How To Maximize Productivity During Your Commute
Time is money. Most people lose a major chunk of both whilst commuting, especially when the distance is long. Not only does it lead to a major portion of your day being wasted, quite often when you come home you are extremely tired and cannot give enough attention to your personal life as well. A long commute back to home after a long hard day, plays a big role in this, even more than the work you actually do in the office/field.
In an ideal world, we all could save a bunch of time and money by living extremely close to the workplace, or even having a home office, but the real world isn’t like that for most of us and a considerable time spent in commute is extremely common for the vast majority.
For most people, who just want to work as little as they can, this probably doesn’t much. But for people who are focused on improving their productivity many fold and being the leaders at their work or in their industry, learning how to make the best possible use of your time during the commute will be extremely valuable to you, so here it is!
The first thing you need to answer is what sort of commute you use.
Typically this is divided into three categories.
People who drive their own cars or ride bikes to work
People who ride in cars driven by others.
People who use public transport.
1) You guys are most out of luck as there are very few things you can do that will not take your attention off the road. However, there is still one thing you can do – You can learn.
The most successful masters are the ones that never stop learning so do not be arrogant enough to assume you don’t need to learn anything or assume you will learn it through experience either, life is too short for that. The best way to progress fast is to learn from people who know about a subject better than you.
You shouldn’t be reading anything while driving so reading a book or even reading stuff on your phone or iPad is out of question. But you can listen. You can listen to audiotapes or audio books or sound clips that maybe motivational or related to your industry to help you learn strategies that help you perform much better at your job.
Instead of playing songs on the radio, put on an audiobook and listen to that. You don’t even have to buy it! These days you can download much of this off the Internet too, for free and legally! You can download podcasts and listen to them. You can even download Educational Youtube videos and convert them to Mp3. By doing just that twice daily you have set yourself apart from 95 percent of the population that is doing nothing to be productive during these crucial hours.
If you are riding a bike, you can use headphones. Just stop listening to songs and start listening to this. However, I would recommend you to NEVER plug in both earplugs while driving or riding as you still need to be aware of your surroundings to prevent accidents. Just plug in one.
2) If you ride Public Transport, you are actually luckier than the first group in this aspect. Depending on how much crowd you need to deal with on public transport there are a variety of things you can do. If you are in a crowded train or bus, you can listen to educational audiotapes and audio books during the commute. You can choose to ignore all emailing during work and only answer all non urgent emails in one go while commuting. This in itself will save you a lot of time at your job and ensure that you are hyper focused while working.
You can also read tons of educational articles related to your industry or related to personal development as you don’t have to worry about driving. If you get a seat to sit, you can even read a book. But make sure they are the right books that help you grow, not books that serve no purpose from a productivity point of view.
3) You ride in a car that is driven by someone else. You are the luckiest as not only can you do all of the above, you can do a lot more. As long as you carry your laptop with you, make sure you have a long battery life and a great internet connection, there is virtually nothing that you can’t do sitting in your car that you couldn’t do in office, except going for bathroom breaks. Make sure your time is spent wisely during the commute and is devoted to either learning or getting a head start on the work that needs to be done for the day.
Conclusion
I hope this article is of value to you. If you are obsessed with productivity, this is the best possible use of your time if you cannot live close to your workplace. A point to add here is that if you have others travelling with you, either in a car or in public transport, it it tempting to gossip and chit chat with them. Depending on your priorities, that maybe totally fine too. But to really make the maximum possible use of your time in a day, you will have to politely pay less attention to them and make sure you devote it to the activities mentioned above
!!
About the Author
The author of this article, Anubhav Srivastava is a trainer, author and director of Carve Your Destiny, a first of its kind inspirational documentary featuring some of the most famous personalities from diverse fields, who teach the viewers how they too can make all of their dreams come true. The movie itself has been seen on Youtube by almost 1.5 Million people. Anubhav has also been featured in numerous International and India Media outlets such as BBC , The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Rediff.com, Leicester Mercury and many others.As a speaker, he has trained participants from various reputed companies and organizations
Email Anubhav Srivastava for coaching, consulting or motivational speaking queries at anubhav101@gmail.com. Facebook Profile: http://facebook.com/anubhav981
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