26 ms·

I can't begin to explain how much less stress I encounter in day to day life having just one week day to stay home. Just having a day to be able to easily knock

by mjayhn 7y ago

I can't begin to explain how much less stress I encounter in day to day life having just one week day to stay home. Just having a day to be able to easily knock out chores between Jira issues; drop the car off at the dealer, sell something on craigslist, complete a house project, go to the dentist, meet the handyman, go to the bank, etc is so nice. All of these things wind up on the back burner when I'm in the middle of high stress projects and forced to sit at a desk for 8-10 hours a day. All that does is lead to more stress because now I'm falling behind on my life tasks and have to burn a weekend catching up when I should be able to spend that weekend de-stressing. I know not everyone is as sapped for energy as I am after work, I hate that I'm this way. But after leaving work and siting in an hour of traffic my energy is just sapped from me by the time I make it home. I have enough energy to feed myself and sometimes work out to maintain my health..

volkk 7y ago
> I know not everyone is as sapped for energy as I am after work, but I leave work and sit in an hour of traffic. My energy is just sapped from me by the time I make it home. I have enough energy to feed myself and sometimes work out to maintain my health.. I know that some people just dont have the privilege of living close to their jobs, but after spending one internship getting up at 5;45am to drive with my dad to work to beat the traffic for 1hr, and then spending 1.5-2 hours driving back in heavy traffic in NYC, I vowed to never ever live in a place where I have to drive that far to get to work. 2 months of that and I was already losing my will to live. My dad did it for 15 years and I can see why towards the last leg of that job, he was bitter and angry on a daily basis. That is not a way to live.
- tombert 7y ago
  I live in NYC, and I have a roughly 1 hour commute each way, but I just take the train everywhere. Of course I can't speak for anyone else, but I find that taking a train to work is a lot less stressful than driving every day. At least on the train, I can read, or pull out my laptop, or just play a video game.
  - TuringNYC 7y ago
    I’m born and raised in NYC and took subways and trains to work everyday for over a decade in NYC. I mostly agree with you...but...I found the past several years of subway outages worse and started driving/ridesharing more and more. I’ve had times where subways constantly get rerouted, suddenly go express, skip stops, run on different lines, etc. it became so maddening.
    - wpasc 7y ago
      Not sure what GP meant but in NYC I find NJ Transit, Metro North, LIRR style to be much more relaxing and reliable. Subway is just a different beast
      - tombert 7y ago
        I take the Subway virtually every day. On weekdays it's not perfect, but generally good-enough.
        Wowfunhappy 7y ago
        To some extent it likely depends on which subway you're on. Some lines are rough, especially at the outskirts. But I agree. For all that New Yorkers complain about the subway, it's my favorite thing about New York.
        davchana 7y ago
        Bad Subway is better than no subway; I wish we had that or any public transport in Northern California.
        gen220 7y ago
        It depends a lot on your origin and destination. In my 6 years, I’ve found the optimal corridor to be Downtown Brooklyn to Midtown, with a slight bias for west manhattan over east. Anything outside that corridor has a high potential to be the Wild West (the G, L, JZM, etc) with kafkaesque reroutes and delays and express running local and no trains after 9pm on random 5 days every 9 weeks.
- mjayhn 7y ago
  Yeah that definitely helps! Unfortunately I think I'd still need a few hours to unwind and get out of "work mode." I've worked jobs where I could actually walk to work and I still went home just drained. TBH, I'm an introvert and I'm not sure going in to the office will ever be really conducive to my personality. I've worked jobs where I had an office to go to when I needed/wanted to be there but could work from home or at a clients office. That was wonderful. I actually showed up to it much, much more often than I expected - by pure choice. If I was having an off day or felt especially introverted and just needed a break from people I could just knock things out at home!
  - chrisweekly 7y ago
    Remote work is increasingly available. Good luck!
  - clarry 7y ago
    I'm still pretty sapped after 8-9 hours, even if I work from home. And yes, it does build up stress from all the errands that would be easiest to schedule during office hours on a weekday with no work.
- kbenson 7y ago
  There are ways to work around the system around metro hubs that tries to push you towards the standard of commuting 2 hours or more each day to get to a higher paying job, but you have to search for them and be flexible yourself in your search for a job that's flexible. These days, it's likely semi-remote work, where you commute 1-3 days a week or in off hours (part of day at home, part at work). For me, I've been lucky enough to always find something that I found interesting and that pays well enough while not having to commute more than 10-20 minutes in the local area, and that's having been born, raised, and lived my entire life 45 minutes North of SF. There's not guaranteed to be something good in the borderlands, but I think people might be surprised what they could find if they can resist the call of the behemoths (and those that congregate in the same area) while being within throwing range of them.
  - Swizec 7y ago
    > push you towards the standard of commuting 2 hours or more each day to get to a higher paying job Crazy question but why not invest some of that higher salary into quality of life improvements like moving closer to work?
    - kbenson 7y ago
