Maybe you’ve seen the film Up in the Air starring the inimitable Mr George Clooney. There’s a scene where his character extolls the virtues of moving effortlessly through travel hubs and getting through security with the minimum of fuss.

I’m not quite that extreme, and I don’t travel nearly as much, but I am an advocate of ‘travel light, arrive light’, especially on those short pesky business trips for 1-5 days. I have a business friend who even for an overnight stay will always check in a bag and for whom the the thought of travelling light brings him out in a rash.

Far from cutting down your options, however, it helps you focus on exactly what you need for the trip, during the day and the evening-into-morning time. More importantly, it makes you learn to respect space, organisation, minimalism and a lack of clutter. This lack of clutter and lack of baggage – the physical seems to transfer to the psychological too – allows you to exit quickly with a skip in your step and whisk yourself away to your destination.

The low cost airlines help you take this approach by charging you for checked in bags and allowing you a regular cabin bag and a smaller bag. The long haul airlines will also let you bring on 2 regular cabin bags. You save money and effort and you get to make better choices with scarce resources. So what if you have to wear the suit jacket on the journey? It makes keeping your vital travel documents secure even easier.

True, you don’t have a contingency plan with this approach, but when was the last time you needed one?