"Cellular telephones may not be used at any time during the flight as they may disrupt the navigation equipment on the airplane."
One of my favorite things about flying is that, for a few hours, nobody can get to you. Think about it. How many people have you seen make a phone call from those expensive airplane telephones? The sound quality is low, and the price is high. An airline seat may be the only place where you have time to just sit, read and think.
Personal productivity expert David Allen estimates that a typical businessperson has 170 interactions every single day. An interaction includes taking a phone call, listening to a voice mail, and reading and responding to email. Of course, there are also scheduled staff meetings as well as impromptu hallway conversations.
How long is your average "Got a minute?" meeting? Answer: At least five and often 15 minutes or more. Those are the meetings that drive me crazy.
It gets worse when you do the math. One-hundred-seventy interactions per day mean 850 interactions per week. Divide 850 by 40 hours, and you have a whopping 21-plus interruptions per hour, meaning that you have less than three minutes in a row to think about any one thing before the next interaction presents itself.
What's needed is not a more elaborate time-management system, but more of what management consultant guru Peter Drucker called chunk time -- a block of time devoted to one thing instead of multitasking.
Coming in early, staying late and working Saturdays is the way many busy professionals buy some time to think and focus on one thing.
There is no question that coming in at 6 a.m. is one way to get significant work done before interactions start. But is it the only way? Long hours can ultimately take a toll on your personal productivity and family life. Even Bill Gates claims he is not working Sundays anymore and has cut back to eight hours per day on Saturdays.
Many of my clients now say to me, "Why don't you call me at my home office. I work there Thursday afternoons." This is a trend. In fact, I know of one boss who ordered his report to take four uninterrupted hours away from the office every week so he could think about his job instead of reacting to everyone on his team who wanted a piece of him. Some millionaires have home offices where they work uninterrupted on important projects that need their full attention.
Assuming you aren't on airplanes every week, consider scheduling time at home or in a spare office somewhere else. Check your voice mail and email every hour or two if you must, but allow yourself an hour of full concentration on an important issue or project. That proposal you're procrastinating on writing will yield more in commissions than having a cup of coffee with a coworker.
Think of this time as time to think. You can thank me later, and you'll actually have the time to do it. By the way, I went home and wrote this article in less than two hours. It would have taken me a day to get it finished at the office.