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It’s easy to pack light if you’re traveling alone. You whittle your deodorant into a chapstick tube, buy shoes that you can wear to an important business meeting and also in the shower, and get used to using your scarf as a towel. But if you’re traveling with a family, you probably end up with a mountain of suitcases despite all your individual endeavors, resourcefulness and creativity.

To pack light as a family, you can command your family members to bring one bag only or insist on doing all the packing yourself. These two approaches will lead to conflict and resentment. What’s more, they won’t solve your problems. Your family will never learn to pack light and you will have to fight the same battle year after year, vacation after vacation. 

Instead, you should apply the following time-tested persuasion techniques. Over time, your family will grow into light packers and all n the meantime you will avoid resentment and conflict.

1. Understand your family’s travel goals

Everybody reading this article knows what the greatest joy and ultimate goal of all travel is: washing your underpants with bar soap in the hotel sink at the end of the day. But, believe it or not, your family members will have other goals in mind for your family trip – visiting the Taj Mahal, playing on the beach, dining elegantly in San Juan, meeting new people, etc. To persuade your family to pack light, you must first understand their unique holiday visions and dreams, even if those visions and dreams seem outrageous, impossible and wrong to you. Ask them what their holiday hopes and fears are and listen closely to their responses. Ask follow-up questions.

Similarly, each of your family members – even small children – will have established an elaborate packing strategy, just as you have. It’s not necessarily a strategy that you agree with and maybe it’s not overly viable or realistic. Nevertheless, you won’t get anywhere until you understand this strategy and can discuss it respectfully. 

2. Get the timing right

If you wait until the last minute to pack, you will have a huge family fight and will still end up bringing ten suitcases. Seek out a calm hour or two in the days leading up to the trip. 

If you have a spare room or a bed, leave the contents out in the open for a few hours or days so that everybody can reflect on the things they’re bringing. This might backfire in the short term as your family member thinks of more and more things that she wants to pack. Use the other techniques to make steady progress in diminishing the pile.

3. Lavish each and every packing improvement with praise

Rome was not built in a day and nobody transforms into Jeremy Maluf overnight. Make sure to praise your family member whenever she removes any item from her bag or makes any good packing decision. In this way, step by step, she will grow into an excellent packer. By praising her consistently and sincerely, you will reinforce her progress and she won’t slide back into bad habits. 

4. Respond minimally to bad packing decisions

For bad packing decisions, on the other hand, respond as minimally as possible. Just nod or say “hmm” and continue what you were doing. If you criticize or challenge or complain, you won’t make any progress. Worse, you will cement the bad practice as your family member learns to identify with that bad packing technique. 

In the wise words of Mike Birbiglia: “What I should have said … was nothing.”

5. Introduce incompatibilities

Your family member doesn’t care about packing light. They are thinking about the San Juan dinner, not about overhead compartments. Perhaps you end up doing all the bag-carrying anyways. Why then should they care how heavy the bags are? 

Try to find reasons to pack light that will resonate with your family member and make sense to her. One easy incompatibility is that the airline won’t let you bring a bag that is too big or too heavy. You can also point out that heavy bags will mean that they can’t achieve some holiday ambition, like sightseeing or hiking.

You could also make a rule that each person carries her own luggage but be careful with this. If you are serious about this rule, then you will need to be prepared for embarrassing showdowns at the hotel and train station. To prevail in the showdowns, you must truly be willing to leave the luggage behind, which is wasteful, expensive and embarrassing. It will require a lot of nerve on your part. 

In reality, you will likely abandon the rule mid-vacation. This is the same as not making the rule in the first place. The only difference is that you have additionally demonstrated to your family member that your rules don’t mean anything.

All in all, it’s best to avoid the you-pack-it, you-carry-it ultimatums. You should definitely encourage your kids to carry their own bags and praise them when they do. But don’t be an ogre about it or lock yourself into an untenable position. 

6. Carpet trade

If all else fails, you may be able to buy, trade, wheedle and bribe your way to a lighter bag.

For younger kids, set the parameters by agreeing up front on the bag they will bring. You can then negotiate about the contents but they can’t bring anything that doesn’t fit in the bag. 

For the contents, don’t start with your final position. First, propose just the barest of bare necessities and gradually let yourself be talked into a compromise position. 

You might also focus on one single activity that is important to them – the swimming or the horse-riding or the San Juan dinner. Organize the packing around that one activity and don’t overwhelm them with dozens of different possibilities and scenarios.

