Don’t let traveling for work destroy your life.
Not sure The Road Warrior is right for you?
I’ll send you two chapters from the book for free, right now—read them and then decide for yourself it the book is right for you.
Traveling for work is hard work
The only experience you’ve ever had traveling before this was being on vacation. This is no vacation. This is hard.
You spend ten hours a week crunched into an airplane seat and another fifty hunched over a laptop. You eat every meal at a restaurant or (even worse) in an airport food court. You don’t sleep enough. You barely exercise.
When you started, they spent an entire day covering how to submit receipts and expense reports, and no time on how to survive the actual trip. And for a while, maybe a long while, it was fine—you were thrilled by new places and new experiences, long hours and exciting work. You were so focused on everything else, you didn’t notice what your new job was doing to you.
Now the changes are beginning to accumulate, and they’re becoming harder to ignore. Your back hurts, and it never used to. A slowly-growing gut is becoming more noticeable. You’ve got a brain fog that you can’t seem to shake. You get sick more often. You wake up feeling tired and achy. It seems harder to focus on simple tasks. You can feel your personal happiness and job performance beginning to suffer.
The human body is resilient, but it’s not indestructible.
Become a road warrior
Order now to receive:
- The entire book in PDF, ePub, and Mobi formats
- A professionally designed infographic laying out the eating strategy (read: diet) covered in Chapter Three of the book.
- Additional supplememental chapters, appendixes, and notes from the authors that didn't make the current verision of the book.
- Updates for life — every time a new edition is published, you get a digital copy of that version too, at no additional cost.
What’s in the book
Introduction: Becoming a Road Warrior
My story, and how to get the most out of the book
Chapter 1: Start
Why—and how—to begin your journey to become a better you on the road.
Chapter 2: Mindset
Developing a mindset for success in your journey (and life), Dumb and Dumber, and practical exercises for shutting up your inner pessimist.
Chapter 3: Eat
Dwight Howard, Behavioral Economics, the basics of eating well, why most eating plans fail, why this one works, and a no-nonsense, no-mistakes, six-rule system for eating healthy on the road.
Chapter 4: Move
The reason why going as hard as possible isn't the answer, a simple system for staying active on the road, and more than half a dozen do-anywhere hotel room and hotel gym workouts.
Chapter 5: Prevent
How sitting is (and isn't) the new smoking, how travel breaks bodies, how to minimize discomfort, and how to reverse the damage.
Chapter 6: Sleep
Why sleep is so important, why you're not sleeping enough, how to sleep more (and better), how to beat jet lag, and when nothing else works, a comprehensive rundown of the chemical assistance available.
Chapter 7: Balance
Reducing stress and overwhelm, getting more by doing less, no- bubble-baths-required self care, productivity systems, and beating the busy trap.
Chapter 8: Automate
Making habits, breaking habits, location-independent lifestyle, the life-changing magic of routine, and how to make the difficult default.
Conclusion: The Work is Never Done
What to do when you've finally got everything under control.
What’s definitely not in the book
The Road Warrior has no lists of foods that will magically burn belly fat. It endorses no unbelievably effective pills or powders, contains no six-week shreds, recommends no healing crystals or other pseudo-science. You won’t find any magic cures or silver bullets. In fact, it provides few canonical paths to success for anything.
It still contains plenty of opinionated recommendations for what can and cannot help you be healthier person. I’ll even explain the research behind them where appropriate. There’s lots of actionable information in these pages.
But it’s not the kind of information you may have come to expect when you think of “health advice,” because that kind of information isn’t information at all. It’s sales. Everyone offers a miracle or a magic trick, because miracles sell considerably better than dedicated, diligent effort and pragmatic, evidence-based knowledge.
Even the products and guides that aren’t total snake oil mostly suck, because they’re made to be sold, not used—these solutions require you to entirely re-arrange your life and put in unsustainable, herculean effort to get the results that they’re promising, which they have to promise so they can move units. You might be able to keep one of these up for a few weeks or even months, but you’re not going to build a sustainable, healthy lifestyle like that. You’re not going to create permanent change.
As a busy professional, let alone a busy professional that goes to a different city every week or every month, you can’t organize your life around staying healthy. You don’t have time to spend 16 hours a week running in a circle or doing a thousand tricep pull-downs, you don’t have enough consistency in your life to guarantee access to exactly the same food in exactly the same portions all the time forever.
You’re already living what can easily become an unsustainably time-intensive lifestyle, there’s no place to put another one on top of it.
Who the book is for
This is a book for business travelers who want to become road warriors. That is, folks who don’t want life on the road to ruin their mind and body, and are ready to put in a moderate effort to make that a reality.
Most specifically, this book is for those who: travel primarily by airplane on weekly short-to-medium-haul flights, are on the road 150–200 (or more) days a year, and whose travel schedule follows the consultant model of “several weeks to several months commuting back and forth to the same place.”
If you drive more than you fly, maintain a truly itinerant travel schedule, regularly fly international long-haul flights, or only travel a few weeks per year, the principles are still completely applicable to your problems. This book is still for you. Some of the specific examples and tricks may not resonate, but it will still be worth the purchase price, and then some.
Get your boss to pay for this book
At many companies, this book will qualify as a reimbursable educational expense. Thinking clearly and feeling your best have direct, measurably positive impacts on your productivity, just as much—if not more—than a book or training on the latest technologies or strategies.
At many places, this kind of price tag won’t even trigger a unique or special expense approval, and simply fall into a standard training, book, or health and wellness allowance. You’ll know better than I do if this will work with your expense and/or training policies.
If you do need to convince a manager or other approver that this is a valuable training expense, I’ve made a two-page PDF explainer for you, with a simple, sound argument on the direct impact the strategies in this book can have on things that managers tend to care about, like productivity, absenteeism, and retention (there are even citations!). Feel free to use it as a cheat sheet when you have the conversation, or just print it off hand it directly to them.
If you’re a manager and would like to buy your team this book, multi-copy discounts are available. Contact inquiries@theroadwarriorbook.com for more information.
Don’t just survive. Thrive.
If you want to be able to survive work travel, you have to build a life around one simple, unavoidable fact: you now spend more time away from home than at home.
Get it wrong, and you’re probably going to be looking for a new job sooner rather than later. But get it right, and you don’t have to stop at survival. A well-built travel life will allow you to thrive on the road.
You’re completely capable of regaining control over your life, reducing your stress levels, feeling better, eating better, and performing better. And you can use that extra bandwidth and energy however you want, whether that’s exploring the cities you find yourself in, being more productive at work, or picking up a new hobby. You’re only limited by your imagination.
You can design a life that’s not only better than the one you have now, but better than the one you had when you weren’t traveling. It still takes work, but with the strategies in The Road Warrior, it’s less work than you might imagine.
So, what’ll it be? Are you going to stay a business traveler, or are you going to become a road warrior?
If you have additional questions, reservations, concerns, or comments that this page doesn't address, feel free to drop me a line at questions@theroadwarriorbook.com and I'll do my best to answer them.