Travel Notes: Write It Down
Before we get much further with the Travel Planning Notes structure, it's time to go ahead and make notes. It's sometimes tempting to make elaborately automated documents when you ought to be simply making some notes. Don't get tied up in infrastructure: go ahead and start making notes. Write it down.
What should we note down? Everything we don't want to forget! The (proposed) dates for the trip. The people I'm hoping to see. Places I'd like to visit. Things I want to do. Things I need to get done.
I've started a simple color coding scheme here. Red things are people. Green things are dates. I don't know this will be useful, at this point, but it helps focus my thinking and suggests new ways to organize and analyze.
It's usually preferable to make lots of small notes instead of a few long ones. Small notes are easier to locate. Because they are tightly focused, small notes make more sense as link destinations. By sticking to one point, short notes are easier to update when things change; if someone is going to be in Hong Kong when I'm in Chicago, I can move them to the next Chicago trip.