Riding in planes ain’t so bad. I wholeheartedly believe they’re safer than cars–and this is the one actual advantage of having short legs. So I don’t mind riding in planes. Maybe, I admit, I even look forward to it a little. But more important than that, I usually get quite a bit of work done on planes. It’s surely the lack of distractions, right? No Internet, no family, no workmates, no phone calls, just me and my laptop (or book).
But perhaps there’s more than just a lack of distractions that accounts for my productivity while aloft: maybe it’s also a sense of agency or freedom. Nobody’s about to tell me what to do, and I know it. I have a block of hours that I know I can dispose of in just the way I like. I might be crammed in a 31″ (average legroom) by 16.5″ (average width) box by rapacious airlines with razor-thin profit margins, but my ability to control my time is positively liberating.
Distraction and lack of agency are both rather puzzling. They seem to be wholly psychological. What, really, is the difference between me sitting at my workstation at home and doing some work and sitting with a laptop in a plane seat? There seems to be nothing more than an awareness that certain things are possible–that I might choose to do something that would (sadly) distract me, or that someone might ask me to do something or interrupt me. I personally lack the ability to turn off that awareness; I can’t as it were put myself into airplane mode. But that inability is simply a decision I make. It’s not a bad think that I make it. I don’t want to be the sort of person who “gives zero f***s.” But riding in an airplane cuts us off, temporarily. And that seems to be a good thing, sometimes, for me anyway.
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