chapter 10: it's time to check in (with yourself)
maximize your travels, budget, and self-reflection with a personal quarterly review
⏰ 7 minute read
Cheers to a new month, a new season (spring is finally here!), a new quarter, a new day!
Take a deep breath, smile, and pause for a moment to reflect on what this new marker of the passage time means to you.
one year ago today…
Today, April 2, marks the anniversary of when I hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and a lot more than just my cardigan.
Well, not that much more – I moved across the country from my hometown in New Jersey with just two checked bags, and the weightless baggage of hopes, dreams, fears, and excitement all bundled up in a small girl who decided to take the leap to finally “settle down” – but not settle for the status quo – in a new city instead of living nomadically as she had been doing for the past five years.
I still can not yet technically say I’ve ever had my name on one lease for a full year, since I ran into more complications than expected with finding good roommates and a suitable home environment… which resulted in me having four different mailing addresses in Los Angeles/Santa Monica in the past 12 months 😅
But, this is indeed is the first time I’ve ever been based in the same city for a full year ever since 2016 when I moved out of my hometown, where I had spent my first 18 years prior to college. So, today is monumental moment for a former nomad like me, and I’m treating this celebratory marker of the passage of time as a prompt for self-reflection.
why reflect?
Reflecting is a habit that I think all people, but especially travelers with busy schedules and action-packed days, should schedule time to do on a regular, recurring basis.
I quite like the definition that comes up when you google “why is reflecting important” so I’ll just include it here rather than rephrase:
“Reflection is a process of exploring and examining ourselves, our perspectives, attributes, experiences and actions / interactions. It helps us gain insight and see how to move forward. Reflection is often done as writing, possibly because this allows us to probe our reflections and develop them more thoughtfully.”
– University of Edinburgh, Institute for Academic Development
For me, writing is the best method that helps me reflect and process events of the past week, month, year, or whatever time period.
Our thoughts tend to swim around in our heads in a haphazard fashion as we progress through each day learning, observing, and feeling hundreds of different new things. Those thoughts don’t tend to crystalize until we either have a reflective conversation with someone, or take the time to journal and put our thoughts into words. The written form of reflection can be most powerful since you have the ability to refer back to that writing years from now, and you have the ability to share it with others who might also be able to extract insights from your reflections.
Ever since starting this newsletter in mid-January, this vessel of my thoughts and reflections has been sent out to hundreds of people around the world every week. By giving myself a weekly deadline to reflect and write, I’m ensuring that I’m actively thinking about my experiences, capturing my most poignant thoughts in written form, and molding them all into cohesive bite-size stories that readers around the world and my future self alike will cherish.
To take a note out of my business school education and my professional life as a product manager, I highly recommend a cadenced retrospective – whether it’s weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, or otherwise.
If you set a time frame for yourself to plan goals, and then reflect on those goals, you’ll more consciously understand and appreciate your life compared to just living each day without looking back before hopping to the next day.
In my relatively new remote job at a startup which I started in January, I looked back at the past three months as Q1 (the timeframe from January until end of March, for those who don’t speak business) came to a close. I accomplished some goals, but other projects changed and evolved or were blocked and needed to roll over to become goals I’ll focus on in the upcoming quarter. Other initiatives are now completely deprioritized and will not be something I continue to work on next quarter, while newer, more impactful ideas did land themselves on my team’s upcoming roadmap.
If jobs mandate quarterly or bimonthly or annual self-reviews since they can be beneficial for professional development, why not also create a personal requirement for yourself to pause and reflect on a cadenced basis about your personal development?
how to reflect
At the end of every month, or every quarter, or every year, I encourage you to write down what you accomplished, what you wanted to do but maybe didn’t have time to do or were blocked on by some obstacle, and what you want to do in the next time frame before you reflect once more. I uphold this cadenced self-reflection practice both in my professional life with work projects and in my personal life with passion projects and relationships or personal goals.
For those who might want to briefly reflect on a daily basis, I highly recommend a One Line a Day-style journal where you can jot down just a few quick phrases and sentences about each day. Each page of the journal is labeled with the date, such as April 2, and there are five sections on each page – one for each year since you started using the journal. So, on one page, I can see what reflections I had written on this same day in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and now today, 2023 – which prompts even further reflection about how much can change in a year between each of the journal entries.
