Twenty years with my husband in the United States Air Force convinced me that “waiting” is the single worst enemy of productivity. Oh, how I would love to do that time over now with smart phone and laptop in hand!
I think I was born with the awareness of time etched on my brain. I have attempted to count time lost through no fault of my own. A Google search yields nearly a billion hits, so it may have crossed your mind, too! I particularly liked a page called The Fact Site because the researcher even added how much time we waste on the toilet.
So, you can imagine how I feel about commuting! Dale City Patch had a great in January that described the Dale City Commute as the worst in the nation of medium sized cities. A whopping 45.4 percent of commuters from Dale City take at least 45 minutes to get to work. My husband’s commute is about an hour, so he’s upping the average for you 30 minute drivers. Except for a seven month period when he worked from home, Bill’s commute has always been about an hour. There was a time frame when he worked in Bethesda, where the commute was well over an hour, so that offsets the time saved when he was working from home.
We spent the first and last tours of our Air Force years assigned to the Pentagon, so that was often more than an hour, especially if there was an accident, but for ease of calculation, let’s just use one hour, each way. There are about 260 work days in a year and if he takes a week for vacation that’s 253. In the 37 years we have been married, Bill has only missed work two days for illness, so I’m not deducting any days for that.
He has been commuting for as long as we’ve lived in Virginia. I’ll calculate 11 years we were at Scott AFB, where the commute was only ten minutes. That would be a mere 154 days in 11 years. Now I’ll add twenty six years of Virginia commuting. Take those 253 days x 2 hours per day = 506 hours a year! That equals 21 days, or three weeks a year sitting behind the wheel. Take those three weeks times 26 years and he has wasted over 1.5 years of his life getting to and from his job!
I am a member of the Prince William, Manassas and Manassas Park Chamber of Commerce and serve on the Telework Task Force. Our goal is to get people off the road and allow as many as possible to work from home or at least work from data centers like the Mason Enterprise Center.
We’re working on legislation, education, awareness, incentives, motives, financial benefits, and many other attributes that make remote work a much more attractive proposition to business than losing a year and a half of one’s life.
Send me your input. Tell me what price you’re paying to commute, whether it’s actual gas, insurance and car repairs or missing your child’s debut in a school play. If there is one single way to improve life in our area, it is to reduce traffic and commute time. It takes a whole lot of squeaky wheels to make noise loud enough to affect change at this level.
