How to Start

As with so many things in life, the hardest part in trip planning is often starting. Unlimited potential is exciting but also overwhelming. How do we decide what to do? If there’s someplace in the world you’ve always dreamed of going, there’s your easy answer…just do it! But what if there’s a multitude of places you want to go? How to pick just one?! It can feel so overwhelming that you’re unable to make a decision. As described by Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice, having too many choices can actually produce paralysis.

Limits Aren’t Necessarily Limiting

There obviously isn’t just one right answer to the question of how to decide where you want to go. I am going to suggest two possible solutions, but feel free to survey your friends who are frequent travelers as to how they make their decisions.

A Practical Approach

One option is to take a practical approach to deciding where to travel and evaluate your time and money to determine how many days you can afford to travel and how expensive of a location you can fit into your budget. Sometimes defining the limits helps us to clarify our decisions and actually sparks creative answers. For example, if you only have one week available, a trip to Australia from North America probably isn’t the best use of your travel budget since you likely would have to buy an expensive plane ticket and travel for many, many hours to ultimately have only a couple days to enjoy just a tiny piece of a large and diverse country. On the other hand, a week might be an ideal amount of time to travel a relatively short distance from North America to an island in the Caribbean.

Go in the Direction Inspiration Points You

Another method, and my favorite strategy to decide where to go, is to let inspiration strike in a general direction and then start digging deeper from there. For example, if you read a novel that takes place in Italy or watch a murder mystery series that takes place in Finland and something deep inside of you sits up and takes notice with the thought of “that looks interesting,” or if you find yourself wondering what it would be like to walk down a cobblestone street in Dublin, Ireland, then some part of you is already starting to dream of traveling to that location. Alternatively, sometimes the inspiration strikes someone you enjoy spending time with, so that when they ask whether you’re interested in taking a trip to Croatia, you might impulsively answer “yes,” not because you know anything about Croatia (yet) but because you enjoy spending time with that person and know it would be fantastic adventure.

Life is a verb! Life consists of action.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Regardless of how you pick the location, once you have at least a general idea as to where you would like to travel, you can start making general, roughed out plans. I recommend using the same approach of brainstorming that you may or may not have been taught in school — initially write down every idea that pops into your head and avoid censoring yourself until you’ve exhausted your ideas. Then go back and start looking for themes and ideas (places or activities ) that group together. At that point you can also let the practical side of your brain chime in with opinions as to what ideas are affordable, safe, reasonable, and achievable. And at some point, you are going to have to make some hard decisions as to what not to do so you have time for the experiences that are important to you, but we’ll explore that in another post (When Less Is More).

Let yourself dream! Where will your travel dreams take you?