Packing Cubes

I have to do a lot of business travel and often enough it is the kind of multi-stop trips that have you packing and unpacking every night as you make your way to a different hotel in a different city.

When you’re young business travel is fun. It’s one of those things that tell you’re progressing in your career and it usually involves flying on planes, staying in hotels and eating in restaurants – all of which can be enjoyable, especially if you haven’t done a lot of it. As you get older – business travel tends to lose its appeal. At some point you’ve done enough of it to notice that flying is generally boring, stressful or uncomfortable (and sometimes all three), hotels are noisy, and nice restaurant meals are not as frequent on these trips as are calorie-laden fast food options that are eaten while running from one appointment to the next. Still – a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do and if your job involves travel there are multiple strategies you can use to make the process less of a grind. One of my favorites is to use packing cubes.

Packing well for business trips has many aspects to it – but my best tip for staying organized is to use several packing cubes inside your suitcase. There are a range of brands out there – I personally find the Eagle Creek ones to be well up to the task of repeated trips. I use a half cube or quarter cube for my “casual” items that I don’t worry about getting wrinkled (underwear, exercise gear, pantyhose, my sleep t-shirt) and the pack-it folders for my actual business clothes. The advantage of the pack-it folders is that they have this board that you use to fold your clothes as you pack them so that everything folds down to being the same size, takes up less space in your bag, and doesn’t get as wrinkled (depending on what you packed you may still have to do some ironing but it certainly reduces the amount.)

I use the packing cubes and folders even for overnight trips because it actually makes packing easier and keeps everything in better condition in your bag but they really come into play on those multi-night trips. There I pack just one or two day’s outfits into each folder – which means I only have to unpack my “casual” cube and that day’s folder in any given hotel and everything else can stay undisturbed in my bag.  It really works well. Makes you think about what you are going to wear each day in advance – so no chance for “wardrobe stress” while on the road and means you are dealing with less unpacking and packing as you go, which for me also adds up to less chance of leaving something behind. And I hate to admit how much more often I do that as I get older and more forgetful……!