I Actually Miss My Commute!
Well, half of it…
This is a controversial opinion but during this time of working from home I have discovered that I actually miss my commute! Hear me out, this makes sense, I promise.
Before I started working from home at the start of March, I had a regular driving commute to work of somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes each way depending on traffic. I literally spent 1–1.5 hours every workday sitting in my car driving. Driving home sucked, I was tired, it’d often been a busy day, I just wanted to be back home with my family getting the evening started.
But driving TO work, that was actually pretty good.
Driving to work gave me a 30 minute mental break each morning where I could gradually warm up my mind from the half sleep state to being functional. It provided me a quiet window of time in isolation where I could drink my coffee, listen to NPR news/podcasts, and slowly bring myself to a state where I was ready to interact with other people. I am not a morning person, I don’t do well ‘functioning’ in the morning until I’ve had a coffee and given my brain time to ‘wake up’.
You may ask “Why not just take that same 30 minutes while at home?”, the answer is because it is optional. Without my commute I just moved the time I wake up each morning, snoozing a little more. When I do get up and showered, then I feel like I better get started with work because there is nothing stopping me. Sure, it partly comes down to will power but when my phone starts buzzing with notifications and my ‘office’ is mere steps away, I just feel like I might as well get started because the work isn’t going anywhere.
The commute provided an immovable barrier between waking up and getting started with work, it was a pause and time of peace that I could not ‘opt out’ of, snooze through, or speed up. It was a time that I did not have control over, and that allowed me to enjoy it.
So, what can I do about it? That is a question I’m still trying to answer. I’m looking for suggestions, and ideas, so please let me know if you have any. In the meantime I’m going to try to just force it, to just fight with will power to make the time. I’m going to try to ignore my phone buzzing, and just enjoy a little time drinking my coffee and listening to the news. Maybe the warmer weather will let me sit out on the deck for 30 minutes before settling in to my home office. We’ll see…