For those who want to reflect on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, the possibilities are truly endless for exactly how to document these reflections. You could pick up a normal journal, or start a digital diary of sorts whether publicly published like an email newsletter or Twitter thread, or privately owned like a personal Google doc, Notion page, or even just on the Notes app of your phone.
reflecting on budget and time for travel
If you’ve read this far and are still wondering how this all relates to travel – don’t worry, I’m getting there :)
Along with writing down my personal thoughts and experiences, which include all of the memories from each of my trips, I also take time each month and quarter to document my spending and take a look at how many days I spent traveling in comparison with my current energy levels, to reflect if I’m perhaps overdoing it.
The short answer for January through March is: yes, I’ve been completely overdoing it 🫠
After about 10 weeks of back-to-back long weekend trips, I am definitely feeling some travel fatigue and am itching to see so many of my friends in LA whom I haven’t been able to catch up with for a month or two amidst my hectic travel schedule.
This upcoming quarter of April through June, I’m building into my travel schedule specific months of no big travel plans (April is finally my rest month!) and specific weekends in between weeks away where I’m not planning anything for the specific purpose of catching up with friends and my personal life in LA. This is crucial amidst an almost nonstop month of back-to-back trips in May (NYC, Kauai, King’s Canyon, and Los Cabos, Mexico) and a three-week whirlwind tour of major cities in Western Europe (London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Nice, and Paris) in mid-June through early July.
Along with reflecting on and planning out my time, I take it upon myself to be financially responsible and confront my spending habits each quarter to make sure I’m on track with my priorities for saving and investing while still having travel be my largest spending category.
I use an app called Rocket Money which pulls in every transaction from my various credit cards and all the balances from my savings and investing accounts to help me see a visual pie chart of which spending categories (travel, food, entertainment, shopping, etc) consume the most of my money. It has filtering options to view by month, quarter, and year, while showing me a visual comparison of how my spending this week/month/quarter/year compares to the previous time period.
By pairing my self-reflections on the value of how much I’m learning and gaining from my travel experiences with an assessment of how much I’m spending on travel, I’m able to constantly recognize the return on my investment, as travel is a powerful tool for personal development. I spend the most money on travel because as the saying goes, “travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer.”
And perhaps, if you reflect on the past time period and realize your life is lacking some adventure and you’ve got room in your budget – then that realization is the perfect spark for planning a new trip!
Hopefully you too can pause, reflect, and appreciate your life on a regular basis to also reap the benefits of self-reflection – but if you’re not yet at a point on your self-reflection journey where you’re comfortable reaching inwards and looking back on yourself, the next best thing you can do is read other people’s written and published self-reflections so you can learn from their own mistakes and gain insights from their personal analyses.
If you’ve joined my newsletter at any point in the last 10 weeks and want to backtrack to a previous issue to learn from my reflections, here are some links for your convenience :)
xoxo your *self-reflective on a regular basis* Type A travel bestie,
Caitlyn
📝 travel hack of the week
This viral travel-related life hack tweet caught my attention earlier this week. As someone who only travels with a carry on, I hate the threat of being forced to check in and have to wait for my bag at my arrival destination if there is no space in the overhead bin by the time I board.
I’ve personally tested out this tweet’s “life hack” advice myself in the past by just lining up in an earlier boarding group than what’s printed on my ticket, and most of the time it has worked flawlessly with no questions asked.
Other times depending on the airline (cough cough Delta), I’ve gotten called out for not paying attention to the correct boarding group number and have been forced to go to the back of the line and wait again, or at the very least be given a warning that I didn’t board with the correct group and should pay more attention next time.
Try this out for yourself and see what happens! The worst consequence is that you’ll be right back where you were supposed to board originally, with nothing lost except maybe your pride if the flight attendant publicly shames you.
🌎 where in the world is caitlyn?
Howdy, y’all 🤠 I’m writing to you from the comfort of a cushioned backyard swing my best friend’s family home in the suburbs of Dallas after having eaten freshly made dosas at midnight while laughing alongside my college best friends in the sweetest reunion after 1-3 months apart from each of them.
Even though I no longer live in the same city as the people I consider my longest-term ride or die best friends from college, we still manage to see each other fairly often as I balance my bicoastal lifestyle with trips back to NYC, or by meeting up with NYU friends in different cities around the country and around the world, at least on a quarterly basis.
