13 ms·

I'm technically working longer because I'm not spending 70-120 additional minutes of each day commuting 14 miles to/from the office. Despite working longer, I

I'm technically working longer because I'm not spending 70-120 additional minutes of each day commuting 14 miles to/from the office. Despite working longer, I still end up having more free time. It is amazing how I manage to rationalize sitting in traffic for that amount of time every day to myself.

bdcravens 6y ago
I will say that driving less I have to look for opportunities to consume the podcasts that I find valuable.
- cloudwalking 6y ago
  Yeah, I've gone from 60-90 minutes of podcasts per day to zero.
  - dkokelley 6y ago
    I listen to them on walking breaks during the day.
    - bredren 6y ago
      I listen while walking my leash trained cat early in the morning.
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    I do listen them while I'm showering, as well as when I'm doing mindless chores, so my consumption hasn't gone to entirely 0.
- drdeadringer 6y ago
  I'm the same. I keep bumping up on the max capacity of my .mp3 player despite finding which tasks would be better served to double up.
- joegahona 6y ago
  That's a good trade-off though, right? Podcasts during commute time are to fill the dead space.
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  Why not listen to them during the time you'd otherwise be commuting?
- godelski 6y ago
  If you're not making time to listen to those podcasts I have to ask, how much value do you gain from them?
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Well, outside of the commute, where they are one of the only things you can do, podcasts compete with surfing the internet, Netflix, etc. Your rubric isn't very useful. Else you would conclude that taking heroin or posting on HN all day must be the most valuable way to spend your time. You don't account for the fact that we actively sabotage our true ambitions. Not many of us are on HN going "definitely glad I'm here wasting my time instead of working towards things that actually fulfill me." It's just constant procrastination. Being unable to identify this procrastination usually stems from rationalization. "Hmm, if something was more important to me, I'd surely be doing it!" being a great example of that faulty bargaining. By the same token, exercise isn't worthless just because most of us avoid it. And we are often slaves to what is easy to do. What is easy to do doesn't always agree with what we want to do.
    - godelski 6y ago
      > Else you would conclude that taking heroin or posting on HN all day must be the most valuable way to spend your time. Considering that I don't make time for heroin use, I believe by my metric that I don't find it valuable. Or else I would use it. Conversely, I don't spend all day on HN because the value degrades as the day goes by. This kind of response is wholly inappropriate. As you yourself point out > podcasts compete with surfing the internet, Netflix, etc. So what I'm suggesting is that you are placing higher (satisfaction) value over surfing the internet, Netflix, etc over the value of podcasts. > Being unable to identify this procrastination usually stems from rationalization. "Hmm, if something was more important to me, I'd surely be doing it!" being a great example of that faulty bargaining. You are misreading. Asking if you find value (what kind of value?) in podcasts is a driving question. The question may be rhetorical in nature but the answer isn't simply "I don't make time for it ipso facto it is not valuable to me." Rather the answer is deeper and not singular, coming to possible different conclusions: "podcasts aren't as valuable as the other things I prioritize" or "podcasts are more valuable than the things I am prioritizing over it, maybe I should re-prioritize." You may fail at the latter, but the question and (personal) answer is necessary if you are to take that step. Either you convince yourself that you're placing too much weight on the value of podcasts and that the relaxing nature of surfing the internet and Netflix is more valuable to you, relaxing IS a valuable and necessary part of existence (yes, people go too far). Or you need to evaluate and work at extracting more value within your day, be that with podcasts, exercise, whatever. No one, except you, implied that such a task is easy. The whole point of the question is to get you to prod yourself and push you to make a decision on the answer instead of just expressing frustration. What you choose is up to you at this point as well as how you choose to accomplish your answer. Additionally I should mention that there are different types of value and what that means to people is different. Don't discount stress relief in the form of "slacking off" as not valuable. You can't be running in high gear all the time. This statement also doesn't ignore addiction unless you are not giving a good faith reading. > And we are often slaves to what is easy to do. Do not fall into this trap. Addiction is treatable and you can get out of it. It isn't easy, but it is treatable. You are not