Do You Feel Pressured to Work From the Plane?

In light of what I wrote in the newsletter this week about Mercedes-Benz integrating Teams and Copilot into their car, I also found this related bit by Kelly Vaughn in After Burnout:

You’re allowed to just sit on the plane.

That voice used to drive everything. It pushed me through burnout, even when my body was screaming for rest. It rewarded me for being “disciplined,” for being the person who could always squeeze in one more task, one more hour.

But here’s the truth I’ve been learning the hard way:

You don’t have to fill every empty space with productivity.

That last sentence I quoted is something I’ve talked about before. At what point do we get to stop being “productive” and enjoy ourselves? For some people, I don’t think it ever comes. There’s some masochistic religious outlook that work is the only thing that gives us meaning, and it must come before everything else.

I don’t think we can ignore the fact that this spills out of politicians every day, either.

When I traveled all over for work, I learned very quickly not to work much on airplanes. One reason is that the company wouldn’t pay for WiFi, so clearly it wasn’t that important to them. Second, because I’m a reasonably large person, working on a laptop in an economy seat is highly uncomfortable. It is for anyone, regardless of size. Third, because on long flights, I would rest. No one wants a trainer to show up tired and jet-lagged to train their users. It made sense to get some sleep to avoid that.

And no, I didn’t feel guilty about it. I know some would likely argue that I should have, but I would point out that the company made no effort to make it accessible for me to work, as evidenced by not paying for upgraded seats, WiFi, or a smaller laptop. None of that happened.

Let me conclude with a story from my time living in Greenville, SC. My connections were often in and out of Charlotte. The distance between those two airports is about 84 miles. The flight is nothing. Most of the time, it was a propeller plane and took about 35 minutes to fly. If you were lucky, and a jet was scheduled, the total flight time was around 17 minutes, as I recall. One late night, on the last connection leaving Charlotte, after 10 PM, I watched a passenger get on, unpack her laptop to put it in the seatback, and as soon as we hit 10,000 feet, she had that thing out and was working away. Three minutes later, we were approaching GSP, and she had to put it away.

After deplaning, she immediately sat down and retrieved her laptop, waiting for her checked bag to arrive.

I was not impressed by her productivity. I was more concerned about how miserable she looked and how she was likely to crash.

All these years later, who knows what happened to her? Maybe she’s a CEO somewhere now. I would be willing to bet, however, that whatever important work she was doing has long been forgotten and made very little difference to anyone.

Years from now, is anyone going to remember that thing you tied yourself into a pretzel to complete while 30,000 feet in the air? It’s unlikely. But your body and brain will be affected by the rest you didn’t get.

The goal of life is not to spend every minute being productive. There’s so much more than that.

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