Our guidance on how to have a great hotel stay.

Mark travels hundreds a nights a year and over the years he’s picked up a lot of tips on getting good rooms that allow him to work and rest most effectively. In this guidance, we’re going to share those tips with you.

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Our guidance on how to have a great hotel stay.

Mark travels hundreds a nights a year and over the years he’s picked up a lot of tips on getting good rooms that allow him to work and rest most effectively. In this guidance, we’re going to share those tips with you.

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Our guidance documents to travel with.

This is our most basic advice on the documents you need to travel with. As with many things Career Tools, if you’ve been traveling for work for 20 years, you’ll have worked this out for yourself. For those who are new to the workforce, or for travel for work, we hope to save you some time and heartache.

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This cast gives our guidance on how to create a trip folder.

Manager Tools recommends to managers that they have their admins create Trip Folders – a document which contains all the details of their trip and which can be printed out to travel with. This means they have all the relevant details with them – with no danger of losing them due to electrical equipment failure.

If you need to create one for your manager or yourself, where do you start? Here's where.

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This guidance describes how to prepare for the inevitable loss of gadgets and gadget power, most likely on while traveling.

We did a cast once on having a printed copy at home of your professional contacts, and we got a SURPRISING amount of comments suggesting we were Luddites, that we didn't need to kill trees, that companies wouldn't do that, that you can just copy them onto other media for home. We're not Luddites, and at least one of us HAS been fired and had his laptop taken from him (stupidly). Thankfully, we also got SEVERAL mails from folks who offered their heartfelt thanks, because they did what we recommended, and then they got fired or laid off, and they had a contact list to reach out to because of our Luddite guidance.

And now we broaden that guidance a little, and recommend that when you travel, you prepare for the inevitable event that you run out of battery power for all your gadgets, and you need to be able to still get some simple things done. We call this cast Travel EMP after the ElectroMagnetic Pulse reward you can get in Call of Duty, a videogame, which knocks out all electronics. (And lest you think this is far-fetched, the former Soviet Union's fighter jets (the MiG-25 was particularly known for this, based on its design and one getting flown to Japan, as I recall, in a defection) actually were equipped with vacuum tubes to make their systems more resistant to the potential EMP caused by nuclear detonations, among other things.)

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This cast describes how to engage the person sitting next to you when you are traveling professionally.

If you're traveling on business, you're going to sit next to someone. Maybe it's a train, or more likely it's a plane. So what do you do? Do you ignore them? Do you bury yourself in work? Do you say nothing until you can open your laptop…and play solitaire?

There's really a right answer, despite what you might think. The right thing to do is engage your seatmate. But we know that at least half of you don't want to talk to the person sitting next to you. If only what we wanted was always the most effective thing.

But how? How do we engage our seatmate? Three questions will get you started.

1. Smile and Ask: "How are you today?"
2. Smile and Ask: "Are you headed out or home?"
3. Smile and Ask: "What is it that you do?"

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This cast concludes our discussion on a standard practice of administrative assistants helping managers prepare for business travel.

In Part 1, we covered what a trip folder is, how to implement them initially, and started a conversation on what trip folders contain. In today's show, we pick up with what they contain.

1. What a Trip Folder IS (covered in part 1)
2. How To Implement Them Initially (covered in part 1)
3. What They Contain (started in part 1)
4. How To Action Them
5. Two Admin Trends Worth Noting
   
   1. Less Admins
   2. Less Training

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This cast describes a standard practice of administrative assistants helping managers prepare for business travel.

Mike and Mark both feel that one of our most unsung casts (actually, it's a series of casts) are the ones on working with an administrative assistant. If you have an admin, it's likely that you're seriously under-utilizing him or her. Great admins, well managed, improve the performance of the executive or manager they support by 50% in all cases, and ... get this ... 100% in MANY cases. Good admins honestly make that much difference. We're not kidding.

In our original set of casts, we talked about really just the beginnings of how to have a great relationship with our admins, leading to our effectiveness. There are hundreds of actions that admins take that add up to noteworthy efficiency gains, many of which ANYONE with an admin can use right away. And this cast is about one of those: creating trip folders to make traveling administratively less burdensome.

1. What a Trip Folder IS
2. How To Implement Them Initially
3. What They Contain
4. How To Action Them
5. Two Admin Trends Worth Noting
   
   1. Less Admins
   2. Less Training

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Part 2 of our conversation on the basics of Airline Travel.

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This cast makes some basic recommendations regarding airline travel for professionals.

Everyone talks all the time about the atomization of the workplace. Commuting is going away, thanks to telecommuting. Teams are virtual. Modern virtualization software and webcams and TelePresence and conference calls and a focus on the individual employee…all of this means that work is going to be much easier for everyone.

But what nobody says is that this means a good deal more AIR travel for some of us. And if we're going to be asked to get on a plane . . . and no one is going to teach us the ins and outs of air travel - then we're going to make a lot of mistakes. And depending upon the situation, air travel mistakes can affect our work performance. So that's why there's Career Tools.

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