Business travel very often involves long hours in flight to
the city where your work will be done.
For most business people, this is lost productivity time that can be
torture if you cannot get work done in flight.
How often have you said to yourself or to a coworker, “That’s all right,
I will just work on that on the airplane.”
That is a noble intent but circumstances inside an airplane cabin,
especially in coach, can make the fulfillment of that commitment hard to
accomplish.
Like anything else, if you are going to redeem the time
while you are in the air, you should come prepared with an agenda of work you
can get done in that setting and with your expectations well in check before
you even check in. Let’s face it, the cabin
of a domestic airplane is not designed for business productivity. You may have a myriad of distractions from
crying babies to a talkative neighbor.
The airline personnel have quite an agenda of items to interrupt your
time with and then there is the turbulence and the narrow seats that dictate
that whatever you are going to get done is going have to be done in a place of
very little space availability.
To expect that you will have the seat next to you to spread
out your work or that this will be the flight of perfect peace and quiet is to
set yourself up for frustration and disappointment. So to be prepared to achieve some level of
productivity on an airplane, be aware of these limitations and design your work
so you can use that time within those constraints, not in spite of them.
A basic necessity to use to realize some level of
concentration in flight is a good set of ear plugs or an earphone and an
ipod. You can use that device to pipe
music to your mind that can be conducive to concentration and thought. Now earphones sufficient to block out the
kind of distractions you will encounter on an airplane will have to be pretty
sophisticated. So don’t cut corners on
this purchase. It will pay you back over
and over as you use them to block out surface noise in airplane cabin.
The best way to walk off of that airplane with a sense of
accomplishment is to set your goals before you board and make them goals you
can attain. You cannot expect to be able
to open up your laptop and work peacefully in coach. It is very possible you will be able to do
that but you may find turbulence, an active population around you or other
factors may make such work very difficult to do. So to be sure, prepare a project to work on
using your laptop but don’t be disappointed if it turns out to be too difficult
to attempt. And above all avoid having a
deadline you have to hit using the time during your flight to make up for lost
time on your deadlines. That will only
make the flight frustrating and result in an angry and worn out business traveler.
The best form of work you can assign to yourself is analysis
or reading. If you have a document or
some documents to review, the confines of an airplane seat accommodate that
work just fine. Business reading is
easily the best form of work to do in flight.
Using those head phones to block out the world, you can lay back with a
book, a business magazine or a report and take your time to study it or read
lengthy blocks of that material during a long flight. In a two to three hour flight, you can read entire
chapters of a business book and come off the flight with a tremendous amount of
food for thought to take into your businesses meetings at your destination.
It is possible to redeem the time in the air by
accomplishing some solid work. But the
key to getting success at that goal is to be realistic about what can be done
in an airplane seat and tailoring your expectations and goals accordingly. If you do that, you will be happy with how
you used the time and the flight will go by much more quickly as well.
