How to organise your travel paperwork
Going on a trip is in my opinion one of the joys of life. I love to travel, and expose myself to different surroundings, people and cultures.
When we travel we however do not escape the need to be organised. In fact, when you travel there is even more need to be organised because things can and do go wrong. Organising for example your travel paperwork can help you immensely before, during and after the trip.
Organising paperwork is a big topic - we are only talking about travel paperwork here
Here is a list of things to do to ONLY organise your trip paperwork when you are in a rush to leave soon.
I am taking some short cuts in terms of long term filing, naming conventions, tagging etc. which I normally would not do. The nature of travel paperwork however is that it has short life span, so you can get away with organising it “good enough” aka you know where to find it in a rush.
Print important travel documentation like tickets, insurance, the accommodation you are staying and any things you have prepaid already.
Put these printouts in a “travel” plastic sleeve (I like to use the firmer ones, they are around $2,- dollars from office works)
And put your items on chronological order, this way when you need any travel paperwork simply go to your travel folder which you should always have on you.
In regards to emails I normally file every email I have attended to in a folder called FILE (it is easy to search and stops your inbox from clogging up). In your case I would create a folder called TRIP TO ##
Then simply move all your trip information to this one folder (Change the name for your next trip so you will only ever have 1 email folder for travel).
When you are done with your trip transfer this folder to FILE (you most likely will never need any information besides the insurance).
When you have more time I would take this opportunity to set up your overall file system. My book how to organise your home and paperwork, part 3 starting talks about paperwork and how to set this up for life.
Note: If some of this is tricky with the technology talk to any 14+ year old in your life and get them to follow these instructions. This is what I do and in some cases it saves me hours!
Do you like this post?
You’ll love the book “How to organise your home and paperwork”. I’ll explain the Essence of Clarity organising system which will help you breakdown decluttering and organising in simple and manageable steps. If you want to go a step further have a look at the paperwork course.
