How to travel and study at the same time

I left London 5 months ago, preparing for a financial exam I'll take in May. The exam requires on average somewhere between 200 and 300 hours of study time. It turns out you don't have to do it in front a white wall.

Equipment

• Macbookpro 15’’
• iPad mini
• iPhone 4S with extra battery
• Huawey E586 with extra battery.

I don’t always walk around with a Macbook pro of course. Whether I take it with me or not depends on several things including how safe it is to leave it in my hotel room. A 15’’ is not ideal for travel, it's clearly heavy. An Air would be easier on my shoulders but it’s ok. Sometimes hotel safes are big enough to accommodate an MBP, sometimes I take the risk of just leaving it in my locked suitcase. When I can leave the MBP behind, I carry only the iPad mini in a small satchel.
The smallest bag I could find to carry the MBP 15’’ is a Samsonite rucksack. The 15’’ retina fits in just right.

Study material

I read books using a combination of

• Amazon Kindle
• Apple iBooks
• Dropbox (for PDF files)
• Public libraries: for books that are not accessible in electronic form. The National Library in Singapore has plenty of reference books, is open to non students (as long as you don’t borrow the books) and is laptop-friendly.

Dedicating time to study

The technical bit is not really the problem. The hardest part is to put time aside and dedicate it to study. Traveling is full of distractions. One of them is doing tourism. When I’m in London I’m not stuffing my days with trips to Mme Tussaud or the British Museum so I don’t feel like doing this either while I’m in another country. Local attractions are not a must-do, they will still be there the next time you come back.

The biggest factor of wasted time while traveling is decision making and exploration - by wasted I mean in relation to the objective of studying, of course it's not wasted time if you actually enjoy exploring. Where should I go today? Where are the good places? Rather than doing extensive and time-consuming research or walking around at random, it’s quicker to rely on a few recommendations from friends/locals/hotel receptionists or even suggestions from FourSquare.

Here are the top 3 questions I ask FourSquare:

• where can I have breakfast now?
• where is a good coffee place to sit down and open my laptop?
• where can I eat now?

Based on where you are FourSquare returns a single list of suggestions. This list includes places you stumbled upon at random before, places recommended by friends and places recommended by FourSquare users.

Dealing with travel overhead

Then another factor is the travel overhead: taking a plane, booking trips, booking hotels, checking in, checking out, washing clothes, etc… Now I do most of my bookings with the Expedia iPhone app. It has a very clean flow and allows quick sorting by deals first. When booking a flight or hotel, it doesn't ask you to type in your life story, just the 3 digits at the back of your credit card. Some airline web booking forms are just horrendous: they have too many pages, ask for way too much info sometimes redundant... It happened to me to spend up to an hour to complete a booking process because of slow websites that crash in the middle. None of this with Expedia for iPhone. Another nice thing: the search shows you the total price for stay as opposed to a misleading nightly rate that excludes taxes...

The drawback of Expedia: it shows only the hotels connected to Expedia. That excludes a lot of smaller more obscure hotels that can be perfectly OK and sometimes very cheap.
I wash my clothes in places that wash, dry and fold them for you, not in launderettes. I try and avoid moving around too much: I prefer staying in the same place for 1 or 2 weeks. After two weeks in the same city you’re pretty much a local: you have your favorite hangouts, you know the good places to eat or study, you have your data SIM card sorted out, you know the cheap local wash&fold laundry service, you can get around in the MTR/subway/metro/tube without a map and you can order a latte in the native language.

Although I spent most of my time in big cities (Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, San Francisco, Los Angeles), I found that for studying sleepy resorts are the best because they remove all distractions. No invites from friends, no dating, no travel, no tourism, no time wasted in transport - it’s a quick walk from the bungalow to the pool. It also removes choice: there is only one restaurant, one cafe, one swimming pool and only 10 items on the menu. I clocked in at least 10 hours daily of intensive study while in Malaysia/Thailand, whereas I struggled to reach 5 hours when I was preparing for the Microsoft exam in Taipei.

See also:
Keep your data safe while traveling
Study plan for a 6-month break

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