What I learned from flying for 49 hours last month

So you might think that spending 49 hours in the air is a lot of time, but don’t forget the time spent waiting at the gate. The security checks, waiting for your luggage. All these accumulative efforts add up to almost twice that amount of time. How do you get anything done while spending so much time in transit? Let me tell you about the ways I stay productive while flying around the world.

First let me explain you where exactly my travels took me. I left my home-country Lebanon and flew to London to present at FullStack Conference. After London I flew to Lisbon and spent 10 days there as a freelance programming teacher for the Le Wagon coding bootcamp. I’m happy to say I was invited to be a database and front-end teacher for the first batch in Lisbon, Portugal. Then I jumped on a plane to Brussels to teach front-end for 3 days with the Le Wagon bootcamp in Brussels.

Afterwards I flew in to Sydney, Australia to present at the first Norwegian Developer Conference (NDC) in Sydney. A few days later, I took the plane to Brisbane to visit family, and then the journey was over. I headed back from Brisbane to Beirut, Lebanon.

At first flying seemed like a major assault on my productivity. I started carrying my laptop with me in the cabin because I knew I had a lot of time to ‘waste’ during the flight. But the lack of internet and social media disturbances left me in a state of undisturbed productivity and soon enough

I started to realise I was actually most productive while flying.

After this revelation I began setting up my laptop and planning a set of tasks to work on during the flight. I manually transfer my tasks from Trello and Google inbox to a text file and preload all documents I might need.

If you’re a developer, this wouldn’t work for documentation.. You have absolutely no idea what kind of functions you’ll encounter. Luckily, “There’s an app for that!” and it’s called Dash (or devdocs), which gives you offline access to software documentation. Can’t fly without Dash!

The message I want to get across today is that you might be the most productive in places you’d never expect yourself to be. Always keep an eye on ways you can make the most of a situation. Adapt!

Checkout my interactive JavaScript course: learnjavascript.online

Text edited by Lars Böhm