Google Maps does Traffic

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/stuck-in-traffic.html

I don't have wireless on my PDA, so this isn't much help to me.  But if you do have wireless in the car, then what better way to get the traffic report than to look at Google Maps?  Check it out.  Once again Google has come up with an outstanding user interface that successfully shows traffic in both directions, breaking up major routes into their big intersections and so on.  As always with a service like this the big question is how up to date the data is, because it can change in as little as an hour.  I couldn't find where Google says.  The article just says "up to date".

 

Technorati tags: Google, Google Maps, traffic

Elevator Etiquette

I count everything between my front door and my cube as part of the commute.  This includes the daily elevator ride.  I'm happy to see that the Mr. Manners podcast tackles the topic of elevator etiquette this week.  He's nicer than I would have been, focusing on the chivalry of whether to let ladies enter the elevator first.  Personally I would have gone straight to, "When you're waiting for the door to open so you can get on the elevator, GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY SO PEOPLE CAN GET OFF."  That is without doubt my #1 peeve about elevators.  Followed closely behind people who stand with their finger on the "close door" button because it's oh so important that they get to their office that microsecond sooner by getting the doors to begin closing while you're still on your way out of them.

 

Technorati tags: elevator, etiquette, advice, podcast

How To Leave Work At Work

[Found via Lifehacker]

Productivity blog Dumb Little Man offers up advice for those that are finding it hard to leave work at the office.  Normally articles like this put me on edge because I'm afraid that they'll take the standard "if you work at the computer all day and then you come home and want to be in front of the computer, you must be a workaholic" argument (which as a computer geek I find complete nonsense).  Instead he offers much more sage advice that goes directly toward avoiding stress at home, including a suggestion to take the long way home, literally, and spend the extra time transitioning your brain from work stuff to home stuff.  I also like the "get up earlier" rule - if you need more time, especially if you have kids, then early morning is the time to get in that email answering . I do it all the time.

 

Technorati tags: blog, advice, commuter, work, life, productivity

Love and Commuting

You married?  Got a significant other living under the same roof as you, at least, who you kiss goodbye before heading off to work every morning?  Have you ever stopped to consider how difficult it is for them when you walk out the door?  It can be difficult to juggle the morning exit, particularly if you have kids, so as not to give off that "escaping and leaving the other person behind" vibe.  Here's a few ideas to brighten up each other's day:

1. If you've got a set routine for your morning, then make an effort to wake up half an hour early.  Anything that your spouse normally does, do that (if physically possible).  Then let her sleep in.  Bonus points if you can get breakfast made and waiting when she wakes up.  
   You can do this if you're the spouse staying home, too.  Get up early, do some chores, and tell your SO that she can sit down and read the paper for a few minutes rather than dashing out of the house.
   
2. Before you leave, scribble a little note on a piece of paper and put it someplace she/he is sure to find it.  Just a simple "Have a nice day", "See you soon" or "I'll be thinking about you".  Doesn't have to be Shakespeare.    It'll still make somebody's day.  If you can find some time to hit the store and buy a card, all the better.   If you're the spouse that's staying home you can still use this trick.  How about leaving a note on the steering wheel?
3. If you've got the flexibility to do a little bit more, try this one.  Get out of the house 10 minutes earlier than your usual schedule.  Run down to the corner store and buy your SO their morning coffee.  Bonus points if you can snag some flowers while you're there.  Show back up at the front door, ring the bell.  Hand over coffee and flowers, and head off to work.  Leave SO standing in doorway stunned.
   
4. Alternately, come home early and announce that you're going out to dinner.  This is a tricky one, so don't go to this well too often.  If your SO's already got something started for dinner, you don't want to ruin those plans.  Likewise you don't want to come in the front door with a big flourish only to discover that nobody's home.  (There's a joke here about coming home unexpectedly and finding your spouse with the gardner, too....)  I find it best to call once I'm on the road and say "I'm on my way home early" rather than waiting until I walk in the door.  It gives her more notice to get the guy out of the house.  That's a joke.  I hope.

Technorati tags: parenthacks, romantic, idea, advice

Relax. Breathe. You'll get there.

As I've mentioned before, I drive about 15 minutes down the highway to get to the train station.  This enables me to take a shorter, cheaper train ride and get home faster.  Except, as happened last night, when the highway is a parking lot because of an accident of some sort.  In that case my 15 minutes turns into 45, or worse.

