is too firm or too soft for your tastes can lead to tossing and turning and never reaching the deep sleep. Do research on which hotels in your destination city offer the type of bed you prefer, as well as a pillow menu that can cater to your tastes. Secondly, be prepared for odd sleeping hours and environments by packing earplugs and a sleeping mask. Outside noises are one of the most common hindrances to restful sleep, especially if you are sleeping during daytime hours or in strange locations like airplanes or airport terminals. Also, light stimulates activity in the brain, regardless of how tired you are, so invest in a sleeping mask to block out light.

Make Time to Relax

As in your normal professional life, business travel productivity is directly related to avoiding burnout, and finding time to unwind so you can be refreshed and re-centered when you hit the workload again is critical. Activities as simple as playing a round of golf, seeing a movie, or getting a massage are quick ways to take a load off and refresh your over-worked mind. Scope out places in your destination city that offer a great massage or a golf club that is renowned for its enjoyable course and nice landscape. Balancing your workload with rewards like a movie or a special dinner can be a great motivation to power through your last projects and check tasks off your list.

Utilize the Best Apps

Being on the go means departing with some office tools that make productivity easier. From printers to fax machines to filing cabinets, when you’re on the go, you won’t have these tools, no matter how much you need them. But the age of technology in which we live has made it much easier to be productive on the road with a few essential apps that make organization, task planning, and communication streamlined and easy. A few apps that we think are great aids to on-the-road productivity include TurboScan, which allows you to scan and upload important documents to your smartphone or tablet and send them to correct recipients. Other apps like CardMunch allow you take pictures of business cards that you acquire on your trip and convert them to contacts in your smartphone, while BaseCamp allows you to manage tasks and projects from tablet or laptop.

Use Your Commute

If you have a sedan service with a chauffeur to transport you to your destinations on your business trip, one of the easiest ways to increase productivity is to use your commute to get work done. Especially if you are traveling during rush hour, commutes can be lengthy and all of that downtime is invaluable to your productivity levels. Use your commutes to answer emails, return phone calls, or make lists of your tasks for the coming day; organizing your workload is often an extra task that gets sacrificed for more pertinent issues. But having a chauffeur to worry about the navigation aspect of your business trip means you get a decent amount of time added to your day to get caught up on tasks that might have been overlooked otherwise. 

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