It’s almost summer (at the time of publication) and for my family that means ROAD TRIP!
I love scanning the scenery, but also feel like to occupy my time while I’m the passenger. So in today’s episode, I’m sharing with you my top 10 ways to keep yourself productive in your business and entertained while on the road.
These tips will help you declutter your digital life, brainstorm content ideas, and even plan the future of your online business or side hustle.
If you have a summer roadtrip planned, give one of these ideas a try!
Let’s connect on Instagram! I’m @melyssamunday and @mamasmakingmore.
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Fun fact about me: I love road trips! Over the last couple summers, my family has driven through a few states and stopped at fun places along the way. My five kids are pretty satisfied to have their headphones on and zone out on their phones (no complaints about that here). My husband is a great driver and navigator. That would leave me twiddling my thumbs while we are driving through less than exciting areas…except that, as a small business (or side hustle) owner, I like to incorporate some business and some personal productivity into my roadtrips.
10 ways to keep yourself busy and productive on the road
1. Digital declutter of your email inbox
This one is instantly satisfying! Delete any unwanted emails, and put the ones you want to save into folders. You can do this for your business and personal emails. See how low you can get your inbox! My goal is always to have an empty inbox.
2. Delete unneeded photos off your phone
Truth time: I have like 13,000 photos on my phone. I’m absolutely certain that there are at least 73 photos of the inside of my purse, 45 screenshots of order confirmations, and one poorly-lit selfie that I could delete from my phone right now. When I’m on a road trip, I finally have the time to go through my photos and delete the ones I no longer need.
3. Send an email to your clients and superfans
Drop them a line thanking them for their continued support. Who doesn’t love an unexpected thank you in their email inbox? Plus, this road trip tip helps to keep you top-of-mind with your clients – always a good thing!
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4. Sort through your Facebook and Instagram saved posts
Organize them into relevant folders and delete any you aren’t sure about. I always find a few saved posts in my folder that confuse me. Did I really mean to save a video about “how to start your own tiny animal ranch”? It’s a cute idea, but I’m relatively sure I’m not ever going to need that information.
5. Brainstorm content ideas
Nothing like some quiet time for brainstorming! I like to start my content process by thinking about the things I wish existed when I was starting my online business. Filling in knowledge gaps is a great way to think up content, and the passenger seat is a great place to get started.
6. Outline ideas for new offers
Hello, notes app! It’s your time to shine. Dump every single idea you’ve ever had for an offer onto a (digital) piece of paper. Give yourself 5 minutes of no-judgment writing time. Then, go through your list and put an asterisk next to the ideas that stand out. I often see if I can combine any of my ideas into one really strong idea!
7. Research books to add to your “to be read” (TBR) list
These books can be for business or personal reading, or a mix of both! I like to explore Instagram for accounts that post about books, aka “bookstagram”, to see what other people are enjoying.
8. Plan out the near future of your business
Will you be launching anything? Will you be focusing on a certain theme? Will you have a flash sale? Now’s the time to think about your business and let your mind wander. There are so many possibilities!
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9. Watch online courses
Please tell me I’m not the only one who purchased an online course and then…never got around to watching it! This road trip tip is also a bonus for the driver – tell them they can crank up whatever music they’d like, pop your headphones in, and learn!
10. Binge your favorite podcasts
This one is a road trip classic! Save up some episodes of your favorite shows (download them if you’ll have poor reception), and listen together with the driver. My husband and I trade off choosing episodes and shows, which means I’ve learned a lot of interesting things I wouldn’t have otherwise.
There you have it, all ten of my best road trip productivity tips. There’s no better feeling than arriving at your next road trip stop and knowing you were productive along the way! Did I miss any of your favorite road trip productivity tips?
Are we Insta friends?! I LOVE connecting there, voice DMs are super fun! I’m @melyssamunday and @mamasmakingmore.
Episode Transcript
Melyssa [00:00:00]:
Hi. Hello. How are you? Welcome to the Mamas Making More Podcast. I have a fun episode for today because I want to talk about summer vacation. We are entering May at the time of this recording, and to me that is this signifies the kids school winding down and summer vacation approaching. And what I want to talk about today is road trips. I don’t know about you, but my family, we generally take a pretty long road trip every summer.
