Retirement Travel School: How to Organize Travel Documents | Monday.com Digital Planner

welcome to travel school today is the first lesson and we are starting with the Cornerstone of our travel planning process a colorful digital spreadsheet system that allows us to keep hundreds of details at our fingertips while we travel weekly around the world I'm going to teach you how to use monday.com walk you through the setup and explain why this system is the perfect trip planning spreadsheet for us and it's all free so stay tuned we're J and Bev and we are the retirement Travelers if you're just joining us we are senior travel bloggers who are traveling full-time around the world today's video is the first in a series of travel lessons where we share with you our knowledge and experience to help you become a better traveler when we first started traveling we would have loved hearing the thoughts of people who are doing this daily and so that is why we're here to give you some insight into our methods we will be posting all of these videos on our website retirement travelers.com so go there and check out the entire series because this is the first it will take us a few months to get through all the questions that we get asked so check back often if you're wondering where we are in the world as we travel you can follow along with us on Instagram we keep it updated to our current location if you find this information helpful please share it with your friends on Facebook we're trying to grow our audience of travel Enthusiast and we want to build our community so hit subscribe and come along when we began traveling full-time we were determined to leave our binder of papers behind and embrace a digital planning system back then we used two programs tripet and Microsoft's one note unfortunately neither system met all of our needs and once we hit the road we quickly learned that we were lacking in organization and we needed something that could easily be accessed at a moment's notice we needed something that wouldn't clog up our calendar with un necessary information we wanted one fully customizable system that was easy to learn easy to read and easy to manage so picture this you land at a foreign country you don't speak the language you don't know what to expect and you walk up to the immigration counter after getting off of the plane they ask you a series of questions like like you know what is the address of the accommodation where you're staying do you have an exit ticket what is the flight number how many days are you planning to stay these are just a few of the questions that we get asked mind you if you're going on you know One Vacation a year these details might be easy to fetch but if you're like us and you're traveling for months at a time you have many details that were planned months before and you know they're not front and center in your mind or even front andent Center in your inbox imagine what it's like to plan one week of travel and then multiply it by 52 what happened to us when we first went abroad is that we were in a constant state of panic wondering if we could retrieve all of the details at a moment's notice there were a few times when we had an email but whose email did it go to who made the reservation was it on tripet was it in one note was it buried deep into one of our inboxes we quickly learned that we needed up our game and make our lives easier with John's engineering and management background he was the master at EXL but I hated it it was dull to look at and cumbersome to learn I've always been the organizer in the family and we lived in a very organized space in our former home I'm just happier if I know where things are I like systems and I really like visual systems that are colorcoded I don't remember how I came across cross monday.com but I made myself learn it at least enough to get me started so today I'm going to walk you through the setup and show you how I set up my boards to organize our travel life it might seem like a lot of work getting started but I can assure you it is worth the effort to do it really isn't hard first let me give you some background information on monday.com now this is a workflow management software that is used by companies to track prod projects across an entire organization let's say a team is collaborating on a project everyone in the team can see the status of the project track deadlines and communicate through the platform to see a project through to completion it does so much more than what I need or want but it's there if you want to figure out more aspects than I'm showing you there are tutorials online that can help there are several paid versions or levels depending on your needs but they also are offer a free version we pay to level up because we use it for project management on Pinterest and our website but for most Travelers the free version is perfect they allow two people to collaborate on one account so it's perfect for a couple another great feature is that monday.com has a phone app and when you create a board on your tablet or computer you can see it on your phone as well we love that we have details in both places so let's get started first you want to create an account after you create an account you're taken to your workspace or your board here you will see two groups a blue and a purple group and Below there is an option where you can add another group or as many groups as you want uh you'll see over to the left there is a main workspace the title right now says start from scratch and you'll see it listed here to the right there's a button with my initials you can add your picture if you'd like and and there are several options if you click on it the most important thing you need to know right now is to the right there is a tab that says invite members now this is where you can invite your partner or your spouse to work on a board with you the first thing we're going to do is replace the title and I call it travel details you'll see this under the uh tab to the left once I hit uh return you'll see it change to travel details Down Below in the groups we're going to rename these I usually start with a date so I'll put 2024 uh Europe summer and that kind of helps me know when I glance which group of um travel we're working with so I'll change this one to 2024 Asia fall and uh then I'll go ahead and I'll create another board below it and we'll call it 2024 Christmas break now after I've done this I will um usually readjust the colors uh you can choose any color you'd like you just click back on it you'll see the little Tab and you you're given a lot of options and the color coding just really helps you keep it all organized here we'll make this one dark green for Christmas now as you look to the right uh these tabs you can do anything you want in all of these columns but you have to pick what kind of column you're creating for me I usually just start out by deleting what they have so we're going to clean this board up and we are going to start fresh just click on the three dots and you delete it so the next thing we're going to do is to recreate our columns let's see let's close that out and we're going to add in a date column a status column and a text column so let's go in at the items and let's rename these so let's say we are going to Europe in the summer let's start with Italy and then we'll go to France and then we'll go to