Digitally prepping for a trip

Over the next few months I’ll be heading to both New York and San Antonio for some fun trips. My goal is to work very little on those trips, but I still want to keep up with some of my daily streaks (such as this blog), so preparation is key.

Blogging

I generally stay a week or so ahead on blog posts, but I’ll try to push that even a bit further before those trips so that I’m not out of posts when I get home. Last year when we went to New York, I had enough posts pre-written for the duration of the trip trip, but just barely, and when I came home with COVID I simply had to stop blogging for a week.

While that might largely unavoidable, I still would like to give myself a bit more cushion for these trips. To write more I need to read more, so I’ve been pushing hard to build up a nice buffer.

Anki

The other big one I need to consider is my daily use of Anki (flashcards, as shared here). I’m currently on an 1,930 day streak, and I’d rather not break it. Fortunately, Anki does two things that help.

1. First, the streak is counted if you review just one card. If things get busy, I can always review a single card.
2. You can “study ahead” whenever you want. In the week or so before each trip, I’ll study ahead so that my daily card count will be much lower while I’m away.

It also helps that I tend to study Anki cards in fits and starts, which works well for those kinds of trips where I can just slip in a few minutes here or there when time allows.

Duolingo and others

I have other daily tasks that I routinely do, such as Duolingo and Wordle. Those are short and easy and I can likely just knock them out as we get moving in the morning. I also consider them to be less important, so it’s ok if I miss a few days.

In the case of all of these items, it helps that I enjoy them. I wouldn’t have that huge streak in Anki if I didn’t enjoy doing it at least to some degree.

Of course, I haven’t talked about how I plan to handle normal work stuff (emails, meetings, etc), but I think most people already have a solid plan in place for those. The bulk of my time lately is in meetings, whether that is with clients or at Chamber-like events, so blocking those from my calendar takes care of most of it.

Now it’s time to go work a bit further ahead to make my time away that much easier…