subjugated to that existence forever. > What is easy to do doesn't always agree with what we want to do. Who claimed this? Rather I'll say that not everything that is critical is a personal attack and often we package complex questions that require the listener to make difficult decisions into compact statements as an intentional method to get the other person to think hard about the question. Frankly because no one can give you an answer but yourself and thus it is woefully inappropriate to do so. So a mechanism is needed to get you to do such a task. This is not an attack on you unless you make it one. The pattern which I have just discussed is littered all throughout this response. What it means to be a good faith response is to think about the intention of the words and not just your interpretation (which both are different than the literal words). It does not mean you have to agree, but it does mean you have to demonstrate that you listened.
- rtlfe 6y ago
  I turned my 60 minutes of daily commuting with podcasts into 60 minutes of walking around my neighborhood with podcasts.
pkaye 6y ago
For me the commute traffic was the worst part of the day and I don't have to deal with that now. Also saving time overall and more quality time with the family. I also have kidney failure and am on daily home dialysis and working from home gives more flexibility. And the fact that more employers will tolerate work from home means I have more job opportunities in the future. I had skipped lots of job opportunities because the longer commute time clashed with my dialysis schedule.
- bosswipe 6y ago
  I'm not sure about more job opportunities in the future, remote work is going to accelerate jobs moving out to lower wage countries and put downward pressure on salaries here.
  - cpach 6y ago
    People has been saying that for twenty years. Yes, some jobs are now done in India, Romania, etc. At the same time the pie has expanded.
    - bosswipe 6y ago
      I don't see how you can rely on the past to predict massive historic trend shifts in the workplace. Previously offshoring created an in-group and an out-group with shitty communication between them. Post-pandemic everybody is in the same virtual group with the same shitty communication tools.
    - rtlfe 6y ago
      It's a lot easier for a bay area company to successfully have remote workers in Idaho than in Romania. The time difference is minimal, cultural differences are less, and it's easy for the person to visit the office.
    - vkou 6y ago
      "Sure, some manufacturing is being done in China now, but the total amount of manufacturing has expanded." -Some soon to be unemployed factory worker in what is now known as the rust belt, circa 1988.
bredren 6y ago
I’m hopeful many people will wake up to the misery that cars and commuting inflicts on themselves. The United States has been consumed with car culture which has bled time and resources from individuals like yourself. But it also is responsible for endless tragedy in the form of accidents and financial overextension. Car culture, partly driven by commuting, has inflated the need for some systems and created entire rent-seeking businesses that could be any number of more useful and interesting investments of human time and capital. I believe a silver lining of the Coronavirus and the actions of political representatives and appointees that have allowed covid to foster will ultimately result in progression in many outdated norms we experienced up through 2020.
- randomProducer 6y ago
  I feel the same. The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me. As someone who grew up pretty poor it always fascinated me that my family and neighbors would buy cars worth 20k - 30k which would be enough to provide a very basic/safe way of living for the foreseeable future. I would take the peace of mind I would of had over having a status symbol that random people on the highway could look at for a few seconds on a trip. Also driving is such a waste of human potential, I don't think the amount of attention needed to drive safely is worth the monotony/tediousness of driving. It's wasted time on a large scale.
  - yodsanklai 6y ago
    > The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me I have no interest in cars and find it quite ridiculous that they can be seen as a social status, so I agree with your statement. But, people have different interests... some will spend their money travelling or playing golf, and some people just like cars!
    - randomProducer 6y ago
