Musings on productivity

For some reason, I'm oddly productive on plane rides.

It's no surprise to me that my most productive stretch for both writing/reading were in the last two months. As part of the Sequoia Arc program, we had to fly a total of three times to the West Coast and back. This phenomenon isn't a recent trend for me either – I distinctly remember writing Burnout at 3:00AM on a plane ride back to NYC, but I've had countless other examples like this in the past.

In Deep Work, Cal Newport mentions the prolific author Peter Shankman who took this to another level:

And I brought my laptop and a sweatshirt and a power cord and my headphones. And I got on the plane and I wrote chapters one through five on the flight to Tokyo, I landed into Tokyo, went to the lounge, 14 hours, had a cup of coffee and a piece of sushi, took a shower, got back on the same plane, same seat, two hours later, and wrote chapter six through 10 on the flight home. I didn’t even clear immigration. I landed 34 hours like that later with a book. And then got held up Homeland Security for five hours because I didn’t actually clear immigration in Tokyo. But literally I spent $5,000 and everyone was like, “Oh my God, you’re crazy. You spent $5,000 to go nowhere.” I’m like, “No, I spent $5,000 to write a book because I know how my brain works.”

At least for me, on a plane, there's literally nothing for me to do. Falling asleep causes my legs to cramp, watching a movie on the tiny screen doesn't appeal to me, and the wifi has never been good enough to do any real procrastination.

A more interesting question I'd like to answer is how I might find the same level of focus without actually having to board a flight. I find that at home, I'm easily distracted by everything on the internet. I've purged consuming social media from my life, but I feel like I've replaced the time spent on social media with supposedly "better" sources (YouTube, Hacker News, NBA blogs, NYT).

Overall, I think that I just need to be more intentional with dedicating time to either read or write, especially on the weekends - but I've found this is much easier said than done. The end of the year is quickly approaching, and I'm behind my yearly goals (as usual) for both reading and writing. I'm hoping that blocking off time will be enough, but I guess we'll see in January of 2023.