Why You Have More Time to Travel Than You Think

Time. There just never seems to be enough of it. It always seems to move too fast (and, every year, it seems to just move faster).

Time is something people always tell me they don’t have enough of and is one of the main reasons why they don’t travel as much as they would like. (Money is also an issue, which I’ve talked about here.)

While there are more digital nomads and remote workers now that COVID has changed the concept of the office, not everyone is able to work remotely these days.

But, even if they don’t want to be nomadic, most people I know with office jobs (specifically Americans) want to travel more than they do. They just feel like they don’t have the time.

They are wrong.

Here’s why.

Let’s say you work 50 weeks a year and get two weeks of vacation. (Not American? Then you probably get a lot more and that’s wonderful.) Counting your vacation time and every weekend brings the total number of days per year you can travel to 110 (104 weekend days plus the 10 days in your two-week vacation). That’s a lot of time to travel. Throw in three-day weekends and holidays, and we can add even more days to our total. It may not be all continuous, but you can do a lot with that much time.

Let’s think about that for a second: 110+ days of free time per year. That’s close to four months of potential travel time per year! Four months! The world is your oyster with that much time.

When looking at it this way, our busy schedule becomes a lot more open. What are you doing with that time?

Everything is about priorities. Yes, there are certain obligations we have in our day-to-day lives that take up time but if you really want something, you find a way to make it happen. It’s like when I say I don’t have the time to go to the gym. I have plenty of time to go to the gym; I’m just spending that time elsewhere.

Because the gym just isn’t a priority for me (though it probably should be).

Moreover, most people associate “travel” with a long-term, big, expensive trip and thus discount all the short-term methods of travel. When people think “I want to travel” they envision a two-week vacation, a cruise, or some long, multi-month journey. It’s a big trip to a faraway land.

That’s not really their fault. It’s just how the travel industry tells us we need to travel because long and big trips mean people will spend more money. We internalize that concept and never consider other options.

And if you hear something enough,…