      I think you misread some of my comment. But as for why people don't do that, I think it's often because "quality of life" means different things to different people at different times in their lives. For a single 20-something, moving closer to work, and the much higher cost of living that usually entails can be worthwhile. For a 30-something or 40-something with a family, what kind of worth the spouse does (and whether it benefits from that move monetarily or in quality of live) and what it entails for the children can be much more important. For a single (or mostly single) income household, shaving 2 hours off your commute in exchange for double the cost of living is very hard to justify. There's often a reason they live far enough away to need to commute. For me, as I said, I've never had that commute. I've been very happy working in the tech industry an hour or so away from SF and its surrounding area. What I advocated is not moving closer to work, but working closer to where you moved. If you move to a suburb of SF, if you start looking for work in that area instead of focusing on SF, you might be surprised what's there. It won't pay as much, but theoretically cost of living is already drastically reduced by moving to the suburb, so maybe re-examining what's a good job to look is called for if that commute isn't to your liking.
- nickbauman 7y ago
  I changed my life so my work is 6 blocks from home. I will never go back. No realistic amount of money will ever be worth a commute. I consider commuting a form of incarceration.
  - exclusiv 7y ago
    I'm lucky to have a drive that takes me down the ocean for the bulk of it and I use my commute time for phone calls after the best part so even though it's nearly 40 minutes it doesn't bother me at all. But yeah if your commute is just boring traffic it can get to you day in day out.
  - goguy 7y ago
    I have to disagree. Realistically my only job opportunities for good pay are in cities, you couldn't pay me to live in one of those. I'll take the commute for the luxury of living in the countryside away from the noise, overpopulation and dirt.
    - nickbauman 7y ago
      For every person I've met from a small town, half say they'd never want to live there again, half are like you. There has been a 10,000 year trend toward urbanization so far. I'm glad for you, even though I suspect your future is going to get harder as the hinterland continues to empty out.
- tentboy 7y ago
  I think there is a happy medium too, and you don't need to live across the street from your job. I really like my job - which is located in the suburbs outside of DC but I wanted to live closer to the city so I have metro access and can easily bike around the city. I could easily get a nice place walking distance from work but my 30 minute commute (pretty much against traffic so not stressful) allows me to enjoy my time after work and the weekends much more than I would from the extra time from a short commute. I also enjoy driving and listening to music in my car so maybe thats part of it too
- anonsivalley652 7y ago
  Exactly. Work someplace else cheaper/less dense, remotely or get the tiniest, rathole, walkup closet where there's only a refrigerator and a tub, and you can't open the frig to open the door (but at least you can drink OJ from the carton while in the tub;). The people who commute by plane, 1-2 hours each way, or 100-200 miles daily are phreak'n outside of their skulls looking in.
  - lastres0rt 7y ago
    Hey, I commute by train to work (about an hour each way once you factor in trotting to the station, waiting for commuter shuttles, etc.), and I'm happy as a clam because I can draw on my iPad or play on my Switch for much of that time. Now, if you're DRIVING that same hour, then yeah, you're nuts.
    - cylinder 7y ago
      What about all the time that takes? If you have kids you need/want to get home as soon as possible to provide help as well as actually see them. Doesn't matter how many games im playing during that time
  - dev840 7y ago
    I wish that I could find a tiny rathole. Unfortunately, regulations around here with the minimum square footage requirements make that almost impossible.
- werber 7y ago
  I quit my last job because of the commute, gave up driving completely this year, and got a job in walking distance of my home. That part alone has made me a significantly happier person, I was able to stop taking anti anxiety medication, I have time for social activities, I have time for my friends and family again. I could never go back to driving to the office
- fjp 7y ago
  Agreed, the one thing I have promised myself is to never have a commute over 35 minutes. I even found a 35 minute commute to an internship in the suburbs disheartening when it was mostly spent sitting in traffic. It's insane to waste that much of your daily life shuttling to your job (if you have an option, which I hope to remain lucky enough to have).
  - tasuki 7y ago
    The commute is not the problem, the car is. In Amsterdam I commuted 45 minutes by bike and it was great. I really miss it now that I work from home.
    - ihaveajob 7y ago
      This. I used to have a longish commute (about 1h door to door) but I took Caltrain, and that time was never wasted. I could work, connect with friends, or just unwind. The few times when I did that by car I ended exhausted. Throw in a weekly 3h bike ride to work to stay fit and it was quite excellent.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      That's better but some days are bad for biking and more than seven hours per week spent on a bike is still a bit much.
    - Nullabillity 7y ago
      Or.. maybe people just have different outlooks? I used to ebike for an hour each way, and it was torture. Now it's a ~20min drive and 30mins of the commuter train. Still pretty miserable, but at least it's not raining directly into my eyes anymore.
    - Broken_Hippo 7y ago
