I have been averaging more than one trip a month since July of 2009, and it feels like a lot of travel, so I want to record some numbers about it in case I want to compare at some point. For the purposes of this accounting, a trip requires that I got on an airplane or stayed in a hotel while not in the Greater Boston Area. For the record I have not stayed in a hotel in the Greater Boston Area during the time period. Lets start with a graph:
The blue line is 1 if I was not home (away) and 0 if I was home on a given date. If i was traveling home on a day the line is a 1. The red line is 0 when I am home, 1 when I am traveling for work, and 0.5 when I am traveling for pleasure. Since the red line is on top of the blue, you can really just think of the blue as personal trips.
This tells us that I spent all of October in Boston, a fact I had forgotten. I have been averaging 1.3 trips per month divided between 0.5 personal trips per month and 0.8 work trips per month.
This has lead to a total traveling percentage of almost 32% of days. That is on any given day there is a 32% chance I’m not in Boston. I would have expected that number to be much higher, but the graph seems to agree with it. If we look only at 2010 only I’ve been gone for a slightly higher 36%, but I really feel like it’s been 50%. That’s the point of the analysis. I now know that 32% is way too high.