Wow! That’s Early!
Well, relatively speaking. The office is empty. People are slowly trickling in but there’s still less than a dozen of the hundred odd staff employed at their workstations.
Spent slightly more than an hour in traffic this morning. It reminded me why I usually choose to leave the house later. Over the years, I’ve realised that the there is little point to commute during rush hour. It’s either you get up very early for work or leave your house real late. There is little point in taking the middle ground.
The nice thing about commuting in the morning is that you practically own the road since there are fewer users. The air is also fresher for that reason. A leisurely drive to the office in the wee hours may take less than 15 minutes of the usual hour. The drive is often stress free, unless you meet some idiot who’s still half asleep.
The down side is that you’ll reach the office way too early to start work. Think about it. You’re leaving earlier and the drive is shorter. So if you leave an hour earlier than usual and the drive takes 45 minutes less, you’ll be arriving at the office nearly 2 hours earlier! If you work 9 to 5, you’ll be at your cubicle by 7am.
Despite popular belief, getting to work early does not mean starting work early. There is a difference. You usually only ever start working as early as the last person to get into the office. Or at least that’s the observation from my previous job. They tell me that I’m the marker for when they start work since I’m usually one of the later ones to get in. I don’t blame them. If you’re getting into the office at seven every morning, chances are, you’ll be snoozing too.
Leaving after rush hour will yield slightly less in terms of time saved in the commute. It will take half the time. That means an hour’s drive will be over in 30 minutes. The downside is that the sun is up and there are a lot more motorists on the road.
Estimated time of arrival at the office follows the same rules as before, except applied in reverse. If you leave an hour later to avoid the traffic and the commute time takes 30 minutes, you’ll arrive an hour and a half later. If you’re usually in the office by nine, you’ll now be getting in at 10.30am. That isn’t a good time to arrive either since you’ll end up idling for two hours before heading off for lunch.
I think by far the best plan is to save yourself the pain and simply not work. How? Now if I knew that, I wouldn’t have been stuck in the traffic for an hour this morning, would I?