      Truthfully, though, the weather in Amsterdam isn't so bad. And wow, there is some infrastructure for biking! These two things combined would make biking so much better, but then you add in the average style of bicycle you see there: Comfortable seats with some space for traveling with stuff. I have some of the infrastructure where I live in Norway, but I'm not brave enough to bike on the snow and ice in the winter. Walking is perilous enough. When I lived in the states, biking was often dangerous and the fastest routes weren't always available to me. I lived in the countryside for years, close enough to bike by main roads, but it not only wasn't allowed on the best path, but it would have been dangerous. No shoulder, curvy road, and cars going over 55mph (over 80kph). It was illegal to ride on sidewalks, where there were sidewalks, and few cities had bike lanes outside of downtown areas (if that). One job literally had no entrance other than off of a 4-lane divided highway: No biking or walking to that job. Even if I got over those hurdles, there was often no where to safely put my bike while I was at work. Heck, some of these places didn't have anywhere to store cold things for lunch.
- nine_k 7y ago
  I work in NYC. My commute from Brooklyn in now about 30 minutes, 20 of them on a train, the rest is walking and waiting on a station. It's the shortest and least stressful commute I ever had among several cities I lived. Dense cities have upsides when you live inside them.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
  What's crazy is that you see regulation on minimum number of parking spaces for nearly any kind of building type and yet for working buildings, there's absolutely 0 regulations on minimum number of places to live. So, what happens is there's a huge imbalance between number of jobs offered vs places to live, thus driving up the cost of housing unnecessarily. It's almost as if they designed cities to only be driven too without any thought given on how to place living spaces closer to working spaces.
- ratsimihah 7y ago
  I've always prioritized living close to work and making my commute a 10mn walk. It's such a quality of life improvement, but I understand it can't be done by everyone. Since I lived and NYC and London, living near work often meant living in busy and noisy city areas, but it's a compromise I've generally been happy with.
- burnJS 7y ago
  Even if your commute is only 30 minutes, that is 5 hours lost a week roundtrip. An hour commute? Say goodbye to 10 hours a week. Yuck. Thankfully I have never had a long commute, my current commute is a 10-minute bike ride. Additionally, every company should provide at least one work from home day. Having a day at home where you can do laundry while working and other minor chores are such a huge win. Not to mention sleep-in to 830 if I want. Even while doing these mini chores I am WAY more productive at home. It also breaks up your week. My WFH day is Tuesday. So I deal with Monday, then have that cushy WFH day, then when I come back on Wednesday it feels like just a 3 day work week. Friday is casual and most employees take Friday to WFH. Its a ghost town and I love it. I need to begin looking for one of these dank jobs that are truly a four-day work week though.
  - riffraff 7y ago
    I think it also highly depends on how you commute. I had a ~1h commute for years, which meant 10 hours gone a week, but I commuted via public transport (train+metro/subway/underground) which meant I had 10 hours a week for reading or conversation with friends on the same route. I worked from home for 10 years after, and I swear I read less! If I had been driving those would have felt like completely wasted time. Or, a friend of mine in Sweden had an even longer commute by train, but his company counted the time as office time, since he'd just work on the train, which meant no loss of free time. (I still agree all companies should encourage WFH as much as possible)
- wonderwonder 7y ago
  Long commutes are pretty terrible. Often times though parents are forced to choose between a long commute to their place of work but sending their kids to a good school zone vs the alternative. Unfortunately funding school zones based on property taxes leads to vast disparity in their quality and their ability to provide for students. The result for many is having to choose a long commute. With that said I commuted for just over an hour+ each way in a sports car pre kids for 3 years and I never want a low car again. Give me a comfortable SUV / sedan any day now.
- golergka 7y ago
  Renting in a 5-minute walk distance from the office have been, by far, best investment I've made in my life. Even though it's a small studio apartment, saving two hours of stress per day is heaven-sent for someone with low energy and chronic depression like me. It's like life switched to easy mode all of a sudden. The only downside is, I can't manage to schedule a time to read books – subways and trains were ideal for it.
Cyph0n 7y ago
I feel exactly the same when it comes to energy, even though I live ~10 mins from work... As far as work schedule goes, my company/team is fairly flexible when it comes to WFH. However, I still operate in "work mode" while at home, which makes it difficult to take of chores, etc.
rverghese 7y ago
But doesn't this rely on everyone else working 5 days? If everyone had a 4-week, it would be just like the current weekend. You can't go to the bank or dentist, because they would also be off. Perhaps you could get the same effect and quality of life by taking Sunday and Monday as your days off and working Saturday.
- jonny_eh 7y ago
  Maybe people could take different "3rd" days off?
  - alistairSH 7y ago
    How do we decide who gets Friday or Monday (ie, a three day weekend)? I have a friend who once had M-W off, and worked the four remaining days. He hated it because his time off was completely misaligned with his peers, so he had no social life. Edit - I don't have any fundamental problem with working fewer hours or fewer days. But, I think I'd prefer 5x7 hour days instead of 4x8.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      > How do we decide who gets Friday or Monday Rotate who gets which days off each week.
    - winfred 7y ago
      I prefer mid week days off (Wednesday, but I'd settle for Tue/Thu). I love to have work weeks of two days. I can imagine there are plenty of other people that prefer the same thing.
      - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
        I'm with you completely, but from talking to others I think we're in a small minority. Most people want a long weekend.
    - smrr723 7y ago
cortesoft 7y ago
It is an especially big deal for working parents... having a day when kids are at school/daycare to do chores and errands is huge... so many things are impossible to do when you are chasing kids around. I get way more done on a weekday home than a weekend.
