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Beat the Commuting

Commuting is Expensive

The average worker in the UK spends 45 minutes commuting each day. That’s nearly 10% of the average working day. A garden office could put a stop to this. Ironically, although people spend this substantial amount of time commuting for the sole purpose of earning money, these hours are non-productive and therefore unpaid, so indirectly the time spent commuting has a massively detrimental effect on your hourly wage. However these cost implications are even wider; the average annual expenditure for travelling to work by car amounts to £2500 for fuel and running costs. Add to that parking tariffs/tickets (!?) etc and you can see for yourself how quickly your hard-earned cash is dwindling.What about the real costs?

Commuting by car causes, on average, 1.3 tonnes of CO2 to be released into the atmosphere per person, per year; so the detrimental effect on the environment is obvious, but what about personal health? Realistically how much harm must we be doing to ourselves by spending so much of our precious lives breathing in this pollution right at the heart of its source?

How Long do you Spend Commuting?

Consider other health issues. Most people will agree that the daily grind of commuting is futile, stressful and demoralising. The expression ‘Life work balance’ may be dismissed as cheesy buzz words but the sentiments behind them cannot be denied. What could you do with all those extra hours? Spend more time with your family? Rekindle neglected friendships? Or take up that hobby you’ve always talked about. The list is endless but whatever you decide it has to be an improvement on all the time and money wasted pointlessly commuting.

Take your normal commute time to work and back and multiply it by 240 days to get an idea of the additional free time per year that could be yours. All you have to do then is decide how to spend your newly acquired leisure time!

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