Holiday travel has always been a crunch. But new patterns are emerging as remote work allows more people greater flexibility in planning both trips and time off. 

Before the pandemic, Thanksgiving week travel had a predictable arc: There would be huge spikes the Wednesday before and the Sunday after the holiday. But over the past few years, Transportation Security Agency data now show travel spread out over a longer period of time — because some people are bringing their work with them. This mixing of business and leisure at the holidays has a lot of benefits … and some complications.

Before remote work became as commonplace as it is now, a trip to visit family during the winter holidays was a whole production for Julie Swenson, a social media manager in Edina, Minnesota.

“When you go away for a week, you feel like you’re going away for the next 10 years,” she said. “You’ve got to get everything done, get everybody up to speed and find a backup for every little thing, leave the office and, you know, use your precious PTO for flying time.”

Swenson’s mom and sister live in Arizona. So she’d always be flying at the busiest, most expensive, most stressful times: parachuting in for a short visit before rushing back home to work.

Now, she’s taking longer trips, where she can spend time with her family apart from the usual hectic holiday feasts. She can savor quiet coffee breaks with her mom or silly playtime with her 3-year-old nephew.

“I could never have done that in the old days,” Swenson said. “In fact, I wouldn’t have taken that trip in the old days, because it was such a hot and heavy time at work. But I could just keep right up because of remote work, which is just a wonderful gift. Really.”

Really! And yet, there are tradeoffs. The Wi-Fi can be fickle, the 3-year-old can be distracting, and Swenson’s mom isn’t always understanding when she needs to break away to meet a deadline.

“For me,” Swenson said, “things get too blended when we travel.”

All that work-life balance many people have found over the last couple years by working from our own homes can be thrown into disarray once we’re with our families, said Ashley Whillans, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School and author of “Time Smart: How to Reclaim Our Time and Live a Happier Life.”

“When we think about working from our parents’ house, we’re thinking about the food and the wine and the conversations,” Whillans said. “And then what we’re forgetting is sitting in the closet and trying to work on your fancy conference presentation in the middle of the night because you’ve been bothered by social events all day.”

Sometimes, too, you’re blithely interrupted by family members who are used to having the run of the house. 

For instance, last December I was taking an extended working holiday at my parents’ house. I was in my childhood bedroom, doing a Zoom interview with a nurse named Robert Down, when my dad popped in, looking for something he’d stashed in the room.

As it happens, my father was also a nurse. So excited to hear a familiar subject being discussed, he decided to chime in, asking Mr. Down a few of his own questions before apologizing and excusing himself.

“I won’t interrupt any longer,” he said. “It’s just that I live here and there’s stuff in this room I need.”

I mean, it’s a fair point. The whole situation is tough for parents, too.

“You know, it’s really hard to know when someone is doing something where they need silence,” said Kimberly Eddleston, a management professor at Northeastern University.

“At one moment, they’re in your living room. Another moment, they’re in the office,” she says of working family members. “Another moment, he’s in his bedroom,” she adds, referring to her own adult son.

Eddleston is an expert on work-family issues — yet she couldn’t help but annoy him when he was working at her house around Thanksgiving.

“I had him put, you know, just a little Post-It on his door like, you know, ‘do not enter,'” she said. “Because he was home and I was being the mom, doing the laundry and walking in his room, dropping piles of laundry, and there he was on the phone.”

Eddleston said setting a schedule for yourself and communicating it clearly to your family can help alleviate some of the confusion — whether you do it with Post-It notes or a conversation.

But at this time of year, she said, protecting work from the distractions of family is not as important as protecting family time from the distractions of work.

“Make sure you you do give yourself a break, that you shut down [your computer]. It does actually make us more productive and effective,” said Eddleston.

Although, she added, it’s OK to excuse yourself for a “work call” when family fun starts to turn into an argument.