I really enjoyed Craig Mod’s How to survive air travel and Cennydd Bowles’s Advice for people who aren’t exactly afraid of flying but aren’t exactly unafraid of flying either. That said, I don’t agree with all their points, so I thought I’d keep this thing going by writing about my own self-imposed list of travel rules. If you learn one thing from all these lists, let it be this: people who spend time on airplanes think about being on airplanes a lot.

In my opinion the main ingredient to a reasonably bearable flying experience is to spend as little time in the airport and on the plane as possible. Anything you can do to minimize the time you spend getting from origin to destination will have a direct effect on keeping your rage levels under control. So that’s the lens through which my advice should be seen. It’s all about minimizing the pain.

So, here we go.

If you travel in the US, sign up for TSA Pre. It costs $80, it lasts 5 years, and it lets you get through security without removing any clothes or laptops. The line is also always shorter than the general security line, so it rarely takes more than 5 minutes to get through.

Set an alarm to remind you when it’s time to check in online. That way you can usually get a reasonable seat (more on seats later), and you can avoid lines at the airport (more on that later, too).

Never check luggage. If you have a long trip and don’t think you can fit everything into a carry-on bag, make a plan. Go to a laundromat half-way through the trip. Wash clothes in the shower. Just do whatever it takes to avoid standing in check-in lines. Remove the ability for an airline to lose your bag or make you miss a connection. Don’t wait 30 mins at baggage claim when you could have been at your destination already. People who check their luggage is where the phrase “sometimes bad things happen to good people” comes from. I use a Tumi Alpha 2 International Expandable Carry-On and I really like it.

There is one big area where I diverge from Craig and Cennydd’s advice. They tell you to get to the airport way early. I’m telling you to get there dangerously close to your flight. I aim to be at the airport 45 minutes before the flight leaves. That gives me just enough time to get through security and walk up to the gate without standing in any lines (remember: you’re checked in already and you have TSA Pre). This is a dangerous art, but worth pursuing. The holy grail is getting out of the cab and walking straight on to your plane without having to stop or run once.

Bring your own food. Airport shops always have lines, and airplane food is gross.

Choose an aisle seat, always. As far to the front as possible, always. The photos you get from the window seat will get you over the “20 likes” barrier on Instagram, but it’s not worth it when you have to go to the bathroom and the person next to you has their 17” Dell laptop open and is working on an intricate Excel spreadsheet. Also, aisle seats get you out of the plane faster.

Noise-canceling headphones are more magical than they appear. It’s amazing how the lack of constant droning in your ears helps to reduce fatigue. I like the Bose QuietComfort 20i headphones because they have a button you can push that lets you hear announcements/flight attendants without removing the headphones.

And finally, the most important piece of advice I can give you: If at all possible, avoid flying altogether.

Michael Sacasas has an interesting viewpoint on the “machines are taking our jobs” argument. In Machines, Work, and the Value of People he argues that since we’ve so closely linked our value as human beings to the work we do, the issue of machines taking over hits us pretty hard:

So, to sum up: Some time ago, identity and a sense of self-worth got hitched to labor and productivity. Consequently, each new technological displacement of human work appears to those being displaced as an affront to the their dignity as human beings. Those advancing new technologies that displace human labor do so by demeaning existing work as below our humanity and promising more humane work as a consequence of technological change. While this is sometimes true–some work that human beings have been forced to perform has been inhuman–deployed as a universal truth, it is little more than rhetorical cover for a significantly more complex and ambivalent reality.

On the surface, Ian Bogost’s Video Games Are Better Without Characters is a nostalgia piece about SimCity:

Such was the payload of SimCity: not a game about people, even though its residents, the Sims, would later get their own spin-off. Nor is it a game about particular cities, for it is difficult to recreate one with the game’s brittle, indirect tools. Rather, SimCity is a game about urban societies, about the relationship between land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth, and other factors. It’s not really a simulation, despite its name, nor is it an educational game. Nobody would want a SimCity expert running their town’s urban planning office. But the game got us all to think about the relationships that make a city run, succeed, and decay, and in so doing to rise above our individual interests, even if only for a moment.

But later on it turns into a strong argument for games that are about bigger issues in society. Games not about fighting one’s way out of a prison or getting off a deserted planet, but games that focus on living systems, politics, and the economy. Great article.