- calvinmorrison 7y ago
  how about single working adults? I have to literally take off of work to go to the DMV.
  - bumby 7y ago
    Isn’t that the case for everyone working a standard 5 day week, single, kids, or not?
    - meesles 7y ago
      No. A good amount of reasonable/compassionate companies like mine don't care if you take 2 hours to go to the DMV during work hours. I'm very fortunate
      - cortesoft 7y ago
        But that still doesn’t have anything to do with having kids or not.
- senderista 7y ago
  This. I literally cannot get anything done on the weekends unless the inlaws stay over to look after our 2 toddlers. As the kids get older I'm sure it'll get easier.
david-gpu 7y ago
> Just having a day to be able to easily knock out chores between Jira issues This seems to conflate working from home with having time off. Is your employer paying you to work on that day or not? I work four days a week (30 hours). On my days off, I do not work at all. On my days on, I do not do random house chores during office hours. That's what my employer and I agreed to, and I think it describes what most people understand as a four day workweek.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  You can do chores during your workday if your workday extends by a similar amount of time. That’s basically the definition of flextime, and I’ve never heard of work from home without flex (how would you check).
systemtest 7y ago
I did it a bit different. For 2020, working four days gives me 204 workable days per year. Working five days gives me 255 workable days per year. What I do is that I work five days a week and around June-July I take ten weeks off. I have the same amount of working days per year with the same income but it feels like a godsend to have a yearly sabbatical of over 2 months during the best weather of the year. It reminds me of being in school again with the long summer holidays. If I ever have children that means being with them for six weeks fully dedicated to them.
- msds 7y ago
  I do this too, but split between 5 weeks in the summer for PNW alpine climbing and 5 weeks in the winter for desert stuff in the SW, plus normal vacation for long weekend climbing trips and the obligatory holidays. If I had children, taking the summer off with them seems great - it's a shame their vacation policy isn't flexible...
erik_landerholm 7y ago
Do you actually like your job? I don't mean any disrespect, but I've had jobs I don't really like and I get where you are coming from. Right now, though and at other times, since I've had my own companies, 6 day work weeks and 10-12 hrs a day was not even an issue. I feel like if people go to 4 day work weeks, people that love their jobs and are willing to work 1.5times as much or more will have a huge advantage over the long haul.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mnicky 7y ago
  At my team, we recently established a rule that during Friday you can work on anything work-related you want (e.g. it doesn't have to be something from the actual sprint etc). Similar to the old Google "20% for your projects" kind of a thing. I expected that lots of useful or interesting things will be made during that time, which is true. But for me, the most beneficial effect is that my enjoyment of my work (which previously wasn't bad - I really liked my work) increased a lot. So this can be another way how to boost your job enjoyment.
GordonS 7y ago
Around 5 years back, I went from 5 days a week to 4, taking a 20% paycut in the process. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made - it feels like I have so much more time for family, side projects and hobbies than I ever did before. And for reference, I work around 90% from home. TBH, the company I work for has got a pretty good deal out of this, as I'm sure my productivity hasn't dropped at all. (it's a mega corp, so there is zero chance of negotiating back to equivalent of a 5-day salary)
- guntars 7y ago
  It's a 20% paycut, but a 50% increase in free time! I'm doing the same thing btw, taking every Wednesday off and I love it - it breaks up the week and having the whole extra day for fun projects is totally worth the money to me.
  - steve_adams_86 7y ago
    Well put – 50% increase in free time. That's a very positive take on it. Depending on who you are that'll matter more or less, but to me that phrase is heart warming. 50% more time for the family, self care, catching up around the house. That sounds peaceful.
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      And you pay less taxes, so the pay cut is not as high as the full sticker.
      - GordonS 7y ago
        Actually, I remained in the same tax bracket.
        waddlesworth 7y ago
        Even in the same tax bracket, your effective tax rate will go down (because less of your income is in that bracket.)
davidajackson 7y ago
This is why I recently started doing remote work. I just can't justify commuting/time it takes to go somewhere 30+ minutes away.
bytematic 7y ago
It's interesting how many of those things rely on certain businesses being open 5 days a week at least.
Eoan 7y ago
Obligatory link to solution that would let working less be something that would not deserve a news story: https://i.imgur.com/ia2s7AM.png https://i.imgur.com/ia2s7AM.png
axaxs 7y ago
Honestly, it just sounds like your job is too stressful. I work 5 days a week, sometimes more, but nobody bats an eye if I need to go somewhere 2 or 3 hours in the middle of the day. I much prefer this to 4 full time days. 5 days of less stress gives you more availability and more flexibility at the same time. I feel it's what we should really be striving for.
turk73 7y ago
I'd say most of us probably are. I am suffering from chronic overwork at this point. I'm thinking of just quitting and taking 6 mos. off and maybe never going back to tech at all. Dow 30 company, total fucking mess.
grappler 7y ago
Seconding this, but particularly and especially for tasks that have to be done during normal business hours. If there's some issue I have that requires calling some customer service number, it often gets put off for days or even weeks before I manage to fit it in.

