I hop on and off planes on a regular basis and I refined quite a few strategies to make it faster, easier, and more comfortable.

Here five of them:

Consistent carry on packing

My carry on is always packed in the same way. Same bag, same stuff, same position.
As a result, my carry on always weights the same and feels the same.
I can tell just picking it up if I forgot any of the largest elements like my camera or my laptop.
Packing and retrieving thing requires the minimal cognitive effort.
Every now and then I tweak the setup to make it better, but not too often.

Status is key

It might seems pretentious, but airport life is dramatically different if you reach status on your airline. As soon as you can access fast lanes, priority boarding, lounges, and priority handling for your luggage, things get really smooth.

Noise canceling headphones

They are large, bulky, and not particularly stylish. It doesn’t matter, they are your best friend on short and long flights.

Minimal carry on, and checked luggage

I can’t travel carry on only. I tried, I felt miserable, I don’t do it anymore.
I check in a luggage, and I carry a minimal carry on.
A lighter carry on, a backpack in my case, allows me to move faster across connections.

Positive attitude

But the most important tip is to constantly have a positive attitude when traveling for leisure or business.
Flights can be delayed and canceled. Airports can be busy. People can be rude. Connections can be late, and eventually missed. You can get an annoying person next to you on the flight. It happens, get over it.
Complaining, being rude, yelling, screaming, won’t get your flight to be on time, or the staff to find you a better connection to make up for a canceled segment.
On the contrary, being extremely collaborative will grease some of the gears for sure. I have been rebooked on expensive flights for free, I got access to off-brand lounges, I got multiple free business upgrades, just asking politely, smiling, and being nice.

Just sayin’…

Dei tanti libri di cultura aziendale che ho letto, “Falla Esplodere” di Luca Carbonelli è forse il più sorprendente.

Luca Carbonelli, abile narratore di formazione giornalistica, racconta la storia recente della propria impresa familiare, in modo chiaro, diretto, concreto.

Allo stesso tempo, affronta i temi più ostici dell’ammodernamento strutturale, economico, e di processo, di una piccola azienda italiana, in un mercato contorto come quello del caffè.

Un mercato in cui i grandi brand distorcono la percezione del prodotto, incoraggiando la filiera distributiva verso abitudini che impediscono l’innovazione.

Luca Carbonelli, non nascondendo alcuni errori commessi durante la sua attività di imprenditore, li eleva a punti cardine per la propria crescita, sia personale che professionale.

Questo libro è un distillato pragmatico di strategia aziendale, cambiamento generazionale, evoluzione imprenditoriale, narrato in tono naturale e mai noioso.

In questo libro l’imprenditore non è mai vittima del mercato, della modernità, o delle tasse. Il protagonista ha un ruolo attivo nella definizione di se stesso, dei propri obiettivi, e del modo per raggiungerli.

Senza dimenticare una visione incredibilmente sobria di come una piccola impresa italiana può sfruttare gli strumenti di Amazon per crescere, vendere, e aprirsi al mercato internazionale. Questa parte da sola vale il prezzo del biglietto.

Questo libro si legge rapidamente e si lascia meditare a lungo.

In the coming days I’ll take a break on the Dolomites to go hiking with Letizia.

We’ll visit the Puez Hutte, a remote alpine hut that I only visited once before when I was 14.

I remember that hike as fairly challenging so I look forward to it!

For the first time in the last decade I’m leaving my laptop at home. Just sayin…

I am one of the early adopters. One of those people who vehemently signed up to every single online service as soon as they became available to me.

My twitter account is dated December 2006, and I was among the first 100 accounts in Italy.

Many other accounts I have were born pretty much at the same time: late 2006, early 2007.

It was a great time for the early adopters. We felt we were the avant-garde of the so-called Web 2.0.

I’ll spare you the details, but we were wrong on so many things.

One and for all, we were wrong in believing that online conversations and direct interaction were only bringing positives.

We thought that online conversations were the purest form of debate, and the collective wisdom was far superior than any previous form of knowledge.

There were pros, I don’t doubt that, but we dramatically overlooked the cons.

Over time, the negotiated truth, the concept that every opinion matters in the creation of a collective knowledge, allowed the establishment of anti-science movements. Propaganda is stronger than ever. Armies of uninformed people pretentiously want to argue on complicated matters with the experts who spent their lives studying such things. Nonsense.

For this reason, in the last few years, my information diet has changed, and so my online presence has too.

The Twitter account that I used and abused for years, lays abandoned.
With the exception of a few automated services, I almost never post anything there. I don’t even read on Twitter. Too much noise, too little signal.

Facebook is one of those things I open every now and then to keep up with my close friends, and forget about it.

I deliberately quit interacting on Facebook three years ago.

At some point I realized that nobody has ever changed their mind about anything, reading a Facebook comment.
So, why bother commenting at all?

Instagram is a little better, but I don’t engage much.

I still read blogs, trying to post on mine every now and then. I’ll probably try to do it more often and with more dedication going forward.

A couple of days ago, Automattic announced the acquisition of Tumblr. I logged into my account to check things out and while I was there I cleaned it up a little. I removed the old posts with broken links and old content, brushed it up and brought it back to 2019.
My latest post on tumblr was 12 years old. Wow.

If you are reading this post, you pretty know where to find me: here on my blog for the serious stuff, and on my tumblr for day to day activities.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to drop an old fashion comment. I would really appreciate that!

How awesome is the current technology that blends real life scenes with computer generated landscapes? Super amazing!

I liked reading this featured article by Claudia Rankine. Check it out!