How to Get Work Done On Airplanes
Learn tips for using a plane flight to be more productive.
If you travel a lot, you need to know how make the most of your time on planes. I first started working on planes when I started speaking on entrepreneurship and leadership.How to Work on Airplanes
With laptops, it’s tempting to bring your entire office with you when you fly. Don’t! Planes are perfect for the things you can’t do in your normal office. Your office is a mishmash of phone calls, emails, text messages, interruptions, and multitasking. In other words, utterly unproductive time that erodes your brain and turns you into an anxiety-ridden hair-trigger explosion waiting to happen. Reproducing that on a plane is a bad idea.
Work Faster on Planes by Using Paper
I recommend not bringing a laptop and doing your plane work on paper. Working on paper gives you time to think about what you’re doing and do a really good job. Paper needs no power cords. Besides, with a laptop, the person next to you can clearly read your strategic plan. You may not care now, but when you walk into the negotiating room and she turns out to be the CEO of the company you’re negotiating with, you’ll regret it. True story.
Even work like designing slides or writing a first draft can go faster on paper than with a computer. That’s because on computer, we get sucked into adjusting font size, choosing clipart, and creating transitions. With paper, we concentrate purely on content and can type it in later.
How to Focus Better on Planes
Unless you bring your laptop, planes are ideal for focus activities like analyzing. Bring your eastern division sales data and you might really notice that polka dots are the new herringbone. You’d never spot that back in your office.
Speculating is another focus activity. Your boss wants market forecasts for 2013. You think she’s crazy. Between peak oil, global warming, and the 2012 Mayan apocalypse, it’s hard to know the demand for plastic back-scratchers manufactured in Chichén Itzá. But a plane flight gives time to really speculate about the forecasts. You might realize that thanks to the Mayan apocalypse, there won’t be a January 2013, so you can safely forecast 0 sales.
And creating is the most fun focus activity of all! Brainstorm, jot down ideas, draw, and mind map. Let your brain run wild, and plane flights can be great for creativity.
Use your plane flights for focus work that you can’t usually do in an office.
Use Your Plane Flight to Catch Up on Reading
If you don’t have any focus work or can’t focus, do mindless activities instead. Finish those unfinished expense reports, letters of recommendation, and thank you cards. Or read. Catch up on all those articles you saved, thinking you’d read someday. Or read books. As you can imagine, I read lots of vampire novels. I would read zombie novels, but they remind me too much of work.
Only Bring One or Two Projects On Board with You
Only bring two projects on board with you. Put each in a single file folder. Keep one folder out to work on, and keep the other in your carry-on. When it’s time to switch, just swap the folders. Since there’s only one folder in the bag to grab, no rummaging required.
Having two projects is motivational! You procrastinate your sales report by working on Melvin’s 360-degree evaluation. Then you procrastinate finishing Melvin’s evaluation by working on the sales report. Perpetual motivation through perfect synergy!
Create a Business Travel Kit
If you travel often, put together a business travel kit. Fill a small satchel with the business stuff you need for a plane: a pencil, extra cell phone, laptop charger, earphones, calculator, pins, and a voodoo doll of your boss. When it’s time to travel, grab your kit and go.
Don’t Force It; Maybe Planes Are Your Time Out
Even with all this, you might find you just can’t work on planes. Don’t force it. Leisure is essential to life! Your plane flight can be a time to relax and smell the flowers.
Use your plane flights for focus work that you can’t usually do in an office: analyzing, speculating, and creating. If you can’t focus on planes, go to the opposite extreme and do all the brainless tasks you usually put off. Bring only two projects at a time, and create a business travel kit so you never need to go hunting for everything you need to work on the plane.
And for more Get-It-Done travel tips, please click here.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
RESOURCES
Peak oil – Peak oil
Global warming – Global warming
The 2012 Mayan Apocalypse – 2012 End of Days
Multitasking destroyes your brain – New York Times Brain Article
Mindmaps – Mindmaps
Working on Plane image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