by mjayhn 7y ago

volkk 7y ago

> I know not everyone is as sapped for energy as I am after work, but I leave work and sit in an hour of traffic. My energy is just sapped from me by the time I make it home. I have enough energy to feed myself and sometimes work out to maintain my health.. I know that some people just dont have the privilege of living close to their jobs, but after spending one internship getting up at 5;45am to drive with my dad to work to beat the traffic for 1hr, and then spending 1.5-2 hours driving back in heavy traffic in NYC, I vowed to never ever live in a place where I have to drive that far to get to work. 2 months of that and I was already losing my will to live. My dad did it for 15 years and I can see why towards the last leg of that job, he was bitter and angry on a daily basis. That is not a way to live.

tombert 7y ago
I live in NYC, and I have a roughly 1 hour commute each way, but I just take the train everywhere. Of course I can't speak for anyone else, but I find that taking a train to work is a lot less stressful than driving every day. At least on the train, I can read, or pull out my laptop, or just play a video game.
- TuringNYC 7y ago
  I’m born and raised in NYC and took subways and trains to work everyday for over a decade in NYC. I mostly agree with you...but...I found the past several years of subway outages worse and started driving/ridesharing more and more. I’ve had times where subways constantly get rerouted, suddenly go express, skip stops, run on different lines, etc. it became so maddening.
  - wpasc 7y ago
    Not sure what GP meant but in NYC I find NJ Transit, Metro North, LIRR style to be much more relaxing and reliable. Subway is just a different beast
    - tombert 7y ago
      I take the Subway virtually every day. On weekdays it's not perfect, but generally good-enough.
      - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
        To some extent it likely depends on which subway you're on. Some lines are rough, especially at the outskirts. But I agree. For all that New Yorkers complain about the subway, it's my favorite thing about New York.
        davchana 7y ago
        Bad Subway is better than no subway; I wish we had that or any public transport in Northern California.
      - gen220 7y ago
        It depends a lot on your origin and destination. In my 6 years, I’ve found the optimal corridor to be Downtown Brooklyn to Midtown, with a slight bias for west manhattan over east. Anything outside that corridor has a high potential to be the Wild West (the G, L, JZM, etc) with kafkaesque reroutes and delays and express running local and no trains after 9pm on random 5 days every 9 weeks.
mjayhn 7y ago
Yeah that definitely helps! Unfortunately I think I'd still need a few hours to unwind and get out of "work mode." I've worked jobs where I could actually walk to work and I still went home just drained. TBH, I'm an introvert and I'm not sure going in to the office will ever be really conducive to my personality. I've worked jobs where I had an office to go to when I needed/wanted to be there but could work from home or at a clients office. That was wonderful. I actually showed up to it much, much more often than I expected - by pure choice. If I was having an off day or felt especially introverted and just needed a break from people I could just knock things out at home!
- chrisweekly 7y ago
  Remote work is increasingly available. Good luck!
- clarry 7y ago
  I'm still pretty sapped after 8-9 hours, even if I work from home. And yes, it does build up stress from all the errands that would be easiest to schedule during office hours on a weekday with no work.
kbenson 7y ago
There are ways to work around the system around metro hubs that tries to push you towards the standard of commuting 2 hours or more each day to get to a higher paying job, but you have to search for them and be flexible yourself in your search for a job that's flexible. These days, it's likely semi-remote work, where you commute 1-3 days a week or in off hours (part of day at home, part at work). For me, I've been lucky enough to always find something that I found interesting and that pays well enough while not having to commute more than 10-20 minutes in the local area, and that's having been born, raised, and lived my entire life 45 minutes North of SF. There's not guaranteed to be something good in the borderlands, but I think people might be surprised what they could find if they can resist the call of the behemoths (and those that congregate in the same area) while being within throwing range of them.
- Swizec 7y ago
  > push you towards the standard of commuting 2 hours or more each day to get to a higher paying job Crazy question but why not invest some of that higher salary into quality of life improvements like moving closer to work?
  - kbenson 7y ago
    I think you misread some of my comment. But as for why people don't do that, I think it's often because "quality of life" means different things to different people at different times in their lives. For a single 20-something, moving closer to work, and the much higher cost of living that usually entails can be worthwhile. For a 30-something or 40-something with a family, what kind of worth the spouse does (and whether it benefits from that move monetarily or in quality of live) and what it entails for the children can be much more important. For a single (or mostly single) income household, shaving 2 hours off your commute in exchange for double the cost of living is very hard to justify. There's often a reason they live far enough away to need to commute. For me, as I said, I've never had that commute. I've been very happy working in the tech industry an hour or so away from SF and its surrounding area. What I advocated is not moving closer to work, but working closer to where you moved. If you move to a suburb of SF, if you start looking for work in that area instead of focusing on SF, you might be surprised what's there. It won't pay as much, but theoretically cost of living is already drastically reduced by moving to the suburb, so maybe re-examining what's a good job to look is called for if that commute isn't to your liking.
nickbauman 7y ago
I changed my life so my work is 6 blocks from home. I will never go back. No realistic amount of money will ever be worth a commute. I consider commuting a form of incarceration.
- exclusiv 7y ago
  I'm lucky to have a drive that takes me down the ocean for the bulk of it and I use my commute time for phone calls after the best part so even though it's nearly 40 minutes it doesn't bother me at all. But yeah if your commute is just boring traffic it can get to you day in day out.
- goguy 7y ago
  I have to disagree. Realistically my only job opportunities for good pay are in cities, you couldn't pay me to live in one of those. I'll take the commute for the luxury of living in the countryside away from the noise, overpopulation and dirt.
  - nickbauman 7y ago
    For every person I've met from a small town, half say they'd never want to live there again, half are like you. There has been a 10,000 year trend toward urbanization so far. I'm glad for you, even though I suspect your future is going to get harder as the hinterland continues to empty out.
tentboy 7y ago
I think there is a happy medium too, and you don't need to live across the street from your job. I really like my job - which is located in the suburbs outside of DC but I wanted to live closer to the city so I have metro access and can easily bike around the city. I could easily get a nice place walking distance from work but my 30 minute commute (pretty much against traffic so not stressful) allows me to enjoy my time after work and the weekends much more than I would from the extra time from a short commute. I also enjoy driving and listening to music in my car so maybe thats part of it too
