Photography by: Osvaldo Gago Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike 2.5 Generic License |
Since then, I've moved, and my commute is about half of what it once was, and now I take more surface streets than I do long stretches of highway. Couple that with school zones where I am not allowed to use my cell phone and the rolling conference-call-mobile is severely limited. That said, I still consider my commute time to be working time and incoming work calls still trump everything else I am doing (unless I am in said school zone).
But when I am not fielding phone calls, the commute time has a potential to be a completely wasted thirty minutes of the day. What I try not to do is listen to the radio. I used to listen to nothing but the radio when I drove and over time, you will not have much personal growth listening to Taylor Swift's Blank Space or Meghan Trainor's All About That Bass. I save that time for when I am chauffeuring the kids around.
For the past several years, I have primarily utilized this downtime in a few activities. The predominant activity is listening to podcasts. Whether financial advice from folks like Dave Ramsey, or writing advice from Mur Lafferty (albeit focused towards fiction), or entertaining myself with Scott Sigler novels, or learning about all kinds of facts from Josh and Chuck at Stuff You Should Know, podcasts fill close to 80% of my morning commute. The remainder falls into a couple of categories - checking email (only at red lights nowadays given how dangerous that can be otherwise), reading Twitter or Facebook (which is not mentally stimulating but gets me out of the daily rut that a commute can put you in), or doing some daily planning. If nothing else, the commute is an excellent time (even if you are listening to something else along the way) to decide what you are going to do next. If you are taking the one-thing-a-day challenge, you likely need to find some time to organize your thoughts and prioritize activities. A commute is perfect for those opportunities.
Don't waste it.