Summer’s fully here and that means that a lot of us will begin to travel. I love to travel. I’ve had the good fortune of traveling to over 40 countries around the world. And over and over again, I’ve noticed something that’s kind of upsetting. Specifically with summer, it just passes by in a blur. All those incredible experiences slowly become fuzzy and incredible moments are quickly forgotten. But over the years, I’ve developed a way to get a lot more out of my travel. Hi, I’m Ryder, creator of the bullet journal method, and today I want to share five tips with you to get the most out of your travel. How? Using one of these. Now, this isn’t what you think it is. Yes, it is a bullet journal, but forget about all the productivity stuff for a moment. I see this more of as a time machine. But rather than helping you travel to the future or the past, what it can really do is help you drastically increase the value of the present. And nowhere is this more true than avoiding the first major pitfall that can totally ruin your vacation. Let’s begin there. One thing that I’ve learned that separates a good trip from a bad trip is an intention. What are you traveling for? This might seem like an odd question, but I found that it’s often really not clear until after the fact when it’s too late. For example, there’s a major distinction between travel and vacation. If you’ve ever tried to go on vacation with somebody who wants to travel, chances are you guys have a lot of problems. You want to relax and they want to go see stuff. So, you have conflicting intentions, which often results in you having even more stress. Maybe you were the one who wanted to go on all these exciting adventures only to find that the person or people that you’re traveling with do not. they want to be on vacation. So, you end up going on all these adventures alone, which is not exciting at all. Setting an intention before you travel with someone can be a powerful way to align on what it is that you’re traveling for. Of course, it’s fine to have different intentions, but that should be made clear upfront, not when you get there. This is not only true for traveling with others. This is also true when you travel by yourself. Maybe the vacationer in you booked the tickets to get some downtime, yet the traveler in you sets the agenda. Without a clear intention for your trip, you can unintentionally end up feeling unsatisfied or overwhelmed. Sometimes even both. Now, to be clear, setting an intention for your trip is not the same thing as a plan. It’s to decide who you want to be on this trip, which can help you navigate the many inevitable decisions that you will have to make while you’re planning and while you’re there. For example, I went on a trip recently where I hadn’t set an intention. I got busy and I forgot and the trip started to get more and more and more stressful. So, I sat down and I set the intention, I will not stress myself out. So, anytime I ran into a choice, I would always choose that which would be less likely to stress me out. Now, this may sound lame, but I can’t tell you how quickly it let me and my partner align on countless choices that travel inevitably entails. Planning a trip can be really overwhelming, especially if you’re going somewhere very unfamiliar. Any place on Earth can take a lifetime to explore. So, how can you possibly narrow it down? Again, this is where our intention can be really practical as a tool. For example, if my intention had been, I want to be surprised, I wouldn’t have made a lot of plans. I’ve actually done this in the past, but in my experience, making zero plans often ends up being far more stressful than exciting. With my intention of not stressing myself out, I know that I have to make a plan. My intentions can also help me filter my search. I simply look for activities that align with my intention. For example, recently I went to Madera in Portugal. It’s an incredibly beautiful place with countless activities that are available. Of the things to do, hiking and visiting natural wonders quickly stood out. Why? Because I love those things and they don’t stress me out. If anything, I find those things both inspiring and calming. So, all I had to do was find which hikes and which areas met my personal criteria. It helped me quickly filter down what it is that I wanted to actually do and see. As I’m searching for those places, I’m taking notes in my notebook for reference in a custom collection in my bullet journal. This often starts off super sloppy. Maybe just writing down names of places, mind map, all that stuff. But as I start to zero in on the things that stand out, it begins to take shape. Once I’ve written down a bunch of stuff, then I start looking at the calendar, putting these things together. If I’ve written down 40 things and I have four days, I need to begin to edit. How do I edit? Again, using my intention as a filter. If I don’t want to stress myself out, one or two things I can do a day or every other day that seems really exciting. And just by doing that, it quickly starts to result in a loose itinerary. Now, with that itinerary in place, I can start to see if it aligns with my intention. And if it does, great. And if not, I just adjust. So, all of a sudden, I create a plan that really aligns with what I want from this travel. As I mentioned, BuJo is often seen as a productivity system, and that’s what I use it for as well. When I go on vacation, though, I get to leverage one of the most powerful features of BuJo, its flexibility. The beauty of this methodology is that it can adapt to new circumstances, but only if you allow it to. For me, I don’t want to bring my productivity tool to the beach, to the forest, to the mountain. No, the whole point of travel is to get away from all of that. One of my favorite things about travel is that I get to experience new things and to have new thoughts. So, I need a tool that is focused on helping me capture, explore, and savor those things. Technically, how does this work? Often it simply boils down to a choice to replace my to-do lists with observations and reflections. It’s not about creating something from scratch. It’s usually really leaning in to a different part of the methodology. If you want to learn more about that, I’ll leave a link below. Now, this may seem obvious, but granting yourself permission to change your focus from doing to being is a really powerful exercise that can help you become far more present regardless of where you are. Ultimately, that’s really what elevates the quality of our time, a conscious choice. It is, however, a choice that we often forget to make in the rush of getting places. The best souvenirs are the ones that we carry home inside of us. They’re the lessons you learn about the world, its people, and about yourself. A strange place can be a powerful mirror into the self. What remains of the old when you’re in a new place? What new ideas or realizations are born when you stand in the shadow of ancient ruins? One of my favorite sayings is that we don’t learn from experience. We learn by reflecting on experience. When I’m traveling traveling, I can see a lot of things in a day and a few of those days back to back and it all becomes a blur. Taking the time to actually make a few notes at the end of the day or first thing in the morning can be a great way to honor each and every experience, to separate them, to savor them, to explore them a little bit longer. What did they feel like? What did they make you think? What did they inspire inside of you? This is also true when you’re traveling with people that you’ve known for a really long time. What did this new environment bring out in them? Though long form journaling can be a great way to unpack experiences, it can also take a lot of time. Time that you may not have, especially if you’re moving around a lot. So, I found that simply by jotting down a few sentences, it’s enough to anchor our thoughts, our feelings in time. to see how you can do that through a technique I call rapid logging. I’ll leave a link in the video below. Once you’ve written down your thoughts and your feelings, you now have a record that you can come back to over and over again. You can either unpack those records at home when you have more time or simply revisit them like an old friend and enjoy its company long after the trip is over. Years from now, when you’re looking back on your life, what do you want to see? a blur of forgotten weekends or a collection of adventures that shaped who you became. Growing up, I was captivated by those legendary metal remoa suitcases. You know the ones covered in stickers from around the world. Each sticker told story. Each one was proof that someone had been there, done that, lived that moment. I started collecting stickers from everywhere I travel, covering my notebook like those iconic suitcases. It’s become more than a hobby. It’s become a ritual. And here’s why I think it’s powerful. First, stickers are cheap and weightless and are worth a thousand words. So much data in something so small. Second, hunting for the perfect sticker becomes a mission that takes you to places you’d never otherwise discover. That tiny shop, that hidden corner, that local artist. Third, these stickers become instant time machines on my shelf. Each one of these bullet journals is another volume in the story of my life. In my life library, each spine tells a story. Each sticker is a portal back to that moment, that feeling, that version of myself. When I see the cherry blossom sticker from Kyoto, I’m instantly back under those trees. The vintage surf sticker from Bali. I can feel the black volcanic sand under my feet. Let me leave you with a question. All these notebooks, all these records, they aren’t just travel journals. They’re proof that you showed up, that you lived intentionally, that you created opportunities to see both the beauty and the complexity of the world. These are the stories of your life. The question is, do you want to remember them?