One of the Benefits of the Right Long Commute
In changing jobs, I recently went from a 15 minute commute to about an hour commute. I can’t say that the hour is my ideal commute, but interestingly it’s better for me than the 15 minute one. If I had to drive a full hour, I’d have other opinions, but 10 minutes in the car, 40 minutes on the train and 10 minutes walking isn’t bad.
The fifteen minute commute was short enough that I hadn’t had a chance to finish mentally shifting out of work mode and unloading all of the tasks that I was working out of my head before I got home. On a good day that meant getting home and not being in the right mental space to hold a conversation with my wife. On a bad day that meant having to deal with an infant making loud, but incoherent, demands while I still had a headache from attempting to untangle a difficult programming problem while trying to tune out large amounts of background noise.
With the new commute I’ve managed to largely keep up with my rather large volume of podcasts that I listen to, read the my RSS feeds first thing in the morning and on the train ride home, and I managed to finish a fairly lightweight novel last week, and am on track to finish another this week or early next week. More importantly it means that I don’t get home feeling like I want to lock myself up in my office for half an hour to an hour before I’m ready to deal with anything.