What can you do?  Sure, I could weave in an out of lanes like a madman trying to inch my way forward at as fast a rate as possible.  Chances are I'll end up in a fender-bender of my own.  At the very least I'm sure to bug the heck out of the people who I'm cutting in front of.  After all, they want to get home as well.

Or I could relax, breathe, and just wait it out.  I called my wife to tell her the story.  As I moved I called her a few more times to let her know how fast I was going, and provide a better estimate of when I'd be home.  If I only called once, think about it, she might think that I'm still sitting in that exact same spot when I might actually be halfway home now.

Just a thought.  Freaking out is not going to get you anywhere.  Leaning on the horn, swerving around cars, cursing out your fellow commuters isn't going to get you anywhere. 

Oh, and hey, one more thing, huh?  If you're driving in the slow lane and you roll your way past an onramp, be nice about merging with people.  It's not their fault that there's traffic.  You're not particularly obligated to let in more than one car, especially if car #2 is being obnoxious and riding up the bumper of that car because he wants to force his way in.  Proper merging doesn't take any time at all, and it keeps everybody happy.

Happy President's Day

Where I work, we don't get our first holiday until Memorial Day.  That's May, people!  That's harsh.  We used to have Martin Luther King day, but they took it away this year so that they could officially give us the day after Thanksgiving since most people were taking it off anyway. "But you still have two floaters!" the HR people say. Floaters are a dumb idea.  Just lump all time off -- vacation, sick, accrued, personal, whatever -- into one big pile and let me pick.  A good friend of mine is Jewish and has often told me, "It doesn't mean anything to me to work on Christmas, but I have to take the day off because the office is closed.  Meanwhile I have to use up vacation days if I want any Hannukah time."  She's got a point.

The advantage to working on a President's Day, of course, is that the commute is a piece of cake.  I almost screwed it up, though.  My wife told me, "Don't forget, the trains are running on a weekend schedule."  I didn't pay much attention, telling her, "I'm sure that during rush hour they will still run at the regular times."  Then an hour later my boss called me up (this being on Sunday) to remind me of the same thing.  So I decided to check their web site, and sure enough the morning trains were at 7am and 9am (I usually take about an 8am train).  And in the evening there's a 4:30 and a 6:30, whereas I usually take a 5:15.  So if I'm taking the train, my day is either two hours shorter or two hours longer.  I don't think the boss would love if I made it two hours shorter.

So I just drove the whole way.  Parking's going to cost me a good twenty or thirty bucks, but maybe I can get reimbursed for it.  I walked into the office and the guy in the cube next to me said, "Hey, did you get a meter?  Parking meters are free today."  D'oh!

 

Technorati tags: commuter, stories, holiday, president's day, parking

Save Money Every Morning

Here's a  quick math problem for you:  Take a guess at how much money you spend every morning just getting to work.  Morning coffee and newspaper?  How about gas?  Do you pay for parking?  Take the train?   Now multiply it times two hundred and fifty -- five days in a work week, fifty work weeks in a year -- to see how much your morning commute is costing you every year.  (If it's easier, try multiplying times 1000 and dividing by 4).  Personally I'm pushing around $14/day.  That's $3500/year.

The sad fact is, you're never going to get this down to zero unless you start a business out of your home and get rid of the morning commute altogether.  So the best we can hope to do is know where we can improve the bottom line a little bit.  I'll try not to resort to the old cliches like "bring your coffee from home" and "read somebody else's newspaper when they're done with it" since I'm assuming you've seen those all a million times.

