[griffinkelly]

One of the biggest QoL improvements for me has been not traveling. I enjoy visiting a new city every once and a while and meeting new people for work, but now in retrospect, my overall work life balance has significantly improved with no business travel.

[hinkley]

If they did a better job of making sure you got a chance to see the city instead of the inside of a hotel, a taxi, a convention center, and office, then I think it would be different. Young people get suckered into it because they don't know yet that they're in for something worse than not going at all; being moment's away and not being able to take advantage of it.

My coworker got sent to 'back home' to do an install for a big customer. He was planning to take an extra week to see extended family, and he asked if he should take it before or after the install. I pushed him to do it before, but he opted for after.

He spent two weeks sitting in a server room trying to sort out problems and barely saw any family. If he had seen them first, we would have extended his stay to get the customer sorted out.

[ghaff]

If you have the control and are in a position to spend the time (which may well depend on family situation), it's partly a function of making the time. Which I've usually done when practical. The timing is not always practical but, in normal times, I've made a point of tacking on personal time to work trips. At the moment, I'm sorry I didn't extend one or two of my early 2020 trips more, but who knew?

[ghaff]

Traveling a lot is what I really miss--for all that I complain about it. I was hoping that I could at least do personal travel relatively freely in the fall but that seems a non-starter. I definitely need to figure out a Plan B if, at some point, I can reasonably travel for myself but events are all still shut down.