Years from now, when Up in the Air has achieved cult status and a social critic decides that George Clooney's Ryan Bingham was the perfect icon for the distracted, disconnected, self-involved first decade of the 21st century, I'll still be harping on this absurdity: "Last year," the Bingham character says, "I spent 322 days on the road, which means that I had to spend 43 miserable days at home."

Only frequent-flyer wannabes think that. Those of us who really do live our lives on the road cherish our free time at home and back at the office. We're not down in the dumps about not being up in the air. We're thrilled. It gives us time to do the mundane little tasks that we've been unable to accomplish while traveling.

Since our most concentrated off-the-road time comes now, during the Christmas-New Year holiday, I thought we'd be well served by checking our to-do list. A couple of weeks from now, when we're back up in the air, we'll have either finished our respective lists—or delayed dealing with them for another year.

Clean Your Metaphoric Junk Drawer

Most homes have a "junk drawer" where the detritus and the irreplaceables of daily life seem to live. The laptop bag is the metaphoric junk drawer of a life on the road. It's where we ditch our dried-out highlighters, half-used pads of Post-it notes, stray thumb drives, discarded discs, abandoned proposals, and every paper clip we own. Use some of your free time to clean out your bag. Dump the trash, reorganize the good stuff, and leave just a few paper clips at the bottom of the bag. You never know when you'll need to uncurl one and stick one end into the little hole near the eject button of your drive to free a balky disc.

Do You Really Need Mink Oil Body Wash?

While you're in the clean-up mode, edit your toiletries kit. If you're putting your stuff in your carry-on bag, thus following the Transportation Security Administration's 3-1-1 rule, you need all of the space you can make. Time to dump the fancy toiletries you took from hotel rooms or airline amenity kits because you thought you might buy some yourself some day. Get back to the basics: one bottle or tube of anything you consider precious. Everything else goes. And if you have a surfeit of sundries, consider donating them to your local shelter or check with a national organization called Hospitality for the Homeless.

Surfing for Dollars

Business travelers like to think we know all the discount angles and get the best airfares, room rates, and car-rental prices. But you'd be surprised how much we miss because we're too busy during the year to surf the Web looking for discount and promotional codes. While you've got the downtime, make a list of your preferred travel suppliers. Then Google that company's name along with the phrases "promotional codes" and "discount codes." There are guaranteed to be dozens of discounts you literally didn't know about. Just this past weekend, for example, I scored 15 percent off the best weekly rental rate I could otherwise negotiate from Enterprise Rent-A-Car. All I did was Google for a promotion, then enter the code in the mysterious little box on the reservation form that said "promo number."

Play Your Cards Right

If you're even modestly creditworthy, your pile of unread mail probably has dozens of offers from credit-card issuers promising tens of thousands of bonus points or miles if you'd only take some airline or hotel's newest affinity card. Your end-of-the-year time at home is the perfect opportunity to reassess the credit and charge cards in your travel wallet and balance them against the newbies on offer. I'm not big on "churning" (taking new cards just for the sign-up bonuses), but you may find that you're ripe for a change in cards. And even if you aren't, now is a great time to call your credit-card company and tell them that you might switch if they don't waive the annual fee. You'll be surprised how many will make the charge disappear for a year as a "courtesy" for a good customer.