anonsivalley652 7y ago
Exactly. Work someplace else cheaper/less dense, remotely or get the tiniest, rathole, walkup closet where there's only a refrigerator and a tub, and you can't open the frig to open the door (but at least you can drink OJ from the carton while in the tub;). The people who commute by plane, 1-2 hours each way, or 100-200 miles daily are phreak'n outside of their skulls looking in.
- lastres0rt 7y ago
  Hey, I commute by train to work (about an hour each way once you factor in trotting to the station, waiting for commuter shuttles, etc.), and I'm happy as a clam because I can draw on my iPad or play on my Switch for much of that time. Now, if you're DRIVING that same hour, then yeah, you're nuts.
  - cylinder 7y ago
    What about all the time that takes? If you have kids you need/want to get home as soon as possible to provide help as well as actually see them. Doesn't matter how many games im playing during that time
- dev840 7y ago
  I wish that I could find a tiny rathole. Unfortunately, regulations around here with the minimum square footage requirements make that almost impossible.
werber 7y ago
I quit my last job because of the commute, gave up driving completely this year, and got a job in walking distance of my home. That part alone has made me a significantly happier person, I was able to stop taking anti anxiety medication, I have time for social activities, I have time for my friends and family again. I could never go back to driving to the office
fjp 7y ago
Agreed, the one thing I have promised myself is to never have a commute over 35 minutes. I even found a 35 minute commute to an internship in the suburbs disheartening when it was mostly spent sitting in traffic. It's insane to waste that much of your daily life shuttling to your job (if you have an option, which I hope to remain lucky enough to have).
- tasuki 7y ago
  The commute is not the problem, the car is. In Amsterdam I commuted 45 minutes by bike and it was great. I really miss it now that I work from home.
  - ihaveajob 7y ago
    This. I used to have a longish commute (about 1h door to door) but I took Caltrain, and that time was never wasted. I could work, connect with friends, or just unwind. The few times when I did that by car I ended exhausted. Throw in a weekly 3h bike ride to work to stay fit and it was quite excellent.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    That's better but some days are bad for biking and more than seven hours per week spent on a bike is still a bit much.
  - Nullabillity 7y ago
    Or.. maybe people just have different outlooks? I used to ebike for an hour each way, and it was torture. Now it's a ~20min drive and 30mins of the commuter train. Still pretty miserable, but at least it's not raining directly into my eyes anymore.
  - Broken_Hippo 7y ago
    Truthfully, though, the weather in Amsterdam isn't so bad. And wow, there is some infrastructure for biking! These two things combined would make biking so much better, but then you add in the average style of bicycle you see there: Comfortable seats with some space for traveling with stuff. I have some of the infrastructure where I live in Norway, but I'm not brave enough to bike on the snow and ice in the winter. Walking is perilous enough. When I lived in the states, biking was often dangerous and the fastest routes weren't always available to me. I lived in the countryside for years, close enough to bike by main roads, but it not only wasn't allowed on the best path, but it would have been dangerous. No shoulder, curvy road, and cars going over 55mph (over 80kph). It was illegal to ride on sidewalks, where there were sidewalks, and few cities had bike lanes outside of downtown areas (if that). One job literally had no entrance other than off of a 4-lane divided highway: No biking or walking to that job. Even if I got over those hurdles, there was often no where to safely put my bike while I was at work. Heck, some of these places didn't have anywhere to store cold things for lunch.
nine_k 7y ago
I work in NYC. My commute from Brooklyn in now about 30 minutes, 20 of them on a train, the rest is walking and waiting on a station. It's the shortest and least stressful commute I ever had among several cities I lived. Dense cities have upsides when you live inside them.
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
What's crazy is that you see regulation on minimum number of parking spaces for nearly any kind of building type and yet for working buildings, there's absolutely 0 regulations on minimum number of places to live. So, what happens is there's a huge imbalance between number of jobs offered vs places to live, thus driving up the cost of housing unnecessarily. It's almost as if they designed cities to only be driven too without any thought given on how to place living spaces closer to working spaces.
ratsimihah 7y ago
I've always prioritized living close to work and making my commute a 10mn walk. It's such a quality of life improvement, but I understand it can't be done by everyone. Since I lived and NYC and London, living near work often meant living in busy and noisy city areas, but it's a compromise I've generally been happy with.
burnJS 7y ago
Even if your commute is only 30 minutes, that is 5 hours lost a week roundtrip. An hour commute? Say goodbye to 10 hours a week. Yuck. Thankfully I have never had a long commute, my current commute is a 10-minute bike ride. Additionally, every company should provide at least one work from home day. Having a day at home where you can do laundry while working and other minor chores are such a huge win. Not to mention sleep-in to 830 if I want. Even while doing these mini chores I am WAY more productive at home. It also breaks up your week. My WFH day is Tuesday. So I deal with Monday, then have that cushy WFH day, then when I come back on Wednesday it feels like just a 3 day work week. Friday is casual and most employees take Friday to WFH. Its a ghost town and I love it. I need to begin looking for one of these dank jobs that are truly a four-day work week though.
- riffraff 7y ago
  I think it also highly depends on how you commute. I had a ~1h commute for years, which meant 10 hours gone a week, but I commuted via public transport (train+metro/subway/underground) which meant I had 10 hours a week for reading or conversation with friends on the same route. I worked from home for 10 years after, and I swear I read less! If I had been driving those would have felt like completely wasted time. Or, a friend of mine in Sweden had an even longer commute by train, but his company counted the time as office time, since he'd just work on the train, which meant no loss of free time. (I still agree all companies should encourage WFH as much as possible)
wonderwonder 7y ago
Long commutes are pretty terrible. Often times though parents are forced to choose between a long commute to their place of work but sending their kids to a good school zone vs the alternative. Unfortunately funding school zones based on property taxes leads to vast disparity in their quality and their ability to provide for students. The result for many is having to choose a long commute. With that said I commuted for just over an hour+ each way in a sports car pre kids for 3 years and I never want a low car again. Give me a comfortable SUV / sedan any day now.
golergka 7y ago
Renting in a 5-minute walk distance from the office have been, by far, best investment I've made in my life. Even though it's a small studio apartment, saving two hours of stress per day is heaven-sent for someone with low energy and chronic depression like me. It's like life switched to easy mode all of a sudden. The only downside is, I can't manage to schedule a time to read books – subways and trains were ideal for it.

