Packing For Someone Else’s Trip?

I keep taking a work trip I haven’t left for yet.

It’s a marketing all-hands, and I’ve been to enough of them that my brain runs the whole thing on a loop whether I ask it to or not. The sessions, the breaks, the dinners, the bedtime math that decides whether I’m worth anything at the morning workshop, the flight home already ubering somewhere in the back of my head before the first cup of hotel coffee goes cold.

Then two columns: what I hope to get out of it, and what I figure I’ll actually get.

It’s a tidy script. It’s also the dullest possible version of the trip, because I’m the only person in it.

Experience does this quietly. Every all-hands you survive sands the next one down a little, until the agenda reads like a bus schedule and the whole trip feels like a layover between two normal weeks. You stop being surprised by the shape, so you stop looking at it.

I’m typing this out mostly so I can’t weasel out of doing it; the hard work of breaking the status quo script to create an all-hands that’ll give next year’s a run for its money.

Stay Positive & It’s Not Really Just About The All-Hands Either