Spain if we come over to the date we open it up and it will pull up a calendar going in June and let's start on the 6th the 13th and then we will click on June the 20th now if you'll notice here this is a column summary at the bottom I hate these so I'm going to open up settings and I'm going to come down to hide column summary and it's gone away if you'll notice on the status bar it also has that so let's go over to settings hide column summary and let's just get that rid of that as well so we're going to rename this hotel we're going to come over to our text box and we're going to rename it as well Hotel so let's start with the um status column if you click on it you can edit the labels the first label that I always start with is a done which is already Nam that um I'm going to make it dark green the next one is working on it I like it bright yellow and we are going to change the last one to Todo I always like this one to be be bright pink just shows up well on my board now you can also add another label and we're going to make one that's called non-applicable I usually make this purple and you can just grab it to the left and you can rearrange these put them in any order you want I usually like the to-do to be at the top so let's shift that up and there are my columns my statuses so I know that I'm going to need a hotel for Italy I'm going to need a hotel for France and a hotel for Spain now this is where the text goes and this is where I usually put the hotel chain or wherever I have the booking now to the right I'm going to create another column and I'll make this another text column we're going to call it transportation now I want to create another status bar but since this one's already formatted I can go over to the three dots and I can say duplicate and add it to the right so here it is I'm going to grab it and I'm going to reposition it whoops went a little too far there going to bring it back over so that my status is in front I'm going to rename this one transportation here I can click on it I know that I'm going to need transportation to get to every one of these places so I'm going to click too to the right I'm going to add another column we usually have one called car rental we rarely rent cars but this just helps us to remember that we do have to do it so we create one there and I will create another one called activities so this is if we're going to do an Excursion or I know I need to get tickets for something then I will um put that one in I'll go over here to Transportation I'll duplicate it again and I will grab it and move it over change the title to Car Rental and then I'll do it one more time duplicate it and then grab it and move it over let me change the title to activities and then let me grab it and move it over as well oops went a little too far again and there it is so car rentals let's say uh we are not going to get a car Ral in Italy but we're going to get one in France and we are not going to get one in Spain now activities I usually just fill these in with working on it because that's some research that I'm going to have to do at a later time so that's what the board looks like you can go through and just work all of the boards just like this and you can kind of keep track of where you're at in your planning state so let's say we book a hotel I usually um you know keep the booking and say we're doing a Booking.com or we're doing a Hyatt Hotel and I know where my reservation is so I put it there and that's the confirmation number once I get it made I put the confirmation number in here with my title so let's say we have a booking here we're going to do another Hiatt and we put on confirmation I'll do the same thing with uh Transportation I'll put the airline and then I'll put our the six-digit code for our reservation and that's how I do that I continue on with a car rental and with activities anything I want to put in here but it is only text now once I make the reservation and I have gone into um H it or whatever I'm going to do I click over here to this column and I can add notes so here I'm writing a note to myself booked a hotel near the airport because we are arriving late I can go to my computer where I have saved my confirmation and I can add it in once it's uploaded there it is I click update and it's there now this is also located on my phone in the app so I love that let's say I'm GNA add a map I've taken a screenshot of a map I've put it here we're actually in New Deli right now so this is a new Deli map but I add it in I can click update and there is the map let's say I want to um go over to the retirement Travelers website and we want to put in a blog post for CH in Italy let's make a copy of it and uh click on the link all right best blog post for Tran so what we really love about monday.com is that we can keep as many notes as we want here uh this has saved us so many times by making making ourselves notes as we try as we're planning because like I said it's sometimes months later 6 months 9 months or later that we will come across what we did and we will need to have information on it so we love this and like I said it goes to your app now if you look up to the uh over to the left you can create a new board uh we keep a board called Flights and uh we just like knowing all of the details of our flights how long we're going to be and a layover how long the flight is where it goes what the flight number is everything you want and you can create another board so we usually have a board called Flights like I said before we also have boards for our Pinterest um organization so be sure you follow us on Pinterest uh but you can see that you can create as many boards as you want uh you can just change the title you can set these up every board doesn't have to be the same as far as the columns go you just find a column that fits your needs if you go into monday.com you can look around and see what kind of columns they have you can create all kinds of things this is an awesome setup and an awesome system you can see above where it says see plans if you click on that you can see that there are different levels what I want you to know here is that the free plan button is right here and after 14 days of your trial you can go in and you can select a paid version or you can select the free but you have to click there to um maintain the free plan so that's how I set up my boards and keep our details organized like I said this system can do a lot of things that I don't need but it's a great travel system for us next week we'll cover setting up a travel budget we'll talk about what we consider when we plan our travels and how it impacts our cost so stay tuned for that and we'll see you next week be sure to hit subscribe and follow along on our retirement Journey around the world

Channel: Retirement Travelers

Views: 28,809

Keywords: travel planning, organize travel documents, organize travel, travel school, digital travel planner, trip planning, organizing travel details, monday.com tutorial for beginners, digital organizers for travel, organize travel details, how to use monday.com for travel planning, how to organize travel documents using Monday.com, what is a better system for organizing travel details, monday.com tutorial for organizing travel plans, john and bev martin, monday.com, plan a trip

Id: 31rS0YcDvL4

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 13 2024