This is definitely, one of my most profitable lifehacks I made in 2007. I hope some of you will find it useful or at least inspiring, but I know it may not work for everybody.
Before August 2007 I was working half-time. I was a student and I didn’t want to turn into full-time mode until I graduated. I used to visit company’s office about 2 or 3 times a week. After graduation I have started full-time and I go to the office each workday.
This switch to full-time pushed me to check if my current route to work is optimal. While I was covering it 2-3 times per week I didn’t find it so important. 5 times a week multiplied by 2 (both ways) means that any improvement would be lucrative.
photo credit: CoredesatChikai
I always go to work by car. Why? It is much faster than public transport and it is comfortable. Very often, after work I go directly to the gym or martial arts classes and I have my bag with necessary equipment in my car. This is very important argue for me to use my car. I hope thieves don’t read my blog or at least they don’t want to steal my tracksuit.
Therefore, optimizing my route to work would mean shorter time of driving a car and lower consumption of fuel. Great. It looked promising, so I decided to experiment a little.
I always knew about two routes that used to give similar results. With help of Google Maps, I found another 4 routes. Now, it was time to test and compare results.
The task was very interesting. I was measuring the total time of travel as well as current time and week day. My old routes usually took about 20-24 minutes one way. Two of those, which I found with Google Maps, were giving much better results, about 15-18 minutes. That’s 10 minutes (both ways) or 20-25% of time less. Wonderful. Additionally, I discovered that one of these routes is faster about 7AM, the other one is better about 8AM and 9AM. Depending on time I’m going to work, I can select a better one.
10 minutes per day multiplied by 5 work days give almost an additional hour per week.
It didn’t take me long to work on my other routes. I managed to slightly optimize my route to the place where I have kung-fu classes. It gives me additional 10 minutes per week.
To sum it up, after successful optimization I usually save about 50-70 minutes per week. I also have lower fuel consumption, but I didn’t measure this precisely. Anyway, the result is very satisfying. You also should try to optimize your daily routes.
March 8th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Very interesting article. I’m lucky enough to work from home, but am going to have to try this for the routes to and from my children’s activities as I am also the family taxi driver.
I found that sometimes going in the opposite direction from my destination, for just a little bit, gets me to my desination faster as I is easier to hock into the less trafficked roads.
March 9th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Interesting take on optimization. I happen to work at home also but this is valid for a lot of things not just driving to work. Optimizing my work day so that I can be of more value than I already am to my clients by finding a more streamlined way to do certain tasks is one way to think about it. Thank you
June 20th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
[...] Simple and effective. But this one doesn’t work for me as Stary Browar is on my optimal route to work. [...]