The L.A. Bus Gave Me Back My Time
How longer commutes made me more productive.
After gas hit $6.00, I stopped driving my car, cancelled my insurance, and turned in my license plates. Not because I couldn’t afford the gas. I’m a software engineer at SpaceX. If I was so inclined, I could buy myself a more fuel efficient vehicle or even an electric vehicle. Two lines of thinking stopped me from doing this. First, by principal I don’t think I should have to buy a forty thousand dollar vehicle because my government fails to build a modern and clean public transit system. Secondly, I realized that the money I was spending to travel to and from work was no longer worth the thirty-five to forty minutes I was spending doing nothing.
See, I detest driving. I view the activity as the biggest waste of my time. That activity requires me to have both eyes on the road at all time and occupies my hands. At most I can check my phone occasionally, but even these have to be short moments. Perhaps a distraction from texts or instagram posts, both void of mental stimulation. So I view the car drive around Los Angeles as a sunk of my productive time.
Arguably, you can spend your morning commutes listening to podcasts or jamming to music. For the most part this is how I spent most of my drives. But it gets old. At some point your favorite tracks become stale. As…
