Continuing with the theme of how we plan trips, and the actual planning for an upcoming Europe trip, I added our second stop to the sketchbook which I will take with me on the trip.

Last week I wrote that I use the Notes app on my iPad for trip planning. It is more than just a planning tool, it becomes the main tool I use when actually traveling to access travel details and tickets. The goal is to have one place where you have and can access everything for the trip. I realize many use email folders for this, but when I taught time management seminars I always recommended that there were often better ways to organize, we have all been frustrated by a lost email, or searching for one in vain. I do have a travel folder where I put all travel related emails, yet that is my back up.

Here is a screen shot of a trip we took to Dublin and the south of England. Over the course of the next few weeks I will tell you how I built this, and how it works. The important thing is that I could find anything I needed right from this one page, and no internet connection is required. For non-Apple folks you can do all of this in One Note, Evernote, and I am pretty sure Google. Some folks use spreadsheets, and I get that, but last time I checked, and I will admit I don’t use them often these days, you can not put a hyperlink in a spread sheet cell, and hyperlinks are the magic of this system.

So, more next week.