If you travel frequently for work or pleasure, you know how complicated traveling can be. Negotiating better ticket prices, finding the right dates, staying comfortable throughout your travels, packing what you need, and seeing the right sights can all be challenging. But fortunately, if you have the right habits in place, your life as a traveler can get a whole lot easier.

The Best Habits to Establish

Habits are powerful because they allow you to employ best practices consistently and intuitively. If you can apply these lifestyle changes and approaches to your daily life, you’ll find travel to be much simpler (and much more enjoyable):

1. Organize your documentation. No matter where you’re planning on traveling in the future, you’ll need some kind of documentation to help you do it. These include things like your photo ID, your passport, and secondary forms of identification like a birth certificate or social security card. You’ll also want to keep your credit cards and other important items together with these documents. Having all these documents organized and easy to find, yet well-protected, is essential if you want to pack and be ready to go faster.
2. Be ready with travel essentials. It’s also helpful to have travel-ready items, such as travel-sized toiletries and bags, handy for when you’re ready to leave. Ben Lido attempts to make this process easier, delivering a batch of travel items to your door at regular intervals, so you never have to make a last-minute run to the travel section of your local supermarket again. You could also collect travel-sized items after buying them in bulk.
3. Pack early (or always have a pack ready). It’s another good habit to pack as early as possible, especially for your longer trips. Having one bag full of clothes and non-daily essentials for travel can put your mind at ease the day before a big trip; you’ll only have to focus on packing a carry-on with your daily essentials. If you travel often enough, you can keep one of your bags in constant circulation, ready to go at a moment’s notice.
4. Keep an eye on prices. If you aren’t sure where your next destination is going to be, or when the urge to travel is going to strike you, keep an eye out for deals. Sites like Travelocity and Travelzoo offer inexpensive package deals based on hotel and flight availability, and sometimes have deeply discounted packages available for those willing to pull the trigger. Getting into a routine with this will ensure you never miss a valuable package to a destination you’ve always dreamed of visiting.
5. Sleep as consistently as possible. Jet lag is real and can wreak havoc on your mind and body if you aren’t careful. Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do to avoid the onset of this sleep-disrupting condition, but you can mitigate its effects by getting into a consistent, healthy sleep schedule. Not only will this help you catch up on sleep faster after a round of travel, it will ensure you start your journey without accumulated sleep debt—and the effects of jet lag will be lessened.
6. Have a network of house-sitters on standby. If you own a home or have pets, one of your top concerns may be leaving your house unattended for a period of That’s why it’s helpful to build up and maintain a roster of people willing to watch your pets and/or housesit. You can start by asking friends, neighbors, or family members to be on call, but it never hurts to scout for people on networks like Rover or MindMyHouse. That way, you always have someone to contact, and you’ll never be caught off guard.
7. Limit your reliance on smartphones. With a smartphone available at all times, it’s easy to get into bad habits like constantly checking your social media feeds for news or taking photos of everything you come across. However, when you’re traveling, these habits have negative consequences. Taking photos of a moment will decrease your ability to remember that momentlater on, compromising the memories you form during your visit, and of course, glancing at your phone all the time will take away from the experience of a new location and new people to interact with. The more consistently you resist this temptation in your daily life, the weaker the temptation will be when you’re on vacation.

Striving for Consistency

The secret to all these habits is, of course, making them stick consistently. Engaging in one of these behaviors once or twice before a trip might be helpful, but they won’t make you a more efficient or a happier traveler all-around. Start incorporating these changes gradually, and use automated reminders to stay on top of them. You’ll thank yourself on your next successful work trip or vacation.