When Travel Days Become Catch-Up Days

A business trip usually has a clear purpose. Visit a client in another city. Walk a site. Meet a supplier. Spend a day at a trade show. The reason for going is almost always about being somewhere in person, with people, in a way that cannot happen on a screen.

For some people, though, the trip is experienced differently. The early flight is spent with a laptop open on the tray table. The wait at the gate is spent answering emails. The hotel evening is spent on the backlog. The client meeting happens in between, with one eye on the phone. And the day back in the office is spent catching up on everything that waited for them.

The trip took place. Whether the person was ever really there is another question.

Why travel turns into catch-up

The underlying pattern is simple. When work is routed to a person rather than to a role or a shared place, it does not stop when that person travels. It accumulates. And because the person knows it is accumulating, they try to keep up from wherever they are.

Several things make this more likely:

Client and supplier conversations live in a personal inbox. Colleagues cannot see them, so they cannot respond on the person's behalf.
Decisions wait for one person. Approvals, pricing exceptions or answers to unusual questions cannot be given by anyone else.
Information is hard to find without them. Colleagues who need a document or a detail have to ask the traveller, because only they know where it is.
There is no travel arrangement. Nobody has agreed what should be handled by others, what can wait, and what genuinely needs the traveller.

Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index gives a sense of how much of working life already goes on communication and looking for things. Based on Microsoft 365 activity data, it reported that people spent 57 percent of their time communicating, and in its survey 62 percent of respondents said they struggled with spending too much time searching for information. Those are global figures from software users, not South African measurements. They do suggest that if a person's role is heavy with communication and information-finding, that load does not disappear when they get on a plane. It travels with them, or waits for them.

An illustrative trip

Take an illustrative example, not a real business: an East London packaging manufacturer with about fifty staff, whose key account manager flies to Johannesburg and Cape Town every few weeks to visit major customers.

In this scenario, the account manager handles all communication for their customers personally. Customer queries come to their mailbox. Production schedules are agreed by phone and confirmed by email from their account. Pricing exceptions need their approval.

On a travel day, the account manager receives the usual volume of messages and has to answer them between flights and meetings. Colleagues in the office who could help do not have access to the conversations. By the time the account manager returns, there is a backlog that takes most of the next day to clear.

The customer visits themselves go well. But the account manager would probably say, if asked, that travel days are their hardest days, and not because of the travel.

The human tax

The first tax is time. Travel already takes hours that are not available for anything else. When those hours are filled with catch-up, and the return day with more of it, a two-day trip can consume most of a week.

The second is energy. Working in departure lounges and hotel rooms, on mobile connections, between meetings that need full attention, is tiring in a way that office work usually is not.

The third, perhaps the most important, is the cost to the purpose of the trip. A client meeting attended with half an eye on the inbox is not the meeting it could have been. It would go beyond the evidence to claim that this damages client relationships in any measurable way. It is fair to say that the reason for travelling in person is presence, and that presence is exactly what catch-up erodes.

What could realistically change

The goal is to let work keep moving while someone is away, so that they can be where they are.

Move customer conversations to a shared place. Microsoft describes shared mailboxes as suited to addresses that several people need to access, with permitted users able to send as the shared address. A shared account-management mailbox means a colleague can see and answer routine queries while the account manager travels. Mellorca's guide to why shared inboxes become bottlenecks covers how to avoid simply moving the problem.
Give a colleague delegate access. Microsoft's support guidance explains that a calendar delegate can see and edit calendar items and respond to meeting requests on someone's behalf. A trusted colleague can then rearrange meetings or confirm appointments without the traveller.
Agree what others can decide. If pricing exceptions within a set range can be approved by someone else, many travel-day messages disappear.
Make information findable. When customer agreements, specifications and correspondence are kept in shared, organised places rather than one person's mailbox history, colleagues stop needing to ask. Mellorca has looked at this in when business knowledge lives in inbox history.
Agree a travel arrangement. Before each trip, a short handover: who is covering, what they can handle, and what genuinely needs the traveller.

What changes first, and for the business

The first change is that the volume of messages needing the traveller personally drops, because colleagues can see and handle much of what arrives. The backlog on return shrinks.

For the business, customers get faster responses while the account manager is away, and customer knowledge is less concentrated in one person. The trips themselves become more valuable, because the person on them can focus on why they went. A related pattern, from the perspective of people working away from the office every day, is explored in why field teams still phone the office for information.

The human dividend

The dividend is time and presence. A travel day can be a travel day: time to prepare for the meeting, rest, read, or simply look out of the window. The meeting can have the person's full attention. The return to the office can be a normal day, not a recovery.

There is also a quieter dividend in how travel feels. Trips that are not shadowed by an accumulating backlog may become something the person can do well, rather than something they endure.

The trade-offs

Shared access reduces personal ownership. Customers may value a single named contact, and the account manager may value being that contact. Moving conversations to a shared place changes the relationship.
Delegation needs trust. Giving a colleague access to a calendar and the authority to make decisions requires confidence in their judgement, which takes time to build.
Colleagues carry more. Whoever covers absorbs extra work during the trip. That should be planned and recognised, not assumed.
Some things genuinely need the traveller. A shared mailbox does not remove the need for the person's judgement on difficult issues. Expectations should be realistic.

Why it matters

People travel for work because some things are better done in person. When the trip becomes a mobile office for clearing a backlog, the reason for going is quietly undermined, and the cost is carried by the traveller in time and energy.

Mellorca's reading is that catch-up on travel days is usually a sign that work is routed to people rather than shared. Change the routing, and travel can return to its purpose. A related Moment considers the same pattern on leave: why holidays still need a laptop in the suitcase.

Sources and further reading

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/will-ai-fix-work (last verified 10 October 2026)
About shared mailboxes in Microsoft 365 - Microsoft 365 admin (last verified 10 October 2026)
Share and access a calendar with edit or delegate permissions in Outlook - Microsoft Support (last verified 10 October 2026)