Sunday. I’m on a train. No serious topic today, just me, my laptop, and a window scrolling by too fast to focus on anything.
I’m bored. So I work. Or at least I try.
SNCF WiFi, an urban legend
Apparently there’s WiFi on some trains. I saw it once. Back in 2019. Since then, I make do with my phone’s hotspot, like everyone who’s figured out the game.
Except tethering in France, on a TGV going 300 km/h, is a gamble. Tunnel. Dropped. Rural stretch between two cities. Dropped. A cell tower decides to take a break. Dropped.
Result: I work in three-minute bursts. Like a free diver coming up for air between attempts.
My commit trick that saves the day
I eventually found a rhythm. Three tasks per connection window, not one more.
One: I push my commit. Always first. Because if the connection dies mid-push, it’s a disaster, and I know that from experience.
Two: I answer the urgent email, the one that’s been sitting since yesterday and will end up annoying me if I leave it.
Three: I check if the bar car still has Diet Coke. Critical info, because if the answer is no, the whole trip switches to survival mode.
And boom, the connection drops again. I close the laptop, look out the window, drink my lukewarm Diet Coke because the bar car coffee costs about as much as a monthly subscription to everything.
The conductor’s screen freeze
There’s this absurd moment when the conductor walks by, you have to dig out your ticket, and you get thirty seconds of blank space where your brain completely reboots.
You come back to your keyboard and you’ve forgotten what you were doing. Genuinely forgotten. Like a temporary split brain. The classic “where was I again” of the nomadic worker.
What it taught me about my own workflow
Paradoxically, these dropouts made me more efficient. Not on the train, mind you. In real life, at my home office, with stable WiFi and no conductor.
Because forcing three specific tasks into a three-minute window taught me to prioritize fast. Before, I used to jump between a dozen open tabs. Now, even with working WiFi, I keep that reflex. Three things, in order, done.
It’s a bit like managing a WordPress multisite, actually. You run 180 sites, you can’t watch everything at once or you lose your mind. You have to sort, prioritize, know what can wait until tomorrow.
The real problem is boredom
Okay, let me be honest. The real trigger for this post isn’t productivity. It’s pure boredom. A Paris-Lyon trip takes two hours. Two hours where your choices are: watch the scenery, sleep, or pretend to be productive to kill time.
I usually pick the third option. Not because I’m a workaholic. Because staring at a beet field for two hours eventually gets emotionally difficult.
Anyway, Sunday
That’s it. No big lesson today. Just a guy on a train, pushing commits between two WiFi dropouts, and finding it almost funny now.
Next time your mobile connection dies in the middle of an improvised Teams call from a train carriage, just know that somewhere, I’m probably going through the exact same thing, with a bit less patience and a lot more Diet Coke.