      I think that's fair but I think the amount of people that think they're into cars is far more than the amount of people that are actually into cars. Not trying to be a gatekeeper but if I think about myself I know I "felt social pressure" (grew up in a culture that glorifies this material item and sets an expect ion of success/fulfillment) to get a car. I guess you could argue that social pressures like this can grow naturally and I suppose I agree that they can but I don't think this one grew naturally and for some people promotes values that they may not hold. Cars as status symbols, I think, is troubling at the scale they're at. If you enjoy to ride around or appreciate their engineering then by all means. Even as I type this I think if you want to splurge on a Car that you will just take social media pictures with to make you feel good and show others then I think you should, more power to you, do what makes you happy. I guess my problem is that "what makes you happy" .. "is a fancy car" (you can go in debt to get) is a message that is "loud" and unlike a house (arguably the other functional yet status symbol) is within reach of people who it isn't in their best interest to get. I think it's a nuanced subject because as most things in life it's mixed up in all aspects of human life like financial education and personal responsibility but what I'm saying is that current "car culture" (to sweep away all the nuance) doesn't feel right to me right now and I think causes a lot of harm.
cheerlessbog 6y ago
With all the energy drained from job +commute it can be hard to have much left to care about the planet and our community. It’s easier to be angry and isolated and fall back on tribal stereotypes and assume someone else will fix climate change and other global problems. With more time and energy, it’s easier to participate.
birdyrooster 6y ago
It’s more amazing to me that you wrote that in the present tense as if you would do it again.
baby 6y ago
It is traffic to an extent, but honestly, it is also not having fixed hours now that you remove the traffic. It's easy to just start working whenever you wake up, and not stop working until you go to sleep. So on one hand I get what you're saying, I personally spent 3 hours per day commuting and I'm so grateful to have put that behind me now, at the same time if I'm overworking now it's mostly because I don't know when to stop the day.
- eikenberry 6y ago
  Sounds like you need to develop a hobby or two. I also tend to overwork when I have nothing else to do as I'd rather work than zone out in front of the TV. But this hasn't been a problem as I'd rather spend time on my hobbies than work... so end of work day is when I get to switch to my hobbies. To put it another way, what I hear you saying that your work is the most interesting thing in your life right now and so, of course, you spend most of your time doing it. If you had other things in your life that we equally or more interesting...
  - baby 6y ago
    I actually am writing a book and I have told myself that I should work on it after work, but I have failed miserably to switch to that hobby after work :(
    - therealdrag0 6y ago
      Right there with you buddy!
    - eikenberry 6y ago
      Unless you just really love writing that could very easily just be a second job.
      - baby 6y ago
        I do love writing, but technical writing actually takes more reading/researching and revising chapters than actually writing new chapters. It makes the second job quite hard :)
pc86 6y ago
I've only saved about 50-60 daily minutes as I live pretty close to the office, but I've also been very cognizant of my hours and not working more just because I'm available. Our pay wasn't increased (in fact, the opposite), so why would I work more?
- simonbarker87 6y ago
  Only 50-60 minutes a day? That’s still huge, over the course of a weekend you’ve over half a work day! Value that time and keep hold of it.
  - pc86 6y ago
    Yeah averaged about 25 minutes one way. Both my apartment and my office are close to the highway and I'm in a relatively low population area (especially compared to SV/NYC).
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> It is amazing how I manage to rationalize sitting in traffic for that amount of time every day to myself. I may be weird, but I enjoyed my commute prior to COVID. I purposely avoided the Interstate Highway, even though it would have saved me 10 minutes, in favor of backroads that have less traffic. Then during my commute, I listen to Audiobooks. I kind of felt that this was my personal time just for me to listen to the books I liked. At work and home, there are always people clamoring for my time and attention, but my commute was just me time. In addition, I have a vehicle with stop and go, automatic cruise control, so even a traffic jamb is not all that stressful.
Shivetya 6y ago
I always judged new jobs by including the commute time into it. Hence if I could shave a lot off my commute I would consider less income. However prior to COVID19 I was on two to three days at home for the past few years so adopting to everyday at home has been easy. In a way I see my commute hours being productive as free time at work, meaning I can knock stuff out without feeling obligated to reply to emails; because I am not "really" at work yet.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  Yeah, I did the same when I bought my house.... made sure I was only 10 minutes away from where my office and many other tech offices were. I was always shocked at how many people were willing to spend 50 hours a month driving just to save $500 on rent... is your tone really only worth $10 an hour? Now, I am totally screwed because I pay more and no one commutes anyway.