A reader of my newsletter who’s based in Dallas had reached out a few weeks ago when I mentioned I’d be traveling here, and we ended up meeting up last night for some ~Texas culture~ in the form of a line dancing lesson and mechanical bull riding. If you’re ever reading this newsletter and see that I have plans to be in your city, please reach out! :)
👯♀️ group trip opportunities
🚨 new international group trip to be announced SOON – July 17-24 :)
My group scuba diving trip to Los Cabos, Mexico is now fully sold out! I’ve got another international aquatic-oriented group trip in the works… keep an eye on this space in the upcoming weeks if you’re free and interested to travel somewhere tropical in mid/late July!
☀️🌲⛰ seattle / olympic national park, washington - july 27-aug 1
A friend from Seattle once told me that summer in Seattle is “godly” and I now always use that phrase, because it’s true – I visited Seattle and the San Juan islands in summer 2021 and absolutely fell in love, to the point that I thought about taking a solo trip back to Seattle last August just to experience it all again.
Solo trips are tough on the wallet for renting cars and exploring the incredible national parks of the Pacific Northwest, however, so a group trip is the perfect opportunity to explore Seattle and its surrounding nature – like the only rainforest in the US, located in Olympic National Park just 3 hours from the city.
Check out the cost details and general itinerary and hit me up if you’re interested in joining this trip and making some new friends in the PNW!
🪣 bucket list inspo
Just about a year ago, I planned a trip to Playa del Carmen, Mexico specifically to dive in the cenotes there – this was my first-ever dive trip after I completed my PADI Open Water scuba certification in San Diego last March.
A cenote is a natural sinkhole that holds both freshwater and saltwater that comes from the ocean via underground cave systems, and this unique environment produces some of the most incredible visual effects underwater. Cenote diving was the catalyst that turned scuba diving from a casual hobby into a passion of mine, as I had never felt such a sense of wonder and awe as I had when floating between the ethereal blue underwater sunbeams and the bubbles forming on the top of the underwater caverns, feeling the closest I had ever felt to floating weightless in outer space.
Even if you don’t dive – I highly recommend visiting the areas around Playa del Carmen and Tulum specifically to swim along the surface of the strikingly blue cenotes which are unique to this region!
💭 food for thought
As part of my reflection on the past three months, I realized that I’ve achieved quite a few milestones in the realm of You Are Where You Go and my other passions that I’m really proud of:
I got interviewed for two different podcasts – one about being a multi-hyphenate individual who embraces multiple passions and backgrounds, and one about falling in love and dating while abroad. Both are topics that are unique compared to prior podcasts I’ve been interviewed on, and I can’t wait to share both of these episodes with you soon when they’re released!
I hosted my first in-person author event and Q&A as a local author at one of my favorite bookstores/coffee shops in Los Angeles called The Village Well. It was heartwarming to look up and see a crowd in front of me as I read my book aloud for the first time and fielded questions for an hour about my experience writing and traveling.
I expressed an interest in learning more about the live music industry in one of my recent Instagram stories, and it resulted in a series of conversations that has now ended up with me having an opportunity to help produce an international concert in London this summer!
The key takeaway from all of the above – these opportunities came about simply because I asked.
I reached out to a podcast I admired and consequently got invited to be on the show. I simply asked at the bookstore how I could get involved with their author events. I just asked publicly on my Instagram story if anyone in the music industry could talk to me about potential opportunities to get involved in the space.
What’s something you’ve been meaning to do, but just haven’t yet asked?
And more importantly – what are you waiting for?
📱let’s connect
If you’ve got feedback on the format of this newsletter, or suggestions for travel topics you want to hear more about, don’t be shy! Reply to this email or DM me:
Instagram: @caitlynlubas / @you.are.where.you.go
Twitter: @caitlynlubas
TikTok: @you.are.where.you.go
LinkedIn: Caitlyn Lubas (feel free to reach out if you want to talk about working remotely, transitioning careers, etc!)
That’s all for now…
Remember, you are where you go – never stop exploring the world and yourself! 🌎 🌍 🌏
If you enjoy my writing in this newsletter, you’d love my book called You Are Where You Go: A Traveler’s Coming of Age Journey Through 70 Countries and 7 Continents During College. Feel free to pick up a copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or reply if you’re interested in me sending you a signed hardcover or paperback copy :)