A new way to plan just about anything... especially a solo trip
Planning and organizing is my thing. Drafting and assembling my own trips, especially the ones I do internationally by myself, never feels like a chore. Traveling, all parts of it, are fun to me.
Admittedly, although I do a good job on the research part, my organization has always been... rudimentary to say the least. For my first international solo trip in late 2014 (a complicated 3.5 week trip to 3 South American countries), I literally wrote down my schedule with pen and paper and carried that around. Over the years, it's evolved to something like this....
or this...
but still, at the end of every trip, I've realized the lackluster organizational component of my travel planning has failed me in critical times of my solo trips. BUT, I think I’ve found a solution.
So, what’s the best tool out there for trip planning?
Enter Trello.
What the heck is Trello?
Trello is a task management app that uses a board and sticky note visual approach (in technical jargon knows as the Kanban system) to assign, track, and archive to-do items.
After you create an account, you are free to draft an unlimited amount of boards. If you imagine a board as a literal bulletin board, once you open the board you have the capability of creating lists, which you pin to your board as standard letter paper. Within those lists you can create tasks (think of them as sticky notes within your standard letter paper on your bulletin board), and within those tasks you can create checklists, add attachments, write down specific notes, and create custom tags.
With Trello, it is easy to break activities into the smallest doable tasks. This, in turn, makes it incredibly easy to follow a sequence. And in essence, every travel is a (likely) organized sequence of events.
I’ve known about Trello for a while but it wasn’t until this year that I started playing around with it to plan the few vacations for this year, including the one “big” scheduled trip: the Grover honeymoon!
Main perks of organizing travels with Trello:
Easy to follow visuals
One stop shop for maintaining important documentation, entry tickets, hotel information, contacts numbers
Access your board anywhere, share it with anyone
Assigning tasks keeps people accountable to due dates
One of the best reasons Trello is especially good for planning solo travels is the versatility in which you can craft your board to fit your needs, and also, its ease of sharing (even as read-only) with others.
As a project manager in my day to day job and someone who likes to have a million different interests and activities running at the same time, Trello has proven very effective in helping me organize my thoughts and keep a record of what’s still to-do, activities ongoing, and progress to date. If you look carefully at the Trello board example, you’ll notice some upcoming dates, which means the “A+K Honeymoon” is literally a few days away! Although this is my first time using Trello to organize my (our?) travel plans, I’m feeling more confident than ever in our preparation. I’ll post an update after the trip to objectively gauge just how effective it is, but so far, it’s a definite organizational win in my book.
Traveling (and solo traveling) doesn’t have to be crazy stressful, especially when technology gives you endless tools with which you can set yourself up for success for a dream trip.
Let me know if you’ve used Trello and call me out if you think I have it all wrong :)