I travel at most 5 times a year. This includes: all invited lectures, all NSF/Darpa investigator or panel meetings, conferences, special workshops, etc. Typically it looks something like this: I do one or two invited lectures at places where I really like the people, I go one full week to a main conference, I do maybe one NSF/Darpa event, and I reserve one wildcard to attend something I really care about (e.g. the Grace Hopper Conference, or a workshop on a special topic). It is *not easy* to say no that often, especially when the invitations are so attractive, or when the people asking are so ungraceful in accepting no for an answer. But when I didn’t have this limit I noticed other things. Like how exhausted and unhappy I was, how I got sick a lot, how it affected my kids and my husband, and how when I stopped traveling I had so much more time to pay real attention to my research and my amazing students.
The author of that post wound up getting tenure at Harvard on schedule, and then getting further promoted to full professor unusually fast.
Anyway, for my part, I have little kids, so traveling is a burden on my family, in addition to sucking up a surprising amount of time / energy (much more than you would think just the nominal travel time, because there’s also booking & planning, packing & unpacking, catching up on chores and sleep and taking notes afterwards, etc.). Big opportunity cost.
There’s a school of thought that academics travel much much more than optimal or healthy. See Cal Newport’s Deep Work, where he cites a claim that it’s “typical for junior faculty to travel twelve to twenty-four times a year”, and compares that to Radhika Nagpal’s blog post The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life which says:
The author of that post wound up getting tenure at Harvard on schedule, and then getting further promoted to full professor unusually fast.
Anyway, for my part, I have little kids, so traveling is a burden on my family, in addition to sucking up a surprising amount of time / energy (much more than you would think just the nominal travel time, because there’s also booking & planning, packing & unpacking, catching up on chores and sleep and taking notes afterwards, etc.). Big opportunity cost.