So you’re on a short flight for business. You have about an hour or so and it’s an early morning flight because you are only away for the day. Your boss doesn’t like paying for a hotel! So what can you do to make this time as productive as possible? Well here are ten things you can do to change that nap time into a productive use of your valuable time.
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Although you are offline, you can still review and respond to email. Just make sure your settings are up to date and that you login into your email on your laptop. When you are online again, all those emails which are sitting in your outbox will be sent.
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Improve your personal brand. Write a blog post or an article to be published on either your own platforms or social media such as LinkedIn.
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Take some time to review your to do list. Just as you would review your list as one of your first tasks in the office, you can use your flight time to organise your day or your week.
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Get out your ‘ideas’ book’. If you don’t have an online or physical book to deposit your ideas, then you should probably get one started. I have a physical book I take on holidays with me and I use Onenote online to jot down ideas as they occur. Flight time is a great time to actually think about what’s going on in your job, career or business. You will be surprised what happens when you start writing these ideas down.
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Budgets! Spreadsheets don’t need to be online. Of course you need to download them to your device beforehand. I find as a business manager with a variety of responsibilities, the time to spend on analysis is hard to find. As an ex-accountant, I also know that getting into the detail of your accounts can be very revealing.
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Read a book! Not a Dan Brown page turner, instead get into a business title that may help you put some ideas into your own ideas’ book.
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Make a list. Sounds a little odd but creating lists can be a remarkable way of revealing opportunity. Here are a few lists you may want to put together.
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Who are my best customers?
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Who are my target prospects?
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What are my priorities in the next 6 months?
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Success and failures of the past year.
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Tidy up your laptop / tablet. If you’re anything like me, you save a lot of irrelevant files on your device. Many people don’t realise that when you save these on your desktop, it affects the performance of your windows machine. So spring clean those files and feel the freedom.
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Listen to or read the interviews conducted with business leaders. I know that flying with Qantas and Virgin, you can either listen to, or read conversations with many business leaders. It’s not something you are going to do on the weekend, but during flight time you may pick up something of which you weren’t previously aware.
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You’re on a business trip. Review your notes for that up-coming meeting. Maybe you can practice your presentation.
There are plenty of things to make that time ‘fly’. I’m writing this on a quick trip to the people2people office in Brisbane and the cabin is being prepared for landing, so it’s time to sign off.
