If you are excited about business travel, thinking it’s a free ticket to see the world, you should stop reading now. But if you are having trouble maintaining your personal life in the face of tons of travel, these tips from a cynical traveler will make life easier for you.

1. Stick with your priorities. When people travel to another city, why do they throw out their to do list for sightseeing in random museums? If you have on your top three things you want in life: go to the gym, stay in touch with friends, read a book a week, then sightseeing is not on the list. You don’t need to do it when you travel. You need to stick to your priorities. If sightseeing is on your priority list, then get a new job, because you have no control over where you sightsee if you have a job with a lot of travel.

2. Eat really well. First of all, you’re not paying for your own food, so you should eat really good, healthy food, which is always more expensive than junk food. Second, if you have a rule for yourself that you always eat well when you travel, then you will actually be healthier from traveling. Most people eat crap when they travel because they are tired and they feel like the calories don’t count because they are across state lines. That attitude will make you burn out faster. I can’t find a link but I’m sure there’s a study to support the hypothesis that you deal with the stress of travel more effectively without McDonald’s.

3. Think of balance in terms of weeks, not days. I know I want to spend time with the Farmer, spend time with the kids, be around for dinner invitations, and tooth-fairy moments. I used to worry about this every day. If I didn’t have breakfast with the kids, then I had to have dinner. Now I think in terms of weeks. If I was gone all week, I take off a day from work to have extra time for my personal life. If you are good at your job, and you travel a lot, no one counts how many days you take off.

4. Get elite status. Somewhere. Anywhere. When everyone is staying overnight at O’Hare, the people who are platinum are getting rebooked first. When you are waiting on the tarmac for an hour at LaGuardia because air traffic control cannot remember how many planes are in the air (which, really, is like, every day) if you get upgraded to first class, you’re drinking free wine and eating firm grapes while you are a prisoner of the airport. To get elite status, it means that every time your company wants to save $50 to put you on another airline, you have to say no. If my company will save more than $300, I’ll travel on an airline that I am not platinum on. Make sure your company knows you’re doing them a favor.

5. Do not agree to stupid meetings for geographical reasons. Just because someone you never want to hang out with lives in Saskatchewan and you’re gonna be there doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you should hang out with him. You have a life. And you surely have stuff you can do that evening besides hang out with a loser. Or maybe he’s only a half-loser. The thing is, you don’t have time for half-losers at home. They are the same everywhere: Still just a distraction from the real work of living the life you want.

The bottom line is that you need to respect your life. Your life cannot be on hold while you travel. The travel, if it’s really frequent, sort of is your life. So the values you have—be spiritual, be frugal, be healthy—have to prevail during your travel. This is not vacation travel. This is not a vacation from your life. Business travel IS your life.

Seymour Is living nude the best revenge? Stephanie Seymour, the 41-year-old former supermodel and veteran of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues, Victoria’s Secret catalogs, and, not least, two Playboy pictorials, would seem to be making that claim on these pages. (A protocol question: Is one still entitled to be addressed as a supermodel even after leaving office, like governors and secretaries of state?)

Her marriage to Peter Brant, a wealthy businessman who resembles a taller, more dashing version of Buddy Hackett, must have seemed like something out of a fairy tale back in 1995, when they tied the knot in Paris and then settled into a comfortable life that included homes in Greenwich, Connecticut, the Hamptons, and Palm Beach. She was 26, he 48. “He’s strong, intelligent, sensitive, and very masculine,” she purred while discussing her then fiancé with People magazine in 1994, on the occasion of her election as one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World. Brant cannot claim that level of renown, but his résumé is not shabby. In People’s words, he is “the polo-playing owner of Interview, Antiques, and Art in America,” while a recent court filing reminds us that he is also “a newsprint entrepreneur, an art collector, film producer, and owner/breeder of thoroughbred horses.”

