I have been working towards FIRE since I came on this concept a few years ago. Learned lots of great things while lurking, all while looking towards getting out of the rat race.
I used to travel for business, and drive to / from the office. Start a year or two before the pandemic, I started full time WFH, with the rare business travel or office visit. I pretty much haven't traveled since start of COVID, and am amazed how better the video conferencing technologies have gotten, that I pretty much am able to keep in touch and do all of the collaborative work via virtual meetings with none of the hassles.
I have a project now where an old school project manager is requesting me to travel on-site every month for 2-3 days. The location is very inconvenient to get to, since airlines have slashed flights and no direct flights exist any more. Instead of hopping on a 2-3 hour direct flight, it now takes 6-8 hours via flight connections to get there. Adding in time to pack, prep, get to the airport, pick up rental car, etc., overall time is now 10-11 hours to get from door to door.
I pushed back on the project manager and declined to be on-site, when virtual meetings have worked just fine. It seems to be pretty ridiculous to demand employees to travel these days for work, if virtual meetings can work just fine. Airline flight cancelations are sky high, disease transmission is pretty high, and traveling is generally a pretty unpleasant business. It seems to be time theft from employees to ask them to travel if an alternate work mode is available.
I feel the same way about having to mindlessly commute daily to the office to do the same thing one could do from the home. The collaborative tools such as slack, teams, all do a very good job of allowing remote collaboration. I'm not sure why employees are still being demanded to spend 1-3 hours per day to drive to an office to do the same thing they could have done from home, for those types of jobs where it may apply.
I wonder why more people don't view the non-paid time to travel to / from work, business travel, as time theft from their day when they could be either more productive, or getting personal things done.
There is a high cost to this type of practice, to the employees, as well as the planet in terms of climate change. I hope this type of attitude can change, and travel / commuting can be trimmed down to save employees time and the planet. With less traffic, those employees who do have to travel to work for necessary tasks will have less traffic to deal with, and get to work home much faster as well.
I'm not sure why any climate change champions don't deal with this topic...it can make such a major improvement in quality of life for employees, with virtually no loss in productivity from employers. We need to get rid of the old school mentality that people need to commute to a central location to do work in farm like cubicles.