• Find out what benefits are available from your company.  On that first day on the job everybody gets the same set of paperwork about health and life insurance, 401k, and long term disability.  But did you pay attention after that?  Because chances are that the HR person kept talking.  Many companies offer various forms of commuter benefits, including subsidized train passes and parking reimbursement.  Do a little research and find out all the details.  You might blow this off too soon.  "Reimbursement" brings to mind the stress of saving months' worth of receipts, just to get back your two dollars a day.  Have you checked to see if the plan requires receipts?  Some don't. 
• Choose the option that's right for your situation.  As an example, take the local lot where I park and pay $2/day.  Recently they began a montly pass program where you could pay ahead for $40/month to save the trouble of having to bring two dollars with you every morning and stick it into that little machine that records your space and gives you your receipt.  Neat idea, right?  The problem is that on average there are about 20 workdays in a given month, so you're not saving any money.  On the contrary if this is a month with holidays, or you're sick or on vacation or otherwise not going in to the office, then you're going to lose money.  (Meanwhile, I've discovered that the lot also offers a debit card program where I can put as much money as I want onto the card and just use that every morning.  That doesn't save me money either, but at least I've got the convenience of not having to dig around for two dollars every morning).
• Don't pay for benefits you don't use.  Where I commute, if you subscribe to the train pass you also get "free" rides on the subway.  Naturally they're not free, they're built into the cost of the yearly subscription.  I don't mind this, since it gives me the flexibility in bad weather (or off schedule days) to jump on the subway instead of walking across town.  However, a coworker who is on the same train as me opts for what's called the "12 ride" ticket where he basically buys 12 rides up front and gets a paper ticket that is punched whenever he uses it.  You see, he's in production support and several times a month he's likely to be called into the office on off hours, in which case he drives rather than takes the train.  So he's only paying for what he knows he'll use.  As a bonus he told me his little summer time secret -- the train gets so crowded (standing room only) that often the conductors won't even bother checking tickets.  One of those 12ride tickets will last him over a month.
• Walk more.  It's hard to find an example here where walking saves you money.  For most situations where you're driving or taking the train, the distance would be too great to walk.  But what about the subway?  I could take the subway across town in 20 minutes, or I could walk it in 25.  In all but the worst weather I walk across town and get my exercise.
• Alter your schedule.  Could you work four 10hr days a week instead of five 8hr days?  Have you asked?  Do you have the sort of job where you could work from home periodically?  If you can cut one day/week out of your commute, you've just saved yourself 20% right there.
• Drive less.  Cars are inherently expensive to drive - gas, maintenance,  mileage.  If you've got a spouse who has his/her own car, maybe you can get a lift?  Even if that is a lift to the train station.  We've already discussed altering your work schedule to save a day by working from home.  Carpooling is an option that's not as popular now as it was a few decades ago due to the prevalence of flexible work schedules.  It's very hard to find someone who has the same schedule as you and the same geography that's willing to share the ride on a regular basis.  But it's not impossible!  It never hurts to ask.  The advantage to car pooling is that the other guy saves money too, so you're not exactly being a leech about it.
• Find the best route.  I love when people ask me if I drive or take the train to work, because I do both and I get to explain my logic.  My nearest train station is still about 15 minutes across town, and then it's almost an hour ride in to the city.  However, if I drive 25 minutes down the highway I catch a train that's only a 25 minute ride, so I end up getting to work (and home) sooner than if I took the closer one.  The train ticket is much cheaper, too.  Of course, the downside is more mileage on my car.  The point is that you've got to be open to the various combinations of getting yourself to work and pick the one that works for you.  If I drove closer into the city, say more like 45 minutes, then I could skip the train altogether and take a quick subway ride over to my office.  However that's more mileage on the car, plus traffic starts to factor in and I'm sure I'd spend days stuck in it.  I choose not to go that route, but some folks like it better because it's one less leg of the journey. 

 It all comes down to what's going to work for you.  You might like sitting in traffic because it's more time to relax and listen to the radio.  Or you might not want to walk any great distance because your good shoes would get ruined.  Pick what works for you. And if you really want to save some money, stop buying that five dollar cup of coffee every morning! 

 

Technorati tags: commuter, tips, money, saving

How do you structure the morning?

What time of day do you head in to work?  Is it the same time every day?  What's your process for getting out the door?  Do you just get up and go?  Shower the night before?  Do you make breakfast, read the paper...?

My wife and I have three kids.  Two of them (5 and 3) have to get to preschool, and the baby is pretty strict on when he wants to be fed.  So our system goes something like this:

1. Baby wakes up at 5am for a bottle, so I seize the opportunity to take a scan at email and RSS feeds to know what's waiting for me.
2. Feed baby, go back to sleep.
3. Wake up around 6:30 and try to catch 5-10 minutes of news (weather, traffic) before the 3yr old wakes up and wants to watch Dora.
4. Take a shower.  Shave.  (My wife takes her shower in the evenings.)
5. Make the beds while my wife gets out clothes for the kids.   This includes waking up the 5yr old if she's not up yet.  Easy way to do that is to make the bed with her still in it, she hates that.
6. Team work as we each grab a child and get them dressed and ready for the day.
7. I start the laundry downstairs while my wife does the kids' hair and brushes their teeth.
8. While I'm downstairs, get my laptop shutdown, packed up and ready to.  If I have time, try to put together a quick breakfast  to take on the road.
9. If I'm ahead of schedule, help get the kids downstairs and started on breakfast.
10. Line up children