The House Farther From Work

I recently considered moving to a house farther away from my office.

On paper, it seemed stupid. I already spend too much time commuting. Why would I voluntarily move farther away?

But then I realized I was measuring the wrong thing. I was optimizing my commute. I should have been optimizing my life.

The commute is the trip everybody counts. It is the first question anyone asks about a house, and it is the number that goes on the spreadsheet. I drive to work three days a week, roughly 150 days a year. So of course that was the number I was staring at.

That's about 260 days a year.

Then there's the grocery store. Target. Church. The pediatrician. My in-laws. Restaurants. The dozens of little trips that never make it into the "Where should we live?" calculation.

None of those feel like a commute, because none of them get talked about as a cost. They are just life. But each one is a trip, and a trip has a length and a frequency like any other. Some of them happen more often than the drive to work does.

So I mapped them.

And something strange happened. The house farther from work started saving me time. A lot of it.

Daycare alone would save me about 20 minutes per day. 20 minutes x 5 days x 52 weeks. That's about 87 hours a year.

Changing the grocery route saved another 17: 20 minutes per trip, once a week, x 52 weeks.

Before counting almost anything else, I had found more than 100 hours. More than two and a half workweeks.

And I almost missed it because I was optimizing one commute instead of the entire system.

We do this everywhere. We optimize tasks instead of workflows. Meetings instead of calendars. Individual expenses instead of the cost of an entire lifestyle.

In every one of those pairs, the small unit is the one that is easy to see. It has a name, it shows up in one place, and it is the thing people complain about. The system is the sum of a dozen small things that never show up together anywhere, so nobody adds them up. And the system is where the time is.

The question isn't "How far is my house from work?"

The question is "How is where I live affecting the total system of my life?"

Those are very different questions.

The first one has a single answer you can look up on a map. The second one you have to build, trip by trip, and almost nobody does, because the trips that matter most are the ones that never felt like a decision.

A hundred hours a year is more than a two-week vacation, given back every year to spend with my family. It's 20 minutes each morning to sit down with my wife over a cup of coffee before the workday starts.

Sometimes the shortest distance between you and a better life isn't the shortest distance between two addresses.

The Operator's Move

List every place you drove last week, not just work. Next to each, write the minutes each way and how many times a week you go. Minutes x trips x 52 is your year in that car. Divide by 60 and you have it in hours.

Say the gym is 15 minutes each way and you go four times a week. That is 30 x 4 x 52, or 6,240 minutes, which is 104 hours a year for one trip nobody calls a commute.

Count the round trip, door to door. Then look for any trip you make more often than the drive to work. If there is one, it has probably never come up in a conversation about where you live or where you work, and it should have.

One Question

What trip do you make most often that has never been part of a decision about where you live or work?

If this reached you by email, hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Josh