Melyssa [00:00:35]:
And I’m usually the passenger. My husband is a driver. He likes to just zone out with his music. I have no shame in the fact that I let my kids zone out on whatever they’re doing on their phones, devices they get to put their headphones on. They’re not arguing. They’re just like hand over fists, putting snacks and junk in their faces. But that’s totally fine with me. I always joke with them that when we are going through an area that’s like scenic or something unique and I want them to pay attention to it, I’m like, okay, headphones off, let’s look at these great United States.
Melyssa [00:01:11]:
And they always roll their eyes, but they do love it as well. The thing about road trips for me though, as much as I like just kind of zoning out and looking at the scenery, I’m just not a person who does really well doing nothing. I’m constantly feeling like I should be doing something while we are driving in these great United States. So I want to share with you, I have my top ten ways of being productive while you’re a passenger in a road trip. Now, feel free if you are someone who likes to just zone out and not do something like this. I’m not judging you, that is totally fine. But if you kind of have that personality where you feel like you need to keep yourself busy and you don’t want to just sit there twiddling your thumbs while you’re watching the great scenery, these are ten ideas where you can be productive and get some stuff done on your business and occupy your time a little bit. So I’m just going to jump right in.
Melyssa [00:02:13]:
Most of the ten tips that I have do require some sort of cell signal and your phone. I suppose you could do it on a tablet. Actually doing it on a tablet would probably save my eyes a lot. There are a couple that are just notebook type of things. So anyways, just wanted to give you that little brief caveat. So number one is to do a digital declutter of your email inbox. I know I’m totally guilty of getting really lazy and not deleting things out of my email inbox and then not having an inbox zero, which is always like a great goal to have. So you can really go through those.
Melyssa [00:02:51]:
You can delete them, you could put them in folders. You can just spend some time organizing and see if you can get close to that email inbox zero. It’s a great feeling for me. Maybe it is for you, but really just to go through and do a lot of deleting of unneeded emails is a great way to spend some time there. Number two, delete your unneeded photos off your phone. I’m not even going to tell you how many photos that I have on my phone right now. It is an embarrassing number. It is in the five figures, but that’s me.
Melyssa [00:03:26]:
I definitely should do this on a road trip. Whatever road trip we have coming up this summer, a lot of it is just screenshots, a lot of it is things that videos that I’ve taken that I don’t need anymore, duplicates, whatever. So just going through and really purging it. It doesn’t take a lot of brain space to do that. It’s kind of mindless. You could pick it up as you go. You can stop doing it and look out at your road trip scenery and you can free up that space on your phone and just pare down the number of photos that are on your phone for whatever you’re going to be doing. If you’re going to be offloading all of them and organizing them in some sort of system, it’s just a great thing to mindlessly do while you’re on a road trip.
Melyssa [00:04:07]:
My number three tip is to send an email to some of your clients or your superfans. I don’t know about you. I know as a kid I really enjoyed getting actual mail and now I get so many emails in my inbox that are just impersonal and part of subscription list and that’s fine, that’s great, but it’s really rare that I get an actual individual email to me that’s in my business inbox especially. So just think about who are some clients that you are really thankful for or some collaborators that you’re really thankful for. Anybody in your life, in your business that’s just been really supportive of you. Just send them an email and tell them it’s the perfect time to just it doesn’t have to be long. Involve whatever, just say like, hey, I’m just thinking of you, I always appreciate your support, hope you’re having a great summer. Something as simple as that could mean the world to the person who’s receiving that email.
Melyssa [00:05:02]:
The number four tip I have when you’re on a road trip is to sort through especially your Facebook and your Instagram saved post. I will go through when I’m scrolling and I’ll save posts because maybe it’s something that I want to look into later or I want to remember something about it. Or maybe it’s a social media post that I really like and I’d like to do something similar, not copy but use as kind of a springboard. Or maybe they’ve shared a tip from Canva or a tip for Instagram stories. So different things. I do that but then I don’t sort through them and I don’t go through them again and I don’t delete the ones I don’t need anymore. And I tend to not organize them into folders so that I know what it is when I want to go back and look for them. So another great thing to kind of just mindlessly do is look at something, oh, is this the tip that you still need or is this a tip that you already know about and you don’t need that.
