A Travel Plan for Couples Who Don’t Agree on How to Travel

Forget about household chores and budgets. The biggest source of tension for some couples starts with a plane ticket.

You like to get to the airport early , they like to come in hot. You insist on checking a bag, they preach carry-on only. And then there’s the vacation to-do list: You need down time, they have FOMO if they don’t see everything.

What’s a conflicted couple to do? Instead of complaining about, or showing contempt for, your partner’s travel habits, learn to love each other’s quirks, tastes and temperaments. After all, you could both be right. Getting that advance ticket for a hot museum may be the only way to see it, and you may be surprised how nicely that afternoon nap hits you.

Short of separate vacations , the best way to address travel differences, a therapist and travelers who have (mostly) figured it out told me, is communication and compromise. You don’t have to be in a relationship to benefit from their lessons. The advice also applies to traveling with friends and family.

Learning to do less

When planning his honeymoon a dozen years ago, Chris McEwen drew up a long list of must-sees in Italy. His wife-to-be, who prefers leisurely mornings and wandering, wasn’t having it.

She told him, “Yo, pump the brakes dude. We are not doing all that,” McEwen, a 49-year-old IT professional in North Carolina, says.

In the end, he relented. And today, one of his favorite memories from the trip is spending hours walking around Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood at the end of their trip. He finally understood the joys of not doing much.

In the years since, they have continued to compromise. He still darts out of bed on vacation, but heads out for a walk and brings back coffee.

On a spring break trip to Arizona with their children, ages 5 and 9, this year, she agreed to his bucket-list slot canyon tour in Page, Ariz., despite also planning to see Scottsdale, the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park.

For an upcoming trip to New York City, he’ll go to a Broadway show with her (but not two).

Some travelers find middle ground. Others discover that the opposite approach that their significant other takes can work for them.

Valerie Paxton, a 61-year-old business adviser who lives near Phoenix, rarely takes a trip without creating a spreadsheet or Word document with every little detail. For an upcoming trip to Italy to celebrate her brother’s 60th birthday, the entries include the types of wine that will be served during a nearly $400 wine-pairing luncheon at Antinori winery in Tuscany.

She has travel-planning documents dating back to 2008 and says she will defend her meticulous planning “to my dying day.”

Her engineer husband isn’t convinced all the stressful planning work is necessary. “He’s like, ‘Why don’t you just not do it and we’ll just wing it?’ ” Paxton says. “And that’s where the tension is.”

He likes nothing more than seeing where the day takes them by talking to locals. She used to consider it a waste of time. On a trip to Napa for his 55th birthday last month, they had not a single plan. She didn’t even know the location of the vacation rental. They went on a 24-mile bike ride and then stopped into a local bar the shop owner recommended. At the bar, they got their recommendation for dinner.

“I may be a convert,” she says.

Travel as therapy

Psychologist Joshua Coleman counsels couples in his San Francisco-area practice and says travel issues are no different than many other conflicts in a relationship. Resolving them comes down to mutual, thoughtful conversation, he says.

“If people really feel understood and they emerge feeling like, OK, that person really gets me, they’re just in a much better position to want to compromise,” he says.

No good comes from simply giving in about, say, that weeklong vacation you’re dreading and then stewing about it. The other person will pay a price later, he says.

Coleman and his wife have been married for 35 years and found a workaround to their different vacation tastes. He loves activity and she loves relaxing at the pool or beach with a book. On a recent family trip to Hawaii they made time for lounging and a snorkeling excursion.

“If every vacation was a beach-read vacation, she would be completely happy and I would be completely insane,” he says.

Veteran Wall Street airline analyst Jamie Baker and his wife are travel pros who eloped nearly 30 years ago to take immediate advantage of his flight benefits at Northwest Airlines.

They decided early on to stay in their own lanes, he says. He handles all flight arrangements and his wife, a former chef, handles accommodations and dining reservations.

Baker is the stereotypical airport dad—on steroids. He insists his wife and adult sons are packed 24 hours before the flight in case their flight is significantly delayed or canceled and there’s an opportunity to jump on an earlier flight.

He’s gone so far to book a “chase car” in addition to his regular car service. This second car trails his travel party by about 5 miles, just in case.

The backup ride saved a trip to Japan several years ago after a tractor trailer accident brought traffic to a standstill. That car picked them up on the other side of the freeway and they dashed across the median with their rollaboards.

Baker says his preflight neurosis has gotten worse over the years because he can check air-traffic control, flight status, road conditions and more from his phone. His family has come to accept his flight prep as gospel, he says, and knows not to talk to him until they are at the airport.

