Commuting seems to be a whole culture and mindset - and a now-common basis of most of our work lives. It seems like very few people I run into don't have a commute of some sort. (Of course, this may be a reflection of working in a corporate world - and so a perfect topic for this blog.)
The New Yorker published a really interesting article in April of this year that looks at commuters' perceptions of their commute. As the opening phrase eloquently states, 'People may endure miserable commutes out of an inability to weigh their general well-being against quantifiable material gains.' In other words, is your commute really worth the gains you get from the job you're commuting to?
In a company like Sun, this almost gets to be a moot point, because Sun actively encourages what it calls Open Work - a variety of practices that allow Sun workers flexibility in how and where we do our work. Hint: you don't have to be at a Sun workstation in a Sun office to work. (More about this in an upcoming blog post.)
A couple of weeks ago, I was in California on the last leg of our family vacation. We typically travel from Colorado back to California for a week or two in the summer to visit friends, enjoy the beach, etc. (It's nice because we can travel as 'experienced tourists' - we know our way around but, since we only visit once a year, we get to experience and look at things with fresh eyes. That means we do end up at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk every year, even though we rarely visited it when we lived only five blocks from it.)
And typically, every year, I end up doing my 'old commute' from Santa Cruz to Santa Clara over Highway 17 for a few days. And typically, I enjoy it - I like getting up early; I like driving; I like having the time to myself in the morning to reflect on whatever needs reflecting upon and the time in the evening to listen to music on the way home and unwind from my day. The commute helps separate my 'work day' from my 'home day'. When driving my old commute, I also typically realize how glad I am to not have to drive that particular drive every day any longer.
(I still have a commute in Colorado - about 23 miles/35 minutes each way - but in many ways it's a huge improvement over my old commute. When we first moved to Colorado, people asked me how far I commute now, and they were generally shocked that I still had such a 'long' commute in Colorado. Believe me, the Colorado commute is NOTHING compared to Highway 17.)
But this time, doing my 'old' commute, it felt - well - really old. To be more exact, it felt old-fashioned. Why was I driving over the hill to get to work, when my colleagues in California (all two of them) are typically working from home anyway, and our old offices and library space has been converted into drop-in work spaces? Why was I commuting when, if I had a laptop, I could easily be doing the work from wherever I was - the hotel room, a friend's house, in a cafe?
So here I was, feeling like a dinosaur, using fuel derived from dinosaurs to get to work. And I started thinking about how my commute, for a while at least, got progressively longer.
At the beginning of my career, I could get to work by bike (and it was the most convenient method, too). Then, I switched jobs and had a 15 minute commute. I switched jobs again and it changed to 25 minutes. Then I made the jump over the hill and to a commute of 35 - 45 minutes there and sometimes two hours coming back.
I started to do the math: I've been commuting at least 15 minutes for well over 13 years of my work life. I guess I'm lucky because I only started commuting when I was in my late 20s and not earlier. But this still seems like a long time to me.
No wonder I was feeling old.
But what I was grateful for (again) was that I had all the tools and components - and more importantly, the corporate culture backing them - to truly have a flexible work structure. I didn't NEED to commute because I had to be at work - I was choosing to commute for other reasons (to meet with some folks I'd never met before, and having dinner with colleagues) than having to physically be at work to do my work. I was commuting for myself - to be with people and to have some time to myself - rather than for my job.
But next time, I think I'll bring a laptop nonetheless.
