Business Travel Is NOT an Excuse

It's 6:10 on a Tuesday morning. You're at the gate. The flight is delayed 40 minutes. You scroll email, buy a coffee you don't want and tell yourself you'll study at the hotel tonight. At 10:30 p.m. you open your laptop, click through a dozen random questions, miss half of them and fall asleep with the screen still on. Thursday you fly home and tell yourself the same thing: this week was a write-off because of travel.

Here's the blunt verdict. Your trips are NOT killing your Executive Assessment prep. Showing up to airports and hotel rooms with no plan is. That's bad news, because you can't blame the airline anymore. It's also great news, because a plan is something you can build tonight.

Count the dead time. I'll wait.

Think about your last trip. Add up the time at the gate, the time on the plane, the car to the hotel and the hour in your room before bed. Stop reading and actually do it.

I'll bet that number is BIGGER than you expected. Most travelers don't have a time problem. They have a what do I do with this time problem. So you have to decide what you want MORE: another hour of scrolling, or a score that gets you into the Executive MBA or part-time program you're after.

The test is built for people who travel

The Executive Assessment (the EA, GMAC's test for Executive MBA programs) is short. It's 90 minutes, split into three 30-minute sections: Integrated Reasoning with 12 questions, Verbal Reasoning with 14 and Quantitative Reasoning with 14. Each section is scored 0 to 20, the total runs 100 to 200, and all three sections count the same. It's adaptive section by section, which means how you do on the first part of a section helps set how hard the rest of that same section is. You can see the full breakdown on GMAC's assessment structure page.

Look at that again. The whole test is built out of 30-minute blocks. A short flight is longer than that. A hotel evening is longer than that. You don't need a free Saturday to train for this. You need 30 focused minutes and a pen.

5 travel mistakes I see every week

1. Packing "study" with no assignment. You bring the laptop and a vague promise. Vague promises lose to room service every time.

   INSTEAD: Write the plan before you leave the house. Which topic, which questions, which part of the trip. "Flight out: one timed Quant set. Hotel night 1: review that set." If it's not written down, it's not a plan.

2. Chasing brand new questions. New questions feel productive. Doing 60 of them on a plane and never looking back feels great and teaches you almost nothing.

   INSTEAD: Pack questions you already MISSED and redo them cold. Being the commander of fewer questions beats being a passing acquaintance of hundreds.

3. Doing math in your head on the tray table. The tray is tiny, so you skip notes. Then you misread one word and the whole question falls apart.

   INSTEAD: Carry a small paper notepad. Write the facts, write the question, do the work on paper. Every question. Pride is not a study method.

4. Taking a full practice test in a hotel at 11 p.m. After a client dinner, tired, with the TV on next door. Then you panic about the score.

   INSTEAD: Remember what a practice test is. It's a measuring device, not training. It tells you roughly where you are. It doesn't make you better. Take practice tests at home, rested, at the time of day you plan to test. On the road, TRAIN in section-sized sets.

5. Coming home with zero review. You did the work but never asked why you missed what you missed. So you'll miss it again next trip.

   INSTEAD: For every miss, write one line: what went wrong and what you'll do next time. "Didn't know the rule" is fine. "No idea" is not. You are NOT allowed to say "I have no idea".

What tray-table training looks like

Here are two questions in the format the EA uses. Do them on paper. Yes, on paper.

Next, a Data Sufficiency question. Data Sufficiency gives you a question and two statements. You don't solve it. You decide whether the statements give you enough information to answer it. The answer choices are always the same:

• (A) Statement (1) alone is enough, but (2) alone is not.
• (B) Statement (2) alone is enough, but (1) alone is not.
• (C) Both together are enough, but neither alone is.
• (D) Each statement alone is enough.
• (E) Even both together are not enough.

Two questions. A few minutes. Done properly, with notes, on a tray table. That's what a trip can give you.

A simple trip plan

• At the gate: redo five questions you missed last week. No peeking at old work.
• On the flight out: one timed 30-minute set from a single section. Notes on paper.
• Hotel, night one: review that set. One line per miss explaining why.
• Hotel, night two: rest, or a 15-minute redo of the night-one misses. Sleep matters too.
• Flight home: redo every miss from the trip, cold.

That's it. Nothing fancy. It works because it's specific, it's short and you write it down before you go.

Here's your challenge for today. Open your calendar and find your next trip. Right now, write down exactly what you'll do at the gate, on the flight out and in the hotel that first night. Then pack the notepad. Next time you're delayed 40 minutes, you won't be scrolling. You'll be training.