Cyph0n 7y ago

I feel exactly the same when it comes to energy, even though I live ~10 mins from work... As far as work schedule goes, my company/team is fairly flexible when it comes to WFH. However, I still operate in "work mode" while at home, which makes it difficult to take of chores, etc.

rverghese 7y ago

But doesn't this rely on everyone else working 5 days? If everyone had a 4-week, it would be just like the current weekend. You can't go to the bank or dentist, because they would also be off. Perhaps you could get the same effect and quality of life by taking Sunday and Monday as your days off and working Saturday.

jonny_eh 7y ago
Maybe people could take different "3rd" days off?
- alistairSH 7y ago
  How do we decide who gets Friday or Monday (ie, a three day weekend)? I have a friend who once had M-W off, and worked the four remaining days. He hated it because his time off was completely misaligned with his peers, so he had no social life. Edit - I don't have any fundamental problem with working fewer hours or fewer days. But, I think I'd prefer 5x7 hour days instead of 4x8.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    > How do we decide who gets Friday or Monday Rotate who gets which days off each week.
  - winfred 7y ago
    I prefer mid week days off (Wednesday, but I'd settle for Tue/Thu). I love to have work weeks of two days. I can imagine there are plenty of other people that prefer the same thing.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      I'm with you completely, but from talking to others I think we're in a small minority. Most people want a long weekend.
  - smrr723 7y ago

cortesoft 7y ago

It is an especially big deal for working parents... having a day when kids are at school/daycare to do chores and errands is huge... so many things are impossible to do when you are chasing kids around. I get way more done on a weekday home than a weekend.