“Once we’re at the curb, it’s all smiles and relief,” he says.

What’s more important than being a good employee right now? Looking like a good employee in the eyes of AI productivity trackers that more managers are using to evaluate their teams.

Employee-monitoring systems are especially popular at tech companies and are also used by other white-collar firms that want to probe how people spend company time. The scary thing: You might not even know you’re being watched because many states don’t require disclosure.

Metrics can include performance data that is undoubtedly relevant, such as sales results. But it also can employ dubious proxies like keyboard strokes and how often your computer screen goes into sleep mode.

We generally accepted, or at least understood, heightened surveillance during the work-from-home era. Back then it seemed reasonable for bosses to keep tabs on employees they couldn’t see.

Yet the oversight has only escalated, and tensions are rising, too.

A group of former Meta Platforms employees alleges in a lawsuit that the company used a “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” when it began laying off about 10% of its workforce in May. Meta says humans make termination calls.

However that case shakes out, a couple of things are clear. Companies eager to gauge which employees are locked in now have sophisticated AI monitoring systems at their disposal. And they believe they have leverage in a tepid labor market.

So while we may chafe at having our worth reduced to numbers on the boss’s productivity dashboard, we have to play the game as it’s being played. Here are some tips, based on conversations with people who make employee monitoring systems—and others who game the systems.

Be meticulous about your calendar

Calendar integration is one way that productivity trackers have gotten more advanced and, ostensibly, fairer.

Let’s say you make an old-fashioned phone call or attend an in-person meeting. Your Outlook or Slack status may switch to “away,” making you appear as inactive as if you were taking an extended coffee break.

Employee monitors like one made by a company called Insightful cross-check your online status with your calendar to see whether there is a valid reason for your apparent inactivity. If that call or meeting is on your schedule, then the system will recognize that you are busy offline. If nothing is on the books, it could look like you’re slacking off.

Hit the activity sweet spot, around 80%

Let’s not go any further without addressing the underlying question: How much downtime is permissible during the workday? After all, people have been scared to let managers see anything non-work-related on their screens since personal computers first arrived in offices.

No one knows this better than Roger Wagner, who is widely credited with creating the first “boss button” in the early 1980s. He designed a keyboard shortcut to instantly display a spreadsheet if the boss walked by your cubicle while you were playing a computer game. Boss buttons have been features of countless diversions since. (I confess to using one built into a March Madness streaming app.)

Wagner, the founder of computer-education company 1010 Technologies, says his original design was a joke—more of a commentary on overbearing managers than a cover for lazy employees. Good bosses understand workers need mental breaks throughout the day, he says.

This matches what I heard from Insightful Chief Executive Ivan Petrovic. He says customers that use his company’s workforce-management platform don’t expect employees to stay on task 100% of the time.

“On average companies are aiming for 60% to 80% of your time being utilized for work during the day,” he says.

Go ahead and exhale. It’s probably OK to watch an occasional YouTube video at your desk.

And if you’re going to artificially inflate your activity level, be careful. Hitting 90% could look suspicious.

Get physical

So don’t leave your mouse jiggler on all day. Choose the right one if you must resort to shenanigans.

There are lots of software applications that mimic the movements of a computer mouse, so you can appear to be working while away from your desk. There are also devices that plug into computer ports and do the same thing.

Corporate cybersecurity systems increasingly block these apps and devices, and productivity trackers claim to be able to detect them. But some workers swear by mouse docks, like one made by Tech8 USA, that keep cursors moving. The company originally made mouse-moving software but now focuses on physical jigglers.

“People are drawn to mechanical solutions because they’re so simple and don’t require software,” says Tech8 Marketing Director Sam Matthews. “As monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated, that distinction has become even more relevant.”

Use AI, but not too much

Another popular metric for employee-monitoring systems is AI usage. Companies want to know who is embracing new tools, and it can be tempting to think more is better.

“There’s a performative aspect where employees overblow their usage of AI so that they appear relevant in the organization,” says Andrea Derler, principal researcher at Visier, which helps companies track and analyze employee work habits.

In a recent Visier survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 48% admitted to exaggerating their AI usage.

This is already an outdated strategy. Using AI for everything used to score points for experimentation. Now it can seem wasteful because many companies are watching AI token spending more carefully.

Look, productivity theater has always been part of work. Most of us aren’t trying to cheat the system, but expectations are changing so quickly that we need to be savvy about what the latest employee trackers are looking for.

Sometimes it takes a little gamesmanship to get full credit for our contributions.