Outsource the Routine to Make Business Travel Less Hectic

On one of my latest business travel adventures, I picked up a copy of "The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich" by best-selling author Timothy Ferris. In summary, the book tells busy people, like myself, to offload or outsource their routine to someone else. By outsourcing daily, weekly and monthly routines, or busy work as I like to call it, allows professionals to get back to what made them successful in the first place. I could not put the book down, as it was quite the eye opener.

Offloading the Mundane in Favor of the Creative

Let's face it, if we truly take a look at our day to day routine, I am quite sure we can find something that we do that has become rote and if you look hard enough, that rote routine was probably at one time something you had to learn and was probably hard. Human nature is a funny thing, once we learn something new we get comfortable and add that task to the many other things we do which in turns robs us of precious time.

Our goal in life is not learning new things to move us forward in our business, but to learn new things and once we mastered it teach it to someone else to do it for us so we can move on the more cerebral things like brainstorming new products or services to give us an edge over our competitors.

Tiny Steps Can Lead to Big Results

After reading the book, I immediately set out to reassess everything I do in a month's time that robbed me of time. What I mean by "robbed me of time" is I asked myself, if I could automate or outsource what I am doing will it free up my time to pursue and reach my goals faster? I started small. For example, I grocery shop weekly, so I changed it to 2 weeks and freed up a good 4 hours a month. I also looked at what I buy often and started ordering through Amazon's subscribe and save program and started receiving items on auto-ship. Not only did that free up more time, I no longer pay sales tax on those items and receive 15% discount for ordering 5 or more items, a win win.

Outsource Your Business Travel Planning

Since I read this book during a long business travel escapade, I decided to see if I can free up my time when planning my trip, not to mention lowering my anxiety when my next trip came closer. If you have a personal assistant, make sure that you are utilizing that assistant to take as much of the mundane off your shoulders as possible. If you do not have an assistant, you may want to consider a virtual assistant to handle as much of your business travel itinerary as possible. Here are a few items that my virtual assistant handles:

Book my flight Track flight status and reschedule Hotel Reservations Plan and schedule my meetings Send me reminders of my travel plans Arrange my corporate limousine service

These are just a few services my virtual assistant arranges for my business travel. But don't limit your virtual assistant to just this, they can do a lot more!

Come to think of it, using corporate limousine service, in and of itself, is also a great time saver, especially if you have a long commute from the airport or even your job. Yes, driving is mundane so let someone else do it.

You have better things to work on.