Most professionals who work in a larger metro area spend several minutes, if not an hour or more, in commute time to and from work. The more days you work at home, the fewer hours you spend commuting. Not only will you save the extra cash required for gas and car maintenance or public transportation and parking, you will save the wear and tear on your health and pocketbook. The country and business world saves collectively as well.
Health Savings by NOT Commuting to Work
According to Princeton Professors Daniel Kahneman (Winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics) and Alan Krueger in their paper: “Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being”, the commute, particularly the morning commute was an activity that elicited bad mood emotions such as anger, frustration, annoyance, depression, hassle, worry, and criticism. Thomas Christian of Georgia State University found that the more time we spend commuting, the less time we spend exercising, fixing our own meals, having people over, grocery shopping – basically doing things that lead to pretty significant health problems. Other studies have suggested that commuters are more likely to experience many physical health problems:
- Neck and back problems
- Obesity
- Body aches
- Sleep problems
- A disappearing social life
- Less time with the family
Basically, work-at-homers tend to trade drive for personal time – or family time or exercise time or kid time or social time – whatever gets moved to the top of your priority list. Even time for an extra hour or so for work is better than sitting in a car, bus, train…
Gas Savings by NOT Commuting to Work
Also, data from GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com (2013) suggests that in addition to the health benefits of NOT commuting, if the estimated 64 million workers of the 120-million person workforce who are not self-employed and who had compatible jobs for working at home plus the desire to do so would actually work from their home office, consumers as a whole would save $20 billion a year in gas alone.
National Savings by Commuting to Work
If that same population of the estimated 64 million workers who could work from home did, as a nation, we would:
- Reduce greenhouse gases by 54 million tons a year
- Reduce wear on our highways by over 119 billion miles a year
- Save 90,000 people from traffic-related injury or death each year
- Save over 640 million barrels of oil each year
Business Savings by NOT Commuting to Work
For that same population, if the appropriate workers did NOT commute to work each day, businesses collectively would:
- Save over $500 billion a year in total costs
- Increase national productivity by 5 million man-years or $270 billion worth of work
- Save on numerous overhead expenses related to office space, utilities, parking, and wasted time at work
Personal Savings by NOT Commuting to Work
On an individual and personal basis, let’s say that you spend one hour in your car in your commute time to work five days each week (30 minutes to work and 30 minutes home.) That is five hours a week NOT doing something else. Multiply 5 times 49 weeks each year (assuming you get three weeks of vacation) and you get 245 hours in the car. Let’s assume you work a 50-hour work week. NOT commuting saves you almost five work-weeks each year. What could you do in five weeks a year of extra leisure, family, exercise, thinking, or work time? Even working from home just one day each week could save you a week a year of work hours. In the big picture, this is a lot of time.
Bottom Line: Working from home, especially the no commute part, has a ton of benefits. The key? Make sure that 1) your business works for you at home, 2) you have developed the skills, discipline, and home office environment so that it works well, and 3) you have thought through the downside of working from home thoroughly (Yes, there are some downsides) and are either OK with them or have found a way over them.
What do you think? How much time do you spend commuting? If you could work a day a week at home, would it be worth it? What are the obstacles? What might be the advantages? We would love to hear your story.