Airplane mode

I used to hate airplane mode. The first draft of these post I did write on my phone on a plane from Brussels to Malaga. It has been dismissed. Because of the Airplane mode. But the post was about the advantages of using Airplane mode.

What do I mean by that? In our connected world, we love to be able to call, send, read anything at any time. I get angry and anxious if I can’t look up something online.

Sitting on a plane, a metal tube without being connected is frustrating at first. 2.5-hour flight is one of the shorter ones, but it is still 2.5 hours without being able to use online services. And I do use online services. E-mail, messenger, Instagram, even my music is on Spotify.

After an hour of listening to my offline available music and slept half an hour still got an hour left in Airplane mode.
I had to do something. I started answering my e-mails, reorganizing them. Archive the ones I might need sometime later, delete the boring ones. And after a while, I got an empty inbox. Wow. I can imagine how the small dwarfs at the Gmail HQ got a shock the time my phone was connecting to the airport wifi and got a huge amount of work to do. Send out e-mails archive and delete the ones in my inbox.

Airplane mode is not a prison. Quite the opposite. It is an opportunity to work distraction-free.

That's it. Since I landed and did work on my presentation, I went airplane mode. Yes, I did. And I was much faster because I closed out all the messages that could distract me from focusing on my work.

Do you go airplane mode?

The post originally appeared on my medium.