How to make a packing list you reuse for every trip

Most people write a new packing list for every trip, or no list at all, and forget the same thing each time: the laptop charger, the adapter, the one medicine that is hard to buy abroad. The holiday travel season is a good moment to fix it, because December trips are often the longest and the most stressful.

The answer is a single list that grows from your own mistakes.

Start from your last three trips

Do not download a generic packing list. Generic lists are long, and long lists get skimmed. Instead, write down what you actually took on your last few trips, and what you wished you had taken. That is your list.

Then add one category at the end: “forgot last time”. It is the most valuable section on the page.

Group by where things live, not by type

Packing goes faster when the list follows the path you walk around the house:

• Desk: laptop, charger, mouse, adapter, headphones.
• Bathroom: toiletries, medicines, glasses.
• Wardrobe: clothes for the number of days, plus one.
• Hallway: keys, wallet, passport, travel cards.

Grouping by place means you visit each room once.

Add a “day before” section

Some things cannot be packed in advance but are easy to forget: charging devices, downloading boarding passes, offline maps, setting an out of office. Put them in a short “day before” section with a time. If your capture tool reads dates, a line like “download boarding pass dec 18 6pm” becomes a reminder you will actually see.

Keep the master list as a note

Keep the master list somewhere you can copy from every time: a note, a document, a text file. In Jot, keep it as a note with a #packing tag. For each trip, create todos only for the “day before” items and anything unusual for that trip. The difference between reference lists and action lists is covered in notes and todos are different animals.

Update it on the way home

The single habit that makes the list better every time: on the journey home, add anything you forgot and remove anything you carried and never used. Two minutes, once per trip, and within a year you have a list that fits you exactly.

Work trips need one more section

For work travel, add the things that are about the trip, not the luggage: expense receipts, the meeting address, the contact on site, the agenda. Capture receipts as you go rather than reconstructing them later; a one-line note with the amount and what it was for is enough to rebuild an expense report. For the handover before you leave, see how to hand over your todos before a holiday.

Jot is on the Microsoft Store.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.