Kate Heddleston makes some great points in The Null Process:

When people say they don’t want process, what they’re really saying is they don’t want formalized process. There is really no such thing as “no process.” A process is simply the steps it takes to complete a task, so if a task is completed then by definition a process was used. Without formalized process everyone does things their own way, and there is no documentation for how problems are solved. This informal, undocumented process is the “null process,” and, if used incorrectly, the null process can have major implications for a company.

This reminds me of two things. The first is Rebekah Cox’s definition of Product Design:

Design is a set of decisions about a product. It’s not an interface or an aesthetic, it’s not a brand or a color. Design is the actual decisions.

What this implies is that everything you do in product design has a consequence. So just “letting things happen” is also a decision. It’s just a pretty bad one. Maybe that should be called “null design.” I don’t know, I’m not good at naming things1.

The second is Michael Lopp’s The Process Myth. The whole thing is great, but this quote in particular has always stuck in my mind:

Engineers don’t hate process. They hate process that can’t defend itself.

Also this advice:

Healthy process is awesome if it not only documents what we care about, but is willing to defend itself. It is required to stand up to scrutiny and when a process fails to do so, it must change.

For more reading on what it takes to build good processes (because let’s be honest, what else are you going to do on a Friday night?), I recommend Adam Wuerl’s Avoiding Process Hell and Jeff Gothelf’s Applying Product Thinking to Process Improvement.

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1. Just look at my URL. Seriously, what was I thinking. ↩

Emily Badger wrote a very interesting article on the politics of sunlight and shade in urban design. From In the shadows of booming cities, a tension between sunlight and prosperity:

For cities, shadows present both a technical challenge — one that can be modeled in 3-D and measured in “theoretical annual sunlight hours” lost — and an ethereal one. They change the feel of space and the value of property in ways that are hard to define. They’re a stark reminder that the new growth needed in healthy cities can come at the expense of people already living there. And in some ways, shadows even turn light into another medium of inequality — a resource that can be bought by the wealthy, eclipsed from the poor.

Andrew Thompson in Engineers of Addiction, a fascinating profile on the psychology of slot machines:

Game [slot machine] designers are charged with somehow summoning the ineffable allure of electronic spectacle — developing a system that is both simple and endlessly engaging, a machine to pull and trap players into a finely tuned cycle of risk and reward that keeps them glued to the seat for hours, their pockets slowly but inevitably emptying.

In other words, their job description is to make people win just enough so that they come back long enough to lose big. I just can’t wrap my head around that.

Jamie Hodari makes the point that the recent blowback against office spaces (and open office plans) might be slightly overblown. She asks, Is Working Remotely Sapping Your Creativity?

A creative work life requires social relationships and serendipitous interactions. It requires contending with ideas you don’t agree with. It requires getting up and moving around. As a result, it’s becoming increasingly clear that for many people, working at an office isn’t a relic of a pre-digital age, but a vital element in reaching their creative potential.

Bumping into coworkers, chatting in hallways, sitting down over lunch, a day at the office results in dozens of interactions everyday. The result, shown both anecdotally and in statistics, is more creativity and greater effectiveness. For instance, in one study tracking the behaviors of a sales team of a pharmaceutical company, “when a salesperson increased interactions with coworkers on other teams … by 10%, his or her sales also grew by 10%.” Cross-functional, seemingly spontaneous interaction facilitated greater effectiveness on the part of workers–something that would not have been possible had sales representatives been working from their homes.

Good thoughts from Martin Eriksson on how the PM is not The Boss. From Product Management is a Team Sport:

The bottom line is that everyone in the company owns the product, and its success or failure lie in the hands of everyone who touches it. A product manager’s job is to lead the team to tackle the product challenges together, to get the best out of everyone on the team when building the product, and to provide a gentle hand to keep it all consistent and going in the right direction.

I’ve been thinking about the topic of my latest A List Apart column for a while, but I was just too scared to write it. I mean, what right do I have to talk about work and privilege? But I ran the idea by my amazing editor, and since she was really supportive and enthusiastic about it, I went for it.

So I wrote Why?:

Why we work—and what kind of work we do—is a function of our privilege and our history as much as it is a function of our choices and our dedication.

I hope you enjoy reading it, and take something from it. This one took a while to get right.