The key to being productive when traveling is planning and selection. Yes, it is that simple. You see, the biggest mistake we all make is that we take a pile of stuff with us that we would like to get through, and in the end can’t face crawling past the big sweaty bloke in the aisle seat to lug a pile of paper out of your bulging cabin luggage. Or fighting with a laptop in the one cubic foot of space you have between your chest sand the reclined seat in front.
The first step is to plan your movements carefully, for example on my current trip to the US:
- 3 hour drive to airport Saturday night;
- 2 hours at airport Sunday morning;
- 8 hour flight;
- 2 hour drive to US site on Sunday afternoon.
Now normally I get phone calls done with my hands-free on long drives but it is a weekend travel so I’m not even going to bother – so that makes the two car journeys non-work time. Great, I’ll take some podcasts to listen to on them – need a 6 hour playlist.
2 hours at the airport are not going to be all in one place so handling a pile of files is daft – I have some reports to read through which shouldn’t need any note taking – I’ll print those off so I can read them in bits as a make my way through.
The flight is during the day so no need to sleep (or at least try to). I’ll have no power, but a bit of room so I can probably aim for 4 hours of laptop use – so than is enough to get that report done, and update the sales spreadsheet. The report is just from my head, but I need the schedule from Janet to do the sales sheet. I’ll factor in 2 hours of rest, which leaves me with two more – ideal to be taking notes on those documents I was send.
So I’m planned. All I need work wise is:
- The reports to read
- My laptop but not the charger
- The report from Janet
- The documents to make notes on
Everything else can go in the hold. And I don’t need to spend anytime faffing about deciding on what to do next, or starting something to find I haven’t go what I red with me.
Right, now off to plan the journey home…
