Trying to be green (or cheap) is hampering my productivity

August 27, 2007 at 10:13 pm (PT) in Personal

Surely to the dismay of my coworkers, I have been remarkably unproductive at work during the past few weeks. I suspect one factor (or a convenient scapegoat) is that VMware recently started a shuttle service that has a stop near my house. I’ve been taking it to save what I estimate to be about $1500/year on gas, but I think it has significantly fouled up my daily routine:

  • I used to wake up at around 10 AM, do about an hour of web surfing and responding to email, head to work between 11 AM and noon, and eventually return home at around 10 PM. Now with the shuttle, I’m forced to wake up earlier, and since I end up rushing out the door, I do my morning web surfing ritual when I arrive to work at 9:30 AM. This means that I actually start working at 10:30 AM, an hour earlier than before, but I have to leave by 7 PM, three hours earlier than before, yielding a net loss of two hours from my normal workday.
  • When I drove home, I used to think about problems I was in the middle of working on. Consequently, when I returned home, I was ready to (and often did) continue working remotely. My brain was active, and driving increased right-brain activity which supposedly can give different insights. Now that I spend the commute on a shuttle, I’m sleepy and end up trying to nap or vegetate, and by the time I get home, I’m totally disengaged from whatever I was working on, and I don’t feel like doing anything else.

Of course, some people will say that maybe I was working waaaay too much before, but my claim is that I have to do that to keep up with all my smart coworkers. Sigh.

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2 Comments »

  1. good point on the sleepness. though i happen to like public transit though. driving often is engaging, so it blocks out the chance to do other things like read or stuff. though yeah, despite that, i often find myself napping.

    — ben @ August 31, 2007, 11:08 am (PT)

  2. But think about all of the lives you’re saving by not driving…

    — Kevin @ September 1, 2007, 11:33 am (PT)

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