bdcravens 6y ago

I will say that driving less I have to look for opportunities to consume the podcasts that I find valuable.

cloudwalking 6y ago
Yeah, I've gone from 60-90 minutes of podcasts per day to zero.
- dkokelley 6y ago
  I listen to them on walking breaks during the day.
  - bredren 6y ago
    I listen while walking my leash trained cat early in the morning.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  I do listen them while I'm showering, as well as when I'm doing mindless chores, so my consumption hasn't gone to entirely 0.
drdeadringer 6y ago
I'm the same. I keep bumping up on the max capacity of my .mp3 player despite finding which tasks would be better served to double up.
joegahona 6y ago
That's a good trade-off though, right? Podcasts during commute time are to fill the dead space.
fractionalhare 6y ago
Why not listen to them during the time you'd otherwise be commuting?
godelski 6y ago
If you're not making time to listen to those podcasts I have to ask, how much value do you gain from them?
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Well, outside of the commute, where they are one of the only things you can do, podcasts compete with surfing the internet, Netflix, etc. Your rubric isn't very useful. Else you would conclude that taking heroin or posting on HN all day must be the most valuable way to spend your time. You don't account for the fact that we actively sabotage our true ambitions. Not many of us are on HN going "definitely glad I'm here wasting my time instead of working towards things that actually fulfill me." It's just constant procrastination. Being unable to identify this procrastination usually stems from rationalization. "Hmm, if something was more important to me, I'd surely be doing it!" being a great example of that faulty bargaining. By the same token, exercise isn't worthless just because most of us avoid it. And we are often slaves to what is easy to do. What is easy to do doesn't always agree with what we want to do.
  - godelski 6y ago
    > Else you would conclude that taking heroin or posting on HN all day must be the most valuable way to spend your time. Considering that I don't make time for heroin use, I believe by my metric that I don't find it valuable. Or else I would use it. Conversely, I don't spend all day on HN because the value degrades as the day goes by. This kind of response is wholly inappropriate. As you yourself point out > podcasts compete with surfing the internet, Netflix, etc. So what I'm suggesting is that you are placing higher (satisfaction) value over surfing the internet, Netflix, etc over the value of podcasts. > Being unable to identify this procrastination usually stems from rationalization. "Hmm, if something was more important to me, I'd surely be doing it!" being a great example of that faulty bargaining. You are misreading. Asking if you find value (what kind of value?) in podcasts is a driving question. The question may be rhetorical in nature but the answer isn't simply "I don't make time for it ipso facto it is not valuable to me." Rather the answer is deeper and not singular, coming to possible different conclusions: "podcasts aren't as valuable as the other things I prioritize" or "podcasts are more valuable than the things I am prioritizing over it, maybe I should re-prioritize." You may fail at the latter, but the question and (personal) answer is necessary if you are to take that step. Either you convince yourself that you're placing too much weight on the value of podcasts and that the relaxing nature of surfing the internet and Netflix is more valuable to you, relaxing IS a valuable and necessary part of existence (yes, people go too far). Or you need to evaluate and work at extracting more value within your day, be that with podcasts, exercise, whatever. No one, except you, implied that such a task is easy. The whole point of the question is to get you to prod yourself and push you to make a decision on the answer instead of just expressing frustration. What you choose is up to you at this point as well as how you choose to accomplish your answer. Additionally I should mention that there are different types of value and what that means to people is different. Don't discount stress relief in the form of "slacking off" as not valuable. You can't be running in high gear all the time. This statement also doesn't ignore addiction unless you are not giving a good faith reading. > And we are often slaves to what is easy to do. Do not fall into this trap. Addiction is treatable and you can get out of it. It isn't easy, but it is treatable. You are not subjugated to that existence forever. > What is easy to do doesn't always agree with what we want to do. Who claimed this? Rather I'll say that not everything that is critical is a personal attack and often we package complex questions that require the listener to make difficult decisions into compact statements as an intentional method to get the other person to think hard about the question. Frankly because no one can give you an answer but yourself and thus it is woefully inappropriate to do so. So a mechanism is needed to get you to do such a task. This is not an attack on you unless you make it one. The pattern which I have just discussed is littered all throughout this response. What it means to be a good faith response is to think about the intention of the words and not just your interpretation (which both are different than the literal words). It does not mean you have to agree, but it does mean you have to demonstrate that you listened.
rtlfe 6y ago
I turned my 60 minutes of daily commuting with podcasts into 60 minutes of walking around my neighborhood with podcasts.