Oh dear. Did we say “court filing”? Well, yes, Mr. and Mrs. Brant truly did have a fairy-tale marriage, or at least a fairy-tale divorce, because if you’ve recently read any fairy tales you know that they are unpleasant little narratives full of rage, jealousy, misbehavior, and vengeance. And if you’ve recently read any tabloids or Connecticut Superior Court documents, you know that the Brant split has devolved into “a real-life War of the Roses,” as the New York Post put it (chops licked), with the bitter couple continuing to share their Greenwich estate while generating a reliable stream of lurid headlines, gossip, and even ancillary court cases: a Brant security guard charged with disorderly conduct for allegedly shoving Seymour after she allegedly grabbed some papers from him and tucked them down her shirtfront; a civil suit filed, in turn, by the same guard against Seymour, claiming that he was injured after she allegedly proceeded to slam a door on his arm following the previously alleged shove; a public-disturbance charge issued against Seymour after she allegedly blocked the family driveway with her S.U.V., then yanked the keys out of another security guard’s car and threw them in some nearby bushes. (Amid tabloid despair, none of these legal actions are currently being pursued.) At issue in the divorce are not only money and property—including commissioned portraits of Seymour by artists such as Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Maurizio Cattelan (the last’s contribution is a bust of the supermodel that has been variously described as calling to mind a hunting trophy or the figurehead on a ship’s bow)—but also custody of the couple’s three children, aged 15, 13, and 5. Not to mention the family’s dignity.

Hindsight suggests there were hints of eruptions to come even before the courtship. She had been sued in 1993 by former boyfriend Axl Rose for, he claimed, having thrown a chair at him and punched him in the groin at a Christmas party. (Rose’s suit was eventually dropped, as was her countersuit, also alleging battery.) For his part, Brant spent 84 days in prison in 1990 for tax evasion, and—perhaps even more damning—some people say he is a bad sport on the polo field. Both he and she were at low emotional ebbs when they met in 1993. He swept her away to Paris and by all accounts they fell deeply in love.

And then—well, after a decade and a half of presumed bliss—it got ugly. Legal documents in divorce proceedings probably never make for happy reading, but the filings in Stephanie S. Brant v. Peter M. Brant read like a series of increasingly nasty, or sad, brushback pitches. Last April, for instance, a month after she filed for divorce and requested custody, Seymour claimed that her husband had “harassed and intimidated” the children in an effort to turn them against her and that he had instructed the family’s domestic staff and officials at their five-year-old daughter’s school to keep her away from the children. Another filing accused him of spiriting a small museum’s worth of artworks from “the marital residence” without Seymour’s consent, a haul that allegedly included nearly 50 Warhols—Brant had a long association with the artist—as well as works by Koons and Prince, not to mention some drawings by Jean-Michel Basquiat that had hung in Seymour’s bathroom and a pair of Cindy Sherman photos allegedly pilfered from her dressing room. No mention was made of the Cattelan bust, which may have lost its trophy-like luster in the eyes of at least one of its owners.

Organization discovery

* Review and analyze marketing business plan (when needed)
* Interview employees to understand perceived risks, challenges, and opportunities
* Analyze existing social media presence and activity
* Understand how business functions and operates internally and externally

Audit and analyze existing data and analytics

* Look at what analytics tools are currently being used and analyze what we need and want to collect.
* Examine business intelligence data and customer information

Define financial (ROI) and non-financial (impact) business objectives and metrics

* Define objectives that are going to impact the bottom line and what metrics are going to be used to determine success
* Define objectives that are not going to impact the bottom line (but that will impact the business) and what metrics are going to be used to determine success.

Creativity

Identify business and technology barriers and opportunities

* Identify business and technology barriers that keep the company from moving forward with social business strategy implementation
* Identify social business opportunities from a corporate business and technology standpoint

Develop business and technology solutions

* Develop business and technology solutions to capture opportunities and overcome barriers

Map and integrate solutions into business functions

* Integrate various social business strategies into various business functions and departments such as marketing, PR, and customer service
* Develop customized approach and process for each department that enables them to work together

Results

Monitor process and analyze new data

* Examine implementation process to make sure everything is going smoothly on business and technology side
* Look at new data collected from internal business units and external facing initiatives and conversations

Calculate ROI and impact

* Compare new data to old data collected at beginning of process
* No time line attached to process so we look at ROI and impact on a quarterly basis but you should start seeing things move in the right direction

Insight delivery

* Comprehensive report analyzing and reviewing all work done up to this point
* Explores future ideas and strategies and provides guidance and recommendations

Adapt and revise

* Adapt work that has been done and try to improve
* Integrate new tools, strategies, ideas, and software solutions