What to do

Sat at the airport for around four hours -- it seemed preferable to wandering around town in the rain with a suitcase -- I'm taking a pause from reading The Economist to think about what else I could be doing. The fact is, when I travel I don't often make good use of the downtime involved. Well, I make use of it, but not productive use. So, I'll read more of a magazine than I might otherwise and listen to more podcasts, but there's always the nagging guilt that I could be doing something else.

It isn't the lack of online access. I could have more of that, for a price. But I've already checked my emails and the social sites that mean something to me, and skipping from site to site online is not actually productive.

More than that, it is a lack of things that I could do when on the road. I've got a couple of ongoing projects -- cleaning up my image files and transferring my main site from one content management system to another -- that I certainly could do. But they're stuck on the desktop machine at home. I have, sometimes, used DropBox to transfer projects to the portable machine so I can work on them while I'm away from home, but neither of those really lends itself to that approach.

OK, now I've used this little bit of downtime to write a post about how to use downtime; very meta. Longer term, though, I think I really need to ensure that I have with me something not too demanding that I could do while on the road.