When you are flying, want to get work done, and told to put your cell phone in airplane mode, you might think that your productivity will suffer.

However, when I turn on my email function and dictate into the phone, even surrounded by the heavy airplane noise, my cell phone, an Android model, works well with few transcription errors.

This particular article was written at 35,000 feet. I was in airplane mode at the time, with all kinds of sounds around me and yet the phone faithfully recorded my dictated words.

If I have notes with me, and enough time on the flight, I'll be able to dash off three or four articles in one sitting. Chances are you have the same capability.

Maybe you're not writing articles per se, but you could be creating future blog entries, making notes to your staff or to your boss, writing messages that you'll send to friends and relatives. So what if you can't send them at the moment that you finished dictating. You'll be landing soon enough, and you'll have the capabilities to resume sending and receiving email. Then, bingo! You've handled so much in the air that now you have less to do going forward.