Melyssa [00:06:04]:
So just really sorting through those so it’s not messy and it can give you some great ideas that maybe you forgot about. All right, number five is to brainstorm your content ideas. This can be on your Phone’s Notes app. This can be on good old paper however you want to brainstorm it, but just really dump any of those content ideas that you have out there. Anything that you’ve been thinking about, anything that you just want to get down on paper or that app, just so you can remember what it is. When you go back and you’re at your desk and you need some of those content ideas you’ll have this whole bank. You’re essentially creating a bank of ideas while you’re sitting there on your road trip. Number six is a similar idea, and that is to outline ideas for offers that you want to have, whether it’s in the next quarter, the next year, whatever the time frame is, any sort of ideas again on your phone app or Phone Notes app or on a piece of paper.
Melyssa [00:07:07]:
Just really outline the ideas of what offers you might potentially be having to launch in the near future. Anything. Just no judgment. Just writing it out, whether it’s something that you actually do or not. Just getting those all down on paper again. After, when you’re back in your office in that actual work mode where you’re super activated, then you can go back through those and see what is something that’s coming up that you’re going to launch soon, what’s something that you’re going to put on your back burner. It’s just great to have those ideas organized and in a specific place. Now number seven is kind of a fun one and it can be business related or personal related.
Melyssa [00:07:55]:
Go through and add any books that you want to read if you’re anything like me. I love reading books. I love reading fiction, I love reading biographies, and I love reading business type of books. The inspirational, the mindset, personal development. And a lot of times I will just spend some time researching what’s out there, who’s written something lately. So you can spend a little time just scrolling through something like Amazon or Goodreads, wherever it is that you get ideas for books and just flag some that you think you might want to read throughout the summer or the year to come. Another good place to find these is if you follow like bookstagrammers on Instagram that’s always fun, too, to see what other people are reading and enjoying. So just create a list.
Melyssa [00:08:39]:
Like I said, it could be your personal list, your business list, both of them. Just kind of get that down so that you do have some books to be looking forward to. Number eight is to do some rough outlining of the future of your business. Not like the ten year future, but the near future, the next couple of quarters, maybe the next calendar year. What are some things that you want to launch? What are some themes that you want to focus on? If you have monthly themes in your business, what are some of the themes that are coming up? Are you going to have any flash sales? Just outline what’s coming up and just don’t let yourself feel like you have to be tied to it. Just, again, get it down on paper. And when you’re back in your office, when you’re out of vacation mode, you can pull it out and you can start calendaring some of those things that you came up with. Number nine is to watch some of those online courses.
Melyssa [00:09:37]:
Maybe you have an online course that you just watched through real fast and you didn’t really take notes and you were like, I need to come back to this and really spend some time on it. You could totally watch a course like that. Maybe you have a few courses that you haven’t watched that are on your to be watched list, and it’s the perfect time to just put in your earbuds and watch some of those online courses, take some notes on them and just get caught up on those things that you’ve been wanting to learn about but really didn’t feel like you had the time to do when you were in your office or sitting at your desk or whatever the reason is. It’s just a great opportunity. I know that not only on road trips, but often when we travel for one of my son, he has a travel soccer team. When we’re traveling longer times to go to some of his games, I’ll definitely pop in the airbuds and listen to some online courses. It just really gets those creative juices flowing and I love to learn. If you love to learn, this is a great time to watch some of those courses.
Melyssa [00:10:37]:
My number ten is to binge your favorite podcast. This is just such a classic road trip thing. You can listen to multiple episodes of the same podcast. You can skip around things that you wanted to catch up on, or maybe you want everyone to be together on that road trip for a little bit. So maybe find a family podcast that you all enjoy and you can listen to it all together. Okay, so that’s a wrap on my ten tips for things that you can do to feel a little bit more productive while you’re on a road trip. I would love to know if any of these are ideas that you’re going to incorporate into your summer travel plans or if you have something that I didn’t mention. Send me a DM.
Melyssa [00:11:20]:
I am on Instagram @melyssamunday or @mamasmakingmore. Let me know what I should add to this list, and maybe it’s something that I’ll add into rotation when I’m on one of my road trips. Okay. I hope this gave you some inspiration to be a little bit more productive on your road this summer. And that’s all I have for this episode. I will catch you in the next one.