One perk Lincoln Loop and other companies with remote staff regularly cite is the lack of a commute. Nothing beats taking the Pajama Freeway to your home office. While reviewing my time entries for last year I started to wonder what the real impact to my available time was by not commuting.
Lets look at some numbers. I am American so lets use those statistics.
I logged a total of 1772 hours last year. This is more than the Lincoln Loop average, but is very much in line with the 1787 average annual hours worked by Americans.
In order to consider the impact we need to figure out how much I am not commuting. Most Americans work – including me – roughly 8 hours a day. So:
1772 / 8 = 221.5 days
We know I would be commuting roughly 221.5 days, but how much time is saved? Some quick Googling tells us that the average total commute per day is 50.4 minutes.
More math:
221.5 * 50.4 = 11163.6 minutes, or ~186 hours
I saved 186 hours by working from home. This means that I would have spent 10.49% of my time worked just getting to and from an office! Prior to this realization I squandered that time. Now I allocate for it. Roughly 1 hour of my day is spent doing something I couldn’t have done while commuting. Most days I cook breakfast for my wife and son. Other days I read or exercise. Some days I tinker with a pet project.
What could you do with nearly 5 work weeks of extra time a year? What projects could you launch? What books could you finish?
(If you’re wondering about the average worker, they would save 187.639 hours a year)
