Up in the air
Long flights are one of the few contexts where I'm disconnected from the internet for a long period. As a result, I'm often very productive in airplanes. Much of this work happens on my iPad Pro. The iPad is light and compact and has a long battery life. It's a perfect computer for working on a seat tray. I've even grown to like typing on its keyboard cover. And once I'm done with work, the iPad also doubles as a great entertainment device. All things told it's a great little travel computer.
However, there's one caveat to working on the iPad while flying: Doing so requires more planning than doing so with a regular laptop. In particular, I must always remember to download the stuff I want to work on to the device before getting on the plane.
In some crucial ways, the iPad functions more like a phone than like a laptop. I have lots of files I can call up at any time on my laptop. If I'm working on a presentation and want to copy a slide from an older deck, I look for the document and open it. Not so on my iPad; older files are usually in one of the various cloud services (Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, etc.) rather than on the device itself. This isn't a problem on the ground; my iPad has a cell radio that keeps me connected to the internet everywhere. Except for airplanes, of course.
In this particular flight, I was planning to work on the slides for my WIAD Switzerland workshop. After I boarded I checked to ensure that I had all the files I needed, and — sure enough — I was missing three of them. These are relatively large files, with lots of images. I started downloading them as the airplane was taxiing. The process became a race against time. I could see the download progress bars slowly nearing completion, download speeds varying as the airplane moved around. The files finished downloading a few minutes before we took off; I got everything I needed and was able to work on the slides during the flight. Still, it was stressful.
There are many advantages to being device-independent. It's great to be able to work anywhere using any one of various computers, phones, tablets, etc. If any one of them dies or is stolen, it won't take my work with it. Being device-independent also means being able to work from the device that's best suited to current conditions. That said, being device-independent also means being network-dependent. It's easy to become complacent about network access when we're in our home region. That dependency can impair our effectiveness when we don't have good connectivity, such as when we travel.
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