pkaye 6y ago

For me the commute traffic was the worst part of the day and I don't have to deal with that now. Also saving time overall and more quality time with the family. I also have kidney failure and am on daily home dialysis and working from home gives more flexibility. And the fact that more employers will tolerate work from home means I have more job opportunities in the future. I had skipped lots of job opportunities because the longer commute time clashed with my dialysis schedule.

bosswipe 6y ago
I'm not sure about more job opportunities in the future, remote work is going to accelerate jobs moving out to lower wage countries and put downward pressure on salaries here.
- cpach 6y ago
  People has been saying that for twenty years. Yes, some jobs are now done in India, Romania, etc. At the same time the pie has expanded.
  - bosswipe 6y ago
    I don't see how you can rely on the past to predict massive historic trend shifts in the workplace. Previously offshoring created an in-group and an out-group with shitty communication between them. Post-pandemic everybody is in the same virtual group with the same shitty communication tools.
  - rtlfe 6y ago
    It's a lot easier for a bay area company to successfully have remote workers in Idaho than in Romania. The time difference is minimal, cultural differences are less, and it's easy for the person to visit the office.
  - vkou 6y ago
    "Sure, some manufacturing is being done in China now, but the total amount of manufacturing has expanded." -Some soon to be unemployed factory worker in what is now known as the rust belt, circa 1988.

bredren 6y ago

I’m hopeful many people will wake up to the misery that cars and commuting inflicts on themselves. The United States has been consumed with car culture which has bled time and resources from individuals like yourself. But it also is responsible for endless tragedy in the form of accidents and financial overextension. Car culture, partly driven by commuting, has inflated the need for some systems and created entire rent-seeking businesses that could be any number of more useful and interesting investments of human time and capital. I believe a silver lining of the Coronavirus and the actions of political representatives and appointees that have allowed covid to foster will ultimately result in progression in many outdated norms we experienced up through 2020.

randomProducer 6y ago
I feel the same. The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me. As someone who grew up pretty poor it always fascinated me that my family and neighbors would buy cars worth 20k - 30k which would be enough to provide a very basic/safe way of living for the foreseeable future. I would take the peace of mind I would of had over having a status symbol that random people on the highway could look at for a few seconds on a trip. Also driving is such a waste of human potential, I don't think the amount of attention needed to drive safely is worth the monotony/tediousness of driving. It's wasted time on a large scale.
- yodsanklai 6y ago
  > The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me I have no interest in cars and find it quite ridiculous that they can be seen as a social status, so I agree with your statement. But, people have different interests... some will spend their money travelling or playing golf, and some people just like cars!
  - randomProducer 6y ago
    I think that's fair but I think the amount of people that think they're into cars is far more than the amount of people that are actually into cars. Not trying to be a gatekeeper but if I think about myself I know I "felt social pressure" (grew up in a culture that glorifies this material item and sets an expect ion of success/fulfillment) to get a car. I guess you could argue that social pressures like this can grow naturally and I suppose I agree that they can but I don't think this one grew naturally and for some people promotes values that they may not hold. Cars as status symbols, I think, is troubling at the scale they're at. If you enjoy to ride around or appreciate their engineering then by all means. Even as I type this I think if you want to splurge on a Car that you will just take social media pictures with to make you feel good and show others then I think you should, more power to you, do what makes you happy. I guess my problem is that "what makes you happy" .. "is a fancy car" (you can go in debt to get) is a message that is "loud" and unlike a house (arguably the other functional yet status symbol) is within reach of people who it isn't in their best interest to get. I think it's a nuanced subject because as most things in life it's mixed up in all aspects of human life like financial education and personal responsibility but what I'm saying is that current "car culture" (to sweep away all the nuance) doesn't feel right to me right now and I think causes a lot of harm.

