Photo by Kai-Chieh Chan.
We joke that one decision ruined business travel forever. Not shrinking legroom. Not sodium as a meal. Not extending lounge access to infrequent flyers. And not the shift from a collective movie-watching experience to hyper-individualistic AVOD selections whereupon every child on the plane ends up accidentally watching 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. No, while all of these elements contributed to the slow and steady degradation of air travel, by far, the single worst moment happened in the late aughts.
The introduction of in-flight wifi was initially heralded as a boon for workplace productivity. Think of how much email you can sort through while catapulting through the sky. Sleeping on that transatlantic redeye? Not so fast. Now you can refine the presentation one last time and arrive to deliver it utterly sleep deprived.
What we gained in quick, short-term wins. Replying to the pings of our colleagues with pongs from above the clouds. We lost in our ability to unplug and stare mindlessly out the window while listening to Elton John’s Rocket Man on repeat. And if you still don’t understand why that would be devastating for business travellers, let’s break it down.
In the pre-wifi era, the flight was your literal liminal space. Either the from or the to. Time to think about what you want the meeting to be, how you want the presentation to go. Or time to reflect on how it went. Either because you rocked it. Or because the presentation bombed. But whether you were in the to or the from, there was nothing but time, the meditative white noise of a 737 engine, and your thoughts.
These hours are not the same weight or value as your inbox-takedown hours. They are where you think about who you want to be, what the role requires of you, how you are showing up for your team. And they are where you surprise yourself with solutions to thorny, annoying problems that won’t go away.
Your receipts shouldn’t be waterlogged
There’s a reason your best ideas happen in the shower. And why it helps to close your computer to take a walk outside when you’re trying to figure something out. No one has ever suggested that you use your big-idea shower time to organize your travel receipts. If they did, you would be within your rights to yell at that person and then kick them in the shins. But that’s precisely what happened when they rolled out in-flight wifi.
This is the trick when your job is thinking big thoughts. Your greatest contributions are often non-linear. You can get to inbox zero and not have moved a lever or advanced a single goal the business cares about. More often, the biggest impact stuff shows up in the quietest moments. When your laptop is shut. When your mind is clear. When you’re turning over very old problems in very new contexts.
If your job involves thinking big thoughts then, by design, you need time to think them. The thing we lost when inflight wifi became standard was a predictable place for long-form integrated thinking. And if you lived it you know, the magic of this time was that you couldn’t easily swap it for the short-term shit. You had to sit in the discomfort of your own mind.
We don’t need you to deliberately sabotage the wifi on your next business flight (truly, you will get in so much trouble). A plane doesn’t even need to be involved. But if you ask leaders today where their long-form integrated thinking happens, many of them will tell you it doesn’t. And, again, if we need them thinking big thoughts and the design of their work doesn’t have a place for that to happen, then, um, it’s simply not happening. And that’s a miss. For bosses and for every person reporting up through them. And for workplaces writ large.
Wasting your shot
And then, sometimes you do find the time. Sometimes the right meetings get cancelled in the right sequence. Or you have a moment of genuine proactive planning and block your morning, and no one books over it, and here you are, it’s 10am, the sun is shining, you have your coffee, and a high-protein snack, and a blinking cursor.
blink.
blink.
blink.
We know how this story goes because so many of you have told us and also because we’ve lived it. The way this story goes is that after the cursor blinks for a minute, you check slack. Maybe you ask Claude to prioritize some stuff for you and then fuss with the prompts because it’s giving you crappy suggestions. A little thing comes up in email that doesn’t really need your attention right now but it’s an easy fix and maybe it will give you some forward momentum. So you do that, which takes slightly longer than expected because you’ve got a new team member so you have to spell things out but then you’re back at your cursor again. Coffee’s cold, though. And you realize you’ve wasted 41 minutes of your 90-minute block and you feel this hot, rising feeling of? Embarrassment? Or anxiety, maybe? Something bad anyway. Something in the general neighbourhood of failure.
blink.
blink.
blink.
What’s even the point of blocking the time if it makes you feel like shit? It feels like you’re failing at, like, thinking. And with half your time and all of your energy already gone, you just resign yourself to letting all the distractions back in because at least those feel useful. Even though you’re afraid that you’re missing whatever the other thing was meant to be. Even though you’re afraid that you wasted your shot at it this time. Or maybe afraid that you waste your shot at it a lot of the time, and wondering if that means you’re broken.
You aren’t broken
If you see yourself in any of this the first thing you should know is that you’re not alone and this is something a lot of leaders struggle with and you can get better at it. Okay, so that’s three things, but listen, they’re closely related things. It turns out that it’s really fucking hard to think these days? Particularly to think any thought that takes more than a second or two to form. Which is a lot of the good ones. It’s hard, but it’s possible.
Here’s what we find works.
To start with, let’s get rid of the blinking cursor. No laptop. No phone. No chat-fucking-GPT. The push notifications are definitely not helping, and the LLMs are actively harmful to critical thought. If you’re on an airplane, tell your devices to forget the wifi network. Find yourself some paper and a writing implement. Actual paper, actual ink. If you’re busy writing yourself an excuse note for why you need a screen, we can’t stop you, just know that screens are what got you into this mess, and that if we’re building new skill we should expect some discomfort. If you’re protesting that there is no paper on this flight just know that we have, more than once, used the barf bags as notepaper. And you can, too.
Once you’re sorted, we’re gonna spend 10 minutes just getting it all out on to the page. All the open loops, half-finished thoughts, the “what are we doing about…” and the “I keep forgetting to…” This is free writing — no one cares about your grammar or spelling or whether your thoughts are well-organized. Feelings are allowed. Just get it out there. We know you don’t write so much any more, but you can do anything in the world for 10 minutes. And while you’re doing it, you’re priming your brain, lighting up context, giving all that noise somewhere to go. (Also you’re plausibly reducing depression and anxiety, whoops!)
Even if it took you 5 minutes to find paper and pen, plus 10 minutes of writing time, we’ve still got 75 minutes to go. Pick one. One thing from that list of noise. The hottest one. Or the fastest one. Or the one you’ve been putting off. Or the one you’ve been eager to get to. The point isn’t which one you pick so much as that your brain is now 15 minutes off of screens, and ready to start to think about any of them. Write it again at the top of a clean page. What comes after that is down to the particulars. It might be pros and cons, or a list of options. It might be a new org chart, or a work-back plan, or the realization that your annoucement has to move. There might be no words at all on the page because the thoughts are happening in your head. That’s awesome. You can do this part outside if you want. Unless you’re on an airplane.
You may find you’re done early. Or that you reach a spot where you need other people, but now you know what you’re asking them. Or that you have an outline but now you need to fill it all in. We’re not saying you can solve everything in a 90-minute block. But for a surprising number of things, 90 minutes of thought represents an immense amount of progress. Wouldn’t you like to be someone who makes immense amounts of progress?
We know. You’re worried that it still might not work. But what if you did these things and it did work? What if you had even just one of these a month? What if you got good at it, and had one a week? How different would your work and your life feel in a year if you had fifty of these blocks? To thoughtfully consider. To think before deciding instead of racing to justify your decision after the fact. To figure out what your actual opinion is instead of just guessing at which decision path will create the fewest headaches and falling into that one out of pure loss aversion and exhaustion.
It’s possible. It’s worth the effort. The bone temple will still be there when your time is up.
— Melissa & Johnathan
