Riding the Bus: The hits just keep on coming

I have a lot of flexibility with my job. I can come and go pretty much as I please. I really appreciate the flexibility but it has its drawbacks; mainly, it's very easy for me to rationalize why I need to leave at 3 and finish the day at home. While I do work when I get home, the distractions at home and task switching overhead make the whole thing really inefficient, and lead to me feeling unhappy. Also I find myself unable to clearly delineate work and the rest of my life since I always feel like I should've done more that day.

I think I've been riding the bus for almost a month now, and it took about that long for me to realize something pretty interesting. I was sitting in my office the other day at about 3 PM and got the standard 'I want to go home' feeling, so I went to start packing up my stuff. Then I realized that I didn't drive, so I'd better check to see when the next bus was going to come, which was not for another 38 minutes. 38 minutes?! I wasn't going to wait outside for 38 minutes, so I went back to my previous task and finished it, distraction averted.

Do you see what happened? It is now more difficult to act on a whim and ride home then it is to stay and do my work until I should actually leave! Some people have more self control than this, but I'm just developing it, so having a way to stack the odds in favor of me accomplishing something makes me very happy.

Another side affect: After this realization, I have been able to take advantage of this new-found inability to give in to laziness. If I'm going to stay this long, I thought, I'm going to make sure I know how productive I'm being. I started taking some extra time during the day to track my activities, and then spend the last few minutes of every day figuring out what I'm going to do the following day. This last part means that when I leave work, I am DONE until I arrive the next day, and it's guilt-free because I know how much I accomplished. There is no lingering 'but I should've...'.

Riding the bus

As of IPhone v2.2, the maps app has public transit info included. I was screwing with this feature and learned that I could ride the bus to work in a little over an hour. At first glance that seemed like a long time, considering it takes me about 30 minutes to drive to work, then it occurred to me that it would be a great time to read.

Background: I go through periods where I buy large quantities of books - I just bought 15 or so books that I got as recommendations from Albert Wong (mostly business stuff), and then from reading Omnivore's Dilemma. I have been scratching my head as to how I will actually get around to reading any of these books.

So I would be chewing up an additional hour a day to get 2 new hours of reading time. This seemed like a reasonable tradeoff - it's not like I can't pack the same amount of screwing around into an hour less a day. I wanted to make sure I wasn't making some incredibly stupid financial move, though I was pretty sure I wasn't.

Simple approach: Gas costs 2 dollars a gallon, I get 32 mpg on my way to and from work, a total of 19 miles round trip (determined using a Scan Gauge) - so it costs me .59 gallons * $2/gallon = $1.18 to drive per day or 5.90/week. A bus pass costs 7 dollars a week. Is it worth 1.10 for me to have 10 hours of reading time? Resoundingly yes - I could've stopped there.

I then started thinking about total costs for driving, and I found this tool to help me (Google Transit online also provides a cost-to-drive figure for each trip)). Edmunds claims that my car costs 40 cents a mile to drive, but that seemed high - it turns out a lot of this is costs you don't incur by driving, but simply by owning the car, so I subtracted those. The final tally was 24 cents a mile for gas, maintenance and repair, which brings the number to 19.6 dollars a week to drive, versus 7 for a bus pass. Any other costs I'm missing?

Well I stop to get a breakfast taco pretty much every day, which works out to 9 dollars. Then I go out to lunch which costs me between 10 and 20. If I don't have a car, I would do none of this since I hate the cafeteria and I don't want to walk anywhere for mediocre food, so I'd eat stuff from home. This math was getting to be pretty crazy - I would be saving between 108 and 158 dollars for every week I rode the bus (note: though it would incur some additional grocery costs I consider these marginal because I waste a ton of food most weeks).

There are a few other things worth mentioning: I'd be seeing some health benefits, as I am now doing some amount of walking to and from the bus stop, as well as eating healthier since I cook good food at home. I will get to talk to a few new people every day, which I love. It's taking a car off the road which is good for the environment. All of this at the cost of 1 hour a day of time that I wasn't doing anything with anyway.

If anyone can think of a way to reward myself for riding the bus please do tell. The only thing I can think of is to save for an Amazon Kindle, but that would only take 4 weeks of bus riding!

I have been riding the bus for 30 days now. So far I have nothing but good things to say. I can't really come up with a reason to start driving to work again, except on days that I have appointments.