Lately, I’ve heard lots of people saying that they’re saving some sort of thoughtful work or another for their next airplane ride. Their plan is to resolve a thorny strategic issue or come up with a good name for something, etc., while cruising over Iowa or the North Atlantic.
Research on how human minds work indicates that airplanes in flight are about the worst sort of physical environments for effective thinking. Even ignoring the cramped conditions, the random and sometimes disconcerting noises made by the airplanes or nearby children, and similar issues, there are other problems with getting good work done while airborne. When we’re dehydrated, and dehydration happens a lot while we’re flying, or at the air pressures encountered inside an airplane, our minds don’t work as well as they do on the ground.
But still, working on an airplane seems like a better plan than other options to many. Why?
The research consistently shows that when people have a range of spaces in which to work their performance improves compared to when they don’t have options. The published research indicates that our human need for control of our environment seems to have a lot to do with this outcome. Especially good results are found when workers see places where they could collaborate with others, that would meet their probable needs, that aren’t currently being used – those unused spaces are a sort of insurance, indicating that if someone needs to find a place to work with someone else, there will be an available meeting place.
Current offices often seem to fail to provide enough, or any, places where people can do solo work requiring focus. Visual and acoustic isolation at workplaces often are just not good enough. Sure, there are distractions when we’re on a plane, but most of them are easier to ignore than in-office ones because we know that they have nothing to do with us; ones on the ground at our workplace are more likely to be relevant to us and our futures. Sending people out of the main workplace to do thoughtful work is always a risk; will those workers be able to find a place where they can truly concentrate at the home they share with two small children, or at the local coffee shop, or at the library with community building sessions, for example? Also, being among coworkers helps build the sort of bonds that encourage extra effort in challenging situations.
The lesson that all those on-plane workers are teaching is that we need to create spaces in offices where acoustic and visual distractions really are minimized, and we need to make them available to all. On-plane workers signal on-ground challenges and opportunities.
Sally Augustin, PhD,a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.