- In 2018, I interviewed Piers Constable, a managing director at Deutsche Bank who traveled 10 days per month for work, about what a typical day in his life looked like.
- It involved countless hours spent on airplanes, face-to-face client meetings, workouts in hotel gyms, and jogs in new cities.
- I caught up with Constable in May 2020 to see what his day-to-day looks like in a world changed by the coronavirus.
- The New York City-based executive has been working from home in the Catskills in upstate New York since the start of the lockdown, and he's discovered some unexpected benefits in doing so.
- He's been able to eat dinner with his wife every night, and he feels more efficient working from home, making him rethink how much business travel he needs to do in the future.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
In 2018, I interviewed Piers Constable, a New York City-based managing director at Deutsche Bank, about his daily routine in a world that is now virtually unrecognizable.
Back then, Constable spent a lot of time on planes and in hotels. On average, he traveled 10 days out of the month for work, meeting with clients and overseeing projects as the bank's head of structured trade and export finance division in the Americas. A competitive triathlete, he would work out in hotel gyms and take morning jogs to explore new cities.
The pandemic has upended that routine, making plane rides and face-to-face business meetings seem like distant memories.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown in New York, Constable has been working from home in the Catskill Mountains, about 100 miles north of New York City. He and his wife, a logistics manager at H&M, bought the house a couple of years ago to spend more time in the mountains, with no idea just how much time they'd be spending there.
"It's in the middle of nowhere and we have felt so fortunate being able to escape the city in this tough time," Constable told Business Insider.
On a typical day during the pandemic, Constable wakes up at 6 a.m., spends the day sending emails and making video calls with clients and colleagues, and manages to fit in daily walks and jogs on the empty, woodsy lanes near their house.
He's also found some unexpected benefits to being home all the time.
The simple joy of eating together
On a simple, human level, Constable now gets to eat dinner with his wife, which he rarely used to.
"This is probably the best change since the lockdown — I never cook dinner in the city and my wife and I rarely get home at the same time to eat," Constable said. "But we've cooked something different every night the past two months and [have] always taken the time to talk over the day we've just had — a real luxury that we'll definitely try and keep to once we get back to the city."
Like Constable and his wife, many people have used their extra time at home to cook and savor home-cooked meals, learn new baking skills, and whip up fancy cocktails.
As Devra First recently reported for the Boston Globe, eating together may be more important than ever right now.
"If families are pulling off one shared meal together, and during that meal everybody has a chance to talk and feel listened to, and it's a time of day everybody looks forward to and maybe has a few laughs, that will be an enormous help during this pandemic," Anne Fishel, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and cofounder of the nonprofit Family Dinner Project, told the Globe.
Those who aren't able to share a meal with family or friends are throwing virtual dinner parties to feel less isolated.
Questioning the necessity of business travel
On a larger scale, Constable describes being more efficient working from home and reconsidering the necessity of so much business travel.
"I'm connecting with colleagues and clients just as regularly as before, but now over phone and video, not face to face," he said. "I feel I'm much more efficient now, and it's definitely making me think twice about how much I need to travel going forward."
This aligns with the predictions of top travel industry CEOs, who say that business travel could become a thing of the past — or that, at least, it will be much less common.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, one of more than 200 CEOs who spoke with Business Insider for a project that examined how the coronavirus pandemic would change the world, said that the unprecedented number of people working from home in recent weeks has proved how much can be done using video conferencing.
"We used to do a lot of travel for work, and then we entertained ourselves on screens. That's going to inverse," Chesky told Business Insider. "I think we'll work more on screens and entertain ourselves in the real world."
Luke Ellis, CEO of hedge fund manager Man Group, said that business travel won't completely disappear, but it will be cut back significantly.
"I think there will be more selectivity around which meetings require travel and which can be done via video — both internally and with clients and companies, and also who needs to travel," Ellis told Business Insider.
Like Constable, some have found they're actually more efficient when working remotely.
"Paradoxically, the crisis has significantly improved the way we operate and made us more efficient with no lunches, dinners, or traveling," Sir Martin Sorrell, chairman of S4 Capital, a media company based in London, told Business Insider.
After traveling for five weeks in Costa Rica, Miami, Madrid, Paris, and Côte d'Ivoire before the lockdown, Constable wondered how he would cope with being stuck in one place.
"But I've surprised myself how I've adapted," he said. "I haven't missed the traveling because no one else is, and I feel I'm calmer now."
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