Business Travel - What to do on the many hours of flight travel? Types of flyers and 3 Tips for more productive flying.

Hours and hours are spent traveling for business, whether it be to meet clients, tie up business deals or negotiations with your biggest customers.

I, myself travel between 18 and 24 hours a month on flights between 5 different cities to see my customers (Yes, you can expect Food and Travel blogs from me in the future on places to see and places to eat across South Africa). The question is what do we do with all that travel time?
Now for the first time, thanks to Steemit, I took the time to observe what people do on a 2 hour flight this morning (during which, in the first 5 minutes of the flight, the flight attendant announces that they cannot heat the water, so no hot beverages will be served. Every 6AM travellers dream for a 2-hour flight) which prompted me to write this post. After my observations, I have come up with a list of types of flyers below:

The Sleeper:
I must admit when I initially started traveling like this 4 years back, I too was a sleeper. After 15 flights of snoring, leaning against the window, neck aches and the occasional drool I decided to invest in a memory foam neck pillow and boy was it a great decision! It gave me great neck support and comfort beyond anything you can imagine and if you are a plane-sleeper I would highly recommend this! It’s wayyyy more comfortable than the blow-up pillow. The only issue is the difficulty carrying it when you travel. Looking across the aircraft this morning I spotted at least 2 sleepers in each row of 6 people (granted this was a 6AM, 2 hour flight from Joburg to Cape Town) - majority of which had window seats. The aislers and middlers are the ones I really felt sorry for - the neck struggle is going to be real in around an hour!

The Newspaper-flyers:
Well, these are few and far between, however each flight contains around 5, and boy do they spread those newspapers wide! So, if you are unlucky enough to be next to the newspaper-flyers, I hope for your sake that they are kind enough not to spread it to your quadrant! These are usually males predominantly in their early 50’s.

The Daydreamers:
Aaah yes, my favourite kind of people. What I cannot understand is spending 2 hours on a flight just staring into space daydreaming!

The Business People:
There are plenty laptops open with people vigorously typing away (including me writing up this post) responding to emails, working on presentations, working on their blogs, there’s maybe even a novelist out there.

The Candy Crushers:
There’s a good chunk of people just whipping out their tablets and cell phones to spend 2 hours crushing candy to try and get to the next level! Surprisingly enough there is no age range to the one’s spending time playing cell phone/tablet games on a flight.

The Readers:
The very few people that crack open a good old novel and read 

The Series Junkies:
Now there may be many people whipping out their laptops to work but there are just as many whipping them out to catch up on the latest episode of Game of Thrones or The Big Bang Theory.

During my 4 years of traveling, I was many of the above mentioned. After a certain time, you feel that the time on the plane can be used much more productively and I am hoping to give some tips on how best to spend time on the plane if, like me, there’s an entire day of the month spent on a plane.
The below is a list of Tips that I feel regular travellers can take advantage of.

Tip 1: Expanding your network
Call me old fashioned but I feel that traveling so often on a plane can be well used by expanding your social network and making new friends/colleagues. What happened to just greeting the person next to you and getting to know them, what they do, who they are, where they are from? You never know how one person may bring value to your life just by telling their story to you. This is probably my most valuable tip today. However, we don’t always meet people that are willing to have a conversation or sometimes there isn’t anybody next to you.

Tip 2: Bashing out emails
If you are in the business/corporate world, chances are, there are always way too many emails in your inbox. I found that if you download your emails before you get onto the flight you can work offline on the flight, read and respond to emails. The email responses will sit in your outbox until you connect again. This is an efficient way to get through a lot of emails that you simply don’t get down to during a normal working day.

Tip 3: Be the reader
Knowledge is power and what better way to expand your knowledge than to read on a plane. You have 2 hours with no disturbance from anyone. Whether it be a novel, business book, religious book, a newspaper (just be considerate of your quadrant) or even an article online (download it before hand on your laptop). Start reading today! You will never regret this.

Now I’m not saying don’t sleep or don’t watch series or don’t play games while you fly. All I’m saying is that there may be more productive and beneficial things that can be done on the plane, especially if you spend close to a day in a month on flying time.
Hope you enjoyed the post! Please engage with me on your own observations from flights that you have been on and on how you occupy your flying time.
Upvote and comment! Let’s engage! :)
Abdu84 out! :)