cheerlessbog 6y ago

With all the energy drained from job +commute it can be hard to have much left to care about the planet and our community. It’s easier to be angry and isolated and fall back on tribal stereotypes and assume someone else will fix climate change and other global problems. With more time and energy, it’s easier to participate.

birdyrooster 6y ago

It’s more amazing to me that you wrote that in the present tense as if you would do it again.

baby 6y ago

It is traffic to an extent, but honestly, it is also not having fixed hours now that you remove the traffic. It's easy to just start working whenever you wake up, and not stop working until you go to sleep. So on one hand I get what you're saying, I personally spent 3 hours per day commuting and I'm so grateful to have put that behind me now, at the same time if I'm overworking now it's mostly because I don't know when to stop the day.

eikenberry 6y ago
Sounds like you need to develop a hobby or two. I also tend to overwork when I have nothing else to do as I'd rather work than zone out in front of the TV. But this hasn't been a problem as I'd rather spend time on my hobbies than work... so end of work day is when I get to switch to my hobbies. To put it another way, what I hear you saying that your work is the most interesting thing in your life right now and so, of course, you spend most of your time doing it. If you had other things in your life that we equally or more interesting...
- baby 6y ago
  I actually am writing a book and I have told myself that I should work on it after work, but I have failed miserably to switch to that hobby after work :(
  - therealdrag0 6y ago
    Right there with you buddy!
  - eikenberry 6y ago
    Unless you just really love writing that could very easily just be a second job.
    - baby 6y ago
      I do love writing, but technical writing actually takes more reading/researching and revising chapters than actually writing new chapters. It makes the second job quite hard :)

pc86 6y ago

I've only saved about 50-60 daily minutes as I live pretty close to the office, but I've also been very cognizant of my hours and not working more just because I'm available. Our pay wasn't increased (in fact, the opposite), so why would I work more?

simonbarker87 6y ago
Only 50-60 minutes a day? That’s still huge, over the course of a weekend you’ve over half a work day! Value that time and keep hold of it.
- pc86 6y ago
  Yeah averaged about 25 minutes one way. Both my apartment and my office are close to the highway and I'm in a relatively low population area (especially compared to SV/NYC).

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> It is amazing how I manage to rationalize sitting in traffic for that amount of time every day to myself. I may be weird, but I enjoyed my commute prior to COVID. I purposely avoided the Interstate Highway, even though it would have saved me 10 minutes, in favor of backroads that have less traffic. Then during my commute, I listen to Audiobooks. I kind of felt that this was my personal time just for me to listen to the books I liked. At work and home, there are always people clamoring for my time and attention, but my commute was just me time. In addition, I have a vehicle with stop and go, automatic cruise control, so even a traffic jamb is not all that stressful.

Shivetya 6y ago

I always judged new jobs by including the commute time into it. Hence if I could shave a lot off my commute I would consider less income. However prior to COVID19 I was on two to three days at home for the past few years so adopting to everyday at home has been easy. In a way I see my commute hours being productive as free time at work, meaning I can knock stuff out without feeling obligated to reply to emails; because I am not "really" at work yet.

cortesoft 6y ago
Yeah, I did the same when I bought my house.... made sure I was only 10 minutes away from where my office and many other tech offices were. I was always shocked at how many people were willing to spend 50 hours a month driving just to save $500 on rent... is your tone really only worth $10 an hour? Now, I am totally screwed because I pay more and no one commutes anyway.