In any case, don’t force it. It took you decades to hone your packing skills and, for a few years when your kids are young, you will probably have to travel like a three-ring circus. Try to be content with incremental progress and with what you learn about your family along the way.

The next item in my project to get my life into order is insurance. Like you, I’m a firm insurance-believer and I have various insurance policies that my employer has signed me up for or that I’ve taken out myself. I’m not totally sure what they say or what they cover but it’s nice feeling to have insurance.

My plan for this year was a comprehensive insurance review: what is covered and what is not, plug the big holes, find better and cheaper policies, get to grips with the claims process, etc.

Unfortunately, it turns out that doing all that stuff is a lot of work, so I didn’t bother. Instead, I just downloaded all my key documents and emailed them to myself.

Still, this is some limited progress and I recommend doing it if you are in a similar situation. At least I have my documents together and nothing seems to have lapsed for the time being. I also got my passwords together, which was a major accomplishment.

Here is the worksheet if you would like to do the same thing:

Obviously, I should take a few more hours for a little due diligence. My wife and I were burgled one time and it turned out that I had failed to name her on the policy: a terrible disaster. I feel like there are probably a million pitfalls like that but a few hours will probably be a wise investment. You know: later on.

Following up on my post from a few weeks ago, it’s good to follow a local blog or an expat blog if you’re thinking about moving somewhere. You’ll feel like you know somebody in town before you move and, more than that, someone who loves the place and wants to show you around.

I thought I would put together a page of these blogs, one blog per country. I’ve started with a few of my own favorite blogs – Following the Funks, Found in Estonia, Walking Almaty and Tacogirl. As I say, each of these is a great resource if you will visit these places and an engaging and transporting read even if you won’t.

I’m hoping to gradually expand the list over the course of this year.

Here is the final version of the travel reference manual for 2021:

This version is smaller and more manageable than the old versions. The previous versions were around 90 MB because the CIA maps were such high definition. I finally managed to get the maps into low definition (by printing to image) and so this is just 7.5 MB.

Otherwise, I’ve just kept working on the sections that I thought needed the most work. A native speaker has now proofed each section of the phrasebook, so I have some more confidence in that now. I’ve also revised the history section after some helpful analysis from a professional historian.

Here is the final table of contents:

• Calendar
• Conversions
• First Aid
• Games for children
• Games for drinking / chess
• History of the world
• Maps
• Meditation
• Packing lists
• Personal finance
• Personal information
• Phrasebook
• Recipes
• Self-defense
• Survival
• Work out
• Notes

Hopefully, it will be a useful book to travel with. I’ve been carrying a copy with me since the summer and it’s been pretty handy.

And here is a digital version if you just want to download it on your phone:

The digital version is the same as the print version except:

• No chess board or big world map;
• No personal finance or personal information. These sections are supposed to be filled in by hand in the print version;
• No blank pages at the back for notes; and
• A few formatting differences.

This is the final pdf that I’ll include in the 2021 edition of my book. It’s a one-page guide to meditation:

For the other pdfs, I’ve tried to read around pretty extensively before I published. For example, for the pdf on starting fires, I read some survival guides, I googled the topic in different ways, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos. Eventually, the advice I was reading became repetitive and I decided I knew enough about starting fires to write the pdf. I might still be terrible at actually starting fires but I described the process in the same way as everybodyg else. It’s fine.

That’s not what happened with this meditation guide. The more you read about meditation, the more confusing it gets. The advice is often contradictory, even about the fundamentals or the purposes of meditation.

Eventually, I landed on four resources that seem simple and trustworthy: mindful.org, Headspace, the University of Vermont and Daniel Ingram. I read these a few times and then I wrote the pdf. The first three are near the top of the google results. Daniel Ingram is more arcane but his book is what got me into meditation in the first place and it’s excellent.

The pdf does not communicate all the history and theory of meditation, all the ins and outs, but I think it should be fine as a place to start.

The crowdfunding campaign for the travel reference manual has now launched. It’s a little book of emergency information to help you wherever your travels take you. It’s $30.

I said previously that I would be using Kickstarter but I ended up using Indiegogo after comparing the two websites a little more.

Please let me know if you have any questions about the book. Most of the materials are available here on the website, at least in draft form, so it should be pretty easy to see what you’re getting.

Thanks!