I previously alluded to the difficulties of maintaining productivity while traveling, and namely, the importance of focusing on your goals and reasons for traveling in a previous post.
I want to explain deeper the importance of maintaining daily rituals and routines while traveling. Something that has become evident during my very disparate and different last 5 weeks.
Going through the day without rituals or systems to fall back on is akin to navigating the open waters without a compass. (I guess, as I’ve never actually done that).. But the important point here is that without daily direction, travel days can feel more like vacation as all outside stimuli is different and internally we don’t have a dedicated goal to acheive for that day.
I found myself continuously wrestling with this fact daily over the past month. Since leaving my daily routines and rituals in Medellin, Colombia I’ve traveled to:
- Palermo, Colombia (4 days)
- Cali, Colombia (3 days)
- Cusco, Peru (6 days)
- Agua Calientes – Machu Picchu (1 day)
- Puno, Peru (1 day)
- La Paz, Bolivia (2 days)
- Cochabamba, Bolivia (3 days)
- Sucre, Bolivia (3 days)
- Uyuni, Bolivia (3 days)
- San Pedro de Atacama, Chile (1 day)
- Santiago, Chile (9 days)
- Valparaiso, Chile (3 days)
And now I am here in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A place I am staying in for 3 weeks. Visiting 12 cities over 40 days seriously stressed my new habits of being productive in the morning with daily priming and developing what my HLAs were for the day. The biggest advantage we have in our normal lives is routine. Once you establish a routine it’s reliant on you to exercise that routine daily to build strength in that habit. To the point that with little thought you go and complete this (i.e. go to the gym, meditate upon waking up, make healthy eating decisions).
For me, this past month was exceedingly hard to maintain routines for body, mind, and soul as my outer scenarios were constantly changing and the will to explore new areas outweighed the will to focus on internal growth. In life we are always going to have external changes that make us think it is okay to acquiesce our internal will just this one time, because externally things are different. But this is how exceptions become the norm, become our routine, become our life. And most external influences all have a certain accountability factor (friends, family, events, work, obligations), whereas staying true to your internal goals relies solely on you. And often, we choose to sacrifice internal commitments to appease external one’s. This has become exceptionally obvious to me as I’ve begun to travel. Living in NYC, I was willing to compromise internal long term personal growth for external instant gratification.
This is why the concept of personal growth is so hard for many of us to obtain. Because it is distant, abstract, and often undefined. Whereas going out tonight with friends is near, defined, and instant in providing us satisfaction. Traveling provides context into this as most external influences are muted or lessened in their importance. I don’t know people in the cities I visit and thus am less inclined to seek their approval or avoid their dissatisfaction when I don’t go out or socialize. Meaning I have the ability to focus on my more abstract personal growth goals.
But why then, with much less external social pressures, is it hard to be productive when traveling? This harps back to my point on personal growth usually being three things: distant, abstract, undefined. How do you then take a concept like that and apply it daily? For me daily priming has helped to provide this, but continually being in an entirely new city has brought about the need to explore it thoroughly at the expense of my long term growth.
If anything, this last month has taught me life is ripe with distractions, even in a city where I know nobody, I can find reason to not be productive. So running away from your current life won’t necessarily solve any of your existing problems. I like the quote, ‘win from within’, because if there’s internal alignment on what I want to achieve and who I want to become, each day’s goals become much more concrete and achievable.