calvinmorrison 7y ago
how about single working adults? I have to literally take off of work to go to the DMV.
- bumby 7y ago
  Isn’t that the case for everyone working a standard 5 day week, single, kids, or not?
  - meesles 7y ago
    No. A good amount of reasonable/compassionate companies like mine don't care if you take 2 hours to go to the DMV during work hours. I'm very fortunate
    - cortesoft 7y ago
      But that still doesn’t have anything to do with having kids or not.
senderista 7y ago
This. I literally cannot get anything done on the weekends unless the inlaws stay over to look after our 2 toddlers. As the kids get older I'm sure it'll get easier.

david-gpu 7y ago

> Just having a day to be able to easily knock out chores between Jira issues This seems to conflate working from home with having time off. Is your employer paying you to work on that day or not? I work four days a week (30 hours). On my days off, I do not work at all. On my days on, I do not do random house chores during office hours. That's what my employer and I agreed to, and I think it describes what most people understand as a four day workweek.

Aeolun 7y ago
You can do chores during your workday if your workday extends by a similar amount of time. That’s basically the definition of flextime, and I’ve never heard of work from home without flex (how would you check).

systemtest 7y ago

I did it a bit different. For 2020, working four days gives me 204 workable days per year. Working five days gives me 255 workable days per year. What I do is that I work five days a week and around June-July I take ten weeks off. I have the same amount of working days per year with the same income but it feels like a godsend to have a yearly sabbatical of over 2 months during the best weather of the year. It reminds me of being in school again with the long summer holidays. If I ever have children that means being with them for six weeks fully dedicated to them.

msds 7y ago
I do this too, but split between 5 weeks in the summer for PNW alpine climbing and 5 weeks in the winter for desert stuff in the SW, plus normal vacation for long weekend climbing trips and the obligatory holidays. If I had children, taking the summer off with them seems great - it's a shame their vacation policy isn't flexible...

erik_landerholm 7y ago

Do you actually like your job? I don't mean any disrespect, but I've had jobs I don't really like and I get where you are coming from. Right now, though and at other times, since I've had my own companies, 6 day work weeks and 10-12 hrs a day was not even an issue. I feel like if people go to 4 day work weeks, people that love their jobs and are willing to work 1.5times as much or more will have a huge advantage over the long haul.

deleted 7y ago
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mnicky 7y ago
At my team, we recently established a rule that during Friday you can work on anything work-related you want (e.g. it doesn't have to be something from the actual sprint etc). Similar to the old Google "20% for your projects" kind of a thing. I expected that lots of useful or interesting things will be made during that time, which is true. But for me, the most beneficial effect is that my enjoyment of my work (which previously wasn't bad - I really liked my work) increased a lot. So this can be another way how to boost your job enjoyment.

GordonS 7y ago

Around 5 years back, I went from 5 days a week to 4, taking a 20% paycut in the process. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made - it feels like I have so much more time for family, side projects and hobbies than I ever did before. And for reference, I work around 90% from home. TBH, the company I work for has got a pretty good deal out of this, as I'm sure my productivity hasn't dropped at all. (it's a mega corp, so there is zero chance of negotiating back to equivalent of a 5-day salary)

guntars 7y ago
It's a 20% paycut, but a 50% increase in free time! I'm doing the same thing btw, taking every Wednesday off and I love it - it breaks up the week and having the whole extra day for fun projects is totally worth the money to me.
- steve_adams_86 7y ago
  Well put – 50% increase in free time. That's a very positive take on it. Depending on who you are that'll matter more or less, but to me that phrase is heart warming. 50% more time for the family, self care, catching up around the house. That sounds peaceful.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    And you pay less taxes, so the pay cut is not as high as the full sticker.
    - GordonS 7y ago
      Actually, I remained in the same tax bracket.
      - waddlesworth 7y ago
        Even in the same tax bracket, your effective tax rate will go down (because less of your income is in that bracket.)

davidajackson 7y ago

This is why I recently started doing remote work. I just can't justify commuting/time it takes to go somewhere 30+ minutes away.

bytematic 7y ago

It's interesting how many of those things rely on certain businesses being open 5 days a week at least.

Eoan 7y ago

Obligatory link to solution that would let working less be something that would not deserve a news story: https://i.imgur.com/ia2s7AM.png https://i.imgur.com/ia2s7AM.png

axaxs 7y ago

Honestly, it just sounds like your job is too stressful. I work 5 days a week, sometimes more, but nobody bats an eye if I need to go somewhere 2 or 3 hours in the middle of the day. I much prefer this to 4 full time days. 5 days of less stress gives you more availability and more flexibility at the same time. I feel it's what we should really be striving for.

turk73 7y ago

I'd say most of us probably are. I am suffering from chronic overwork at this point. I'm thinking of just quitting and taking 6 mos. off and maybe never going back to tech at all. Dow 30 company, total fucking mess.

grappler 7y ago

Seconding this, but particularly and especially for tasks that have to be done during normal business hours. If there's some issue I have that requires calling some customer service number, it often gets put off for days or even weeks before I manage to fit it in.