For much of my career I had a 5-minute commute. I wondered how coworkers could stand spending 2 hours a day in their cars. In 2010 Numara moved, bringing my drive to 20 minutes. Not ideal, but I still felt lucky to have a relatively short drive. This year, my family & I acted on a really great opportunity to move. One of the few downsides that I feared was my commute: it would be 50-60 minutes each way.

I asked friends about their commuting habits, and searched the web for advice. I am amazed at how quickly I’ve adapted my daily rhythm, so much that I actually look forward to the drive on most days! I’ve been jotting down some of my trials, successes, and failures over the past 3 months of learning to commute, and I figured I’d share them in occasional blog posts.

I’ll start with a simple tip: snacks & drinks.

I get thirsty and snacky during my drive. I definitely don’t want to waste time & money stopping to buy food. To solve this, I prep a snack and drink that I can grab quickly on my way out the door. At night before bed, I pour orange juice in my water bottle and put it in the fridge. When I get to work, I rinse out the bottle and fill it with icewater for the drive home. I keep a bag of pretzels in my desk, and I put a few pretzels into a little tupperware container. Prepping ahead of time is key. If I waited until I was on my way out the door to do it, I’d be kicking off each drive with an annoying little hassle before I could be on the road. Those couple of minutes of prep beforehand help put me in a positive mindset to start my drive, since they enable me to just get up and go.

Stay tuned for upcoming musings on shaving while driving, podcasts, playing harmonica, and cell phones.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2011 at 12:43 am and is filed under musings.