Travel is broadening! Travel is exotic! Travel is also exhausting. Which prompts the question: Has anyone figured out how to stay put? Fast Company hit the road in search of professionals who have found ways not to travel. How have they reshaped their organizations and developed new work strategies? How do they maintain relationships and settle disputes from afar? Here, 16 road-savvy time travelers offer their road-tested methods on how you can reshape the road to the future by traveling on that road less often.

Nick Shelness

Chief Technology Officer
Lotus Development Corp.
Edinburgh, Scotland

My wife and I live in a renovated late-seventeenth-century corn mill 60 miles north of Edinburgh, Scotland -- and about 3,500 miles from Lotus headquarters. We moved there in 1991 -- four years after my wife had surgery for a neurological condition. During most of those four years, she spent about a third of her time in the hospital. Even so, before we moved, she was still running the molecular-medicine lab at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. Her neurologist told her, "We can't guarantee that if you stop working, you'll get better. But if you don't stop, we can guarantee that you won't." She's Scottish, so we moved to Scotland.

I spend about a third of each year on the road. The rest of the time, I work from my home, where I have four computers. In the morning, I can work uninterrupted, but in the afternoon, I'm constantly communicating. To keep my travel load to a minimum while making sure that the CEO knows my activities, I submit weekly reports detailing what I've accomplished.

In truth, those reports are more for me than for him. Having a written record of what I've done is very valuable. When you work at home, it's easy to feel ineffectual. If you're at home reading and thinking, and the phone isn't ringing, it's easy to lose track of what you've accomplished. Maybe people with huge egos don't have that problem, but I do.

Nick Shelness (shelness@lotus.com) is lead evangelist of Lotus Development's technological vision. He also works with IBM Research. At both Lotus and IBM, Shelness is a fellow -- the most senior technical designation at each company.

Andrew McGrath

Technical-Design Manager
British Telecommunications PLC
Ipswich, United Kingdom

My job over the past few years has been to look at how people who live in different cities work together. I'm not against people getting together. But many people don't want to spend all of their time on an airplane. We've done studies on office behavior -- what happens when people run into one another at, say, the photocopier. When you don't share office space with people, things like networking and exchanging information tend to dry up. I'm looking at ways to enable those interactions to occur between people who work in different cities.

My team has created the "Forum Contact Space," a 3-D world that appears in a little window on your computer. You, and whoever else is participating, appear online as animated figures called "avatars." Your avatar moves into different rooms depending on which project you're working on. You may find yourself in a room with three other people who are located in different cities. If several people are in the same room with you, you're free to interact with all of them. You can upgrade the contact space to a "meeting room," or you can shut off the talk feature, indicating that you're unavailable.