Blog – My Office Diet

How I stay productive on business trips or generally when traveling

I love traveling. I always did and always will. For the experience of a new place, new landscape, new people, new everything, I love the exposure and the massive learning about the world that I am gaining during travels.

Therefore, I focused my career towards a job that would get me on a plane as much as possible, as often as possible. Most of my trips – 98% or so are literally business trips, where very rarely I see anything but the airport, the hotel and the conference center or the office building where my meetings are taking place. And a restaurant or two.

In general, I travel every week to a new location, be it in Europe or to Middle East, Russia or USA and most of my business trips are spent in meetings with the local teams and very rarely I have time for my “day job”.

It’s piece of cake to get overwhelmed by the amount of emails to answer on top of the back-to-back meetings, networking lunches and business dinners.

Plus I don’t have a PA. And I am a control freak – I want to know what is happening in every country I am responsible for, stay connected to my family and be in touch with my partner, while being active, healthy and efficient. And sane.

Here are my productivity hacks while traveling:

Once at the hotel, I move! After any flight, be it for 1 hr or for 12, I seek opportunities to move. Most of the times, this means a combo of power walking while doing a mental brain dump (let my thoughts get out of my brain) . I need to get my blood flowing, so I move. The places I go to don’t always have a gym opened non stop, or a pool or sometimes, I simply don’t carry with me gym equipment. And while the first impulse after I arrive at the hotel is to take a shower and sleep, maybe eat something, what works best for my mood, productivity and maintaining high energy levels is staying active. I self educated into it and now it’s part of my DNA. When I don’t have the perfect setting to exercise, I use my room. To dance or walk on the spot until I get comfortably stinky sweaty . Benefits of in-room gym : NO excuse: no need to carry equipment, no embarrassment that someone may see your flabby abs, no time spent on putting on the “gym face”. oh, and one more thing – I carry my trolley and lift my luggage as much and as often as possible. Why would I allow someone to do this for me and then I go to the gym to weigthlift ?!
Before, after and while up in the air, I fast! I spend anything between 2 and 12 hrs flying in one go (which is basically sitting on a chair at 35,000 feet). Since I don’t move, I don’t eat. Plus plane food is served as a fill up, not as a savory culinary experience, why would I fall for the mediocre when I can taste a healthy meal when at the destination? Water fasting keeps me more alert and awake, especially on long – haul, intercontinental flights when days are longer than 24 hours
I go to bed when locals sleep. This applies mainly to intercontinental flights, when time zone difference can be significant +6 hrs. I force myself, through keeping active (read 1 and 2 above), to stay awake until it’s bed time in the local time zone. My body adapts faster to the new time zone if I go to bed and wake up at the typical hours I wake up at home, but it does it in a different time zone.
I go for light, simple and carbs – free. Business trips often mean business lunches and dinners in nice restaurants and most of the time great company. Translation – easy to overeat and taste all the “local” foods. Restaurant portions tend to be quite large compared to my caloric needs (I am “forced sedentary” and sitting most of the time while in meetings) and prepared to be tasty, which can mean anything from more sugary, salty or fatty than same recipe home-made. What I do in most business trips is always skip at least one meal – typically breakfast – I would have a latte and plenty of water. Then I would “cheat” lunch with something very light – such as a little salad (if possible nothing if I have a business dinner) and then indulge at dinner, by allowing myself to try out local food. But even then, my plate returns to the kitchen half full, that’s pretty much all my body needs to be satisfied. I stay away from carb loaded foods, because it gets my insulin levels spike, making me feel tired faster and using some of the energy I should use on brainy activities to digest a heavy meal.
I set up time for distractions. Sure, I still check my social media accounts, as part of my business, or just for fun, but don’t spend unlimited amount of time. I give myself 2 time slots – 15 minutes in the morning and another 15 minutes in the afternoon. No more, no less. 30 minutes daily is more than enough to like photos, tweet, Instagram, keep up to date with my social media friends etc. Why is it so important to keep disciplined? because discipline means guilt-free life. I stick to my plan, I feel proud of myself. If I spend 3 hours instead of 30 minutes scrolling through Facebook, I feel lazy, procrastinator, big hits for my self confidence and self esteem.
I use any minute I have awake to be productive. It’s incredible how many emails one can reply to or go through while waiting for the taxi, at the check-in queue, waiting for a colleague to powder her nose before going to lunch or dinner. My point is, I don’t waste time, I capitalize on any minute I have available to DO. Sometimes DO means texting my mother, write a message to my partner, say hi to a friend or simply screening through my mailbox.

How do you keep up with business traveling? what are your tips and tricks to stay active, productive and rock the world?

I would love to hear from you.

Xoxo,