Make drive time productive

Make drive time productive
By David Allen

At the risk of overstating the obvious: The car is a relatively unproductive environment.

It only allows for sporadic and variable attention spans, with much visual stimuli that must be tracked (so you don’t run into something!). Therefore, listening and talking are the best activities to leverage car time.

Here then, are the activities you find most productive in the car:

(We’re starting with the assumption here that you have hands-free capability and use it wisely.) If you’re in the minority who still wonders whether it is worth getting a cell phone — it is.

A cell phone can boost productivity by giving you the ability to take advantage of car time to return calls, check and respond to voice mails, and get organized en route (getting directions to where you’re going, arranging for reservations at the restaurant, checking airline flight status, etc.).

It also allows you to be accessible to the office and patients to handle quickly needed responses. And if you know you have a 90-minute drive in the afternoon, you can save the phone calls that might need an open-ended conversation for then, and not use up valuable office time.

Research the various service plans and equipment options carefully. A wide variety of options is available, with a great difference in costs. What you don’t want to be distracted by is how much money you are spending when you are on your cell phone, yet you don’t want to pay for something you don’t use or need.

I recommend using a dictation device as well, to make notes to yourself about conversations and voice mails, and to capture information that you might be getting over the phone, such as directions.

Ideas that you might find useful later show up at the oddest times, especially when you are driving, so keep a little pocket microcassette or digital recorder handy. (So you don’t forget to retrieve what’s on the tape, remember to put your tape or recorder in your in-basket when you get back to your office.)

If you have a secretary or assistant, it can be productive to dictate memos and drafts of documents and delegate tasks using a microcassette tape.

An interesting new spin on dictating in the car which we will probably see more of in the future, is voice-recognition software for the computer.

A few companies have developed surprisingly good voice-recognition software. If you could wear a headset microphone connected to your laptop on the front seat, you could think out loud into your word processor or write e-mails and make such more productive use of commuting time.

You may find this is still too much of a novelty to make it standard procedure right now, but it has a lot of potential. There are also tape recorders that purport to match with voice recognition back at the computer, so you can put thoughts on tape, and have them digitized for your computer later on.

If you’re like me and don’t watch TV very much, the car is the best way to get your quota of current event updates.

Obviously the car tape player (or CD player) is the way to catch up on the recorded programs that have been stacking up around you and that you never seem to get around to. Keep your dictating recorder handy when you are listening, to capture “aha’s” and “I’m gonna’s” that might appear as you listen.

There are times when you are in the car with colleagues, staff, family members, clients, and prospects. These are ideal times for certain types of interactions with those people.

You may find drive time is a good time to broach sensitive subjects casually, (Your audience can’t leave, but you can easily avoid eye-to-eye intensity.) It’s also great for tiptoeing into a topic, or just getting some good hang-out time together that you or they might be hungry for.

Consider asking your assistant to drive you to the airport next time you have to travel. Use the time to interact in ways that would serve both of you to get work done and enhance your working relationship.

This article is reprinted with permission from David Allen, an international author, lecturer, and founder and president of the David Allen Company, a management consulting, coaching, and training company. He can be reached through his Web site, www.davidco.com.