How to Travel well with Limited Time and Energy

The real constraint in modern travel isn’t money or access - it’s energy. In the era where social media has taken over our brains and the messages of hustle culture enthusiasts and over-hyped photo spots cloud our judgement, the mere act of doing research for a trip becomes exhausting. Those who have mastered social media marketing and virality overtake our feed at the expense of other locations, waiting patiently for their turn. 

This isn’t all bad - I’ve seen many deserving restaurants go from zero customers to queues of people at their door. Many accommodations get customers through social media, especially the B&B’s who struggle to get a spot on the Trip Advisor leader board. However, there are so many places to choose from and so much information to consume, that trip planning becomes overwhelming. Add to that the constraint of limited PTO, the pressure to “do-it-all” and hundreds of “optimized” trip itineraries online and you’ll end up with a bad case of decision fatigue. 

In my opinion, the real mistake is treating time as the only constraint. There are a plethora of 7 or 10 day itineraries online to choose from, but what you need to remember is that your 7 days aren’t the same as my 7 days. In scrolling through the immeasurable amount of recommended days to be spent in this and that city, readers forget that the essence of the trip should come from them, and that there is no recommendation available to satisfy their internal needs. Two people with the same number of days can have radically different trips, determined entirely by the way they view things. The obsession with widespread “musts” is incessant and there is a lack of conditionality that comes with these “must see” recommendations. Real travel recommendations, done well, require a framework that helps the reader identify in what context the restaurant, hotel or activity being described is recommended. The experiences you are spending hours researching on must be worth your time and that means that they must fit into your trip, rather than you trying to fit them into yours. 

For example, if I wanted to speak about the “must-try” knife-cut noodles in South Korea, I could add this dish as part of a top 5 foods you cannot miss in this country and leave it at that. Or, I could explain to you that this dish is heavier and is better suited for a dinner rather than a lunch. I could tell you that the best knife-cut noodles are sold at markets, where you’ll have to sit on a little stool and order your food with unspoken words to overcome the language barrier, and therefore may not be ideal for more nervous travellers. I could also tell you that having this dish for dinner will prevent you from visiting multiple stalls and trying smaller street foods, since it’s such a filling dish. Last but not least, I could warn you that the best stall for knife-cut noodles is so popular that you’ll have to wait in line before you get to eat. Now, all of this is hypothetical, but it’s to illustrate some of the many ways to add context to travel recommendations, context which I struggle to see when doing my own research.

Travellers need to know whether something is good for them, not whether 5 million other people enjoyed it or not. As a traveller, you have the permission to prioritize and say no to the essential recommendations of someone else. This doesn’t mean to stop planning your trips using online recommendations all together, it means that you should choose more deliberately what takes up some of your precious time. The takeaway here is that not everything is for everyone, and there is truly no optimal itinerary. My goal with Table for One is to help in that way, providing you with context that may be missing elsewhere, so that you can be better informed when doing your research and hopefully, realize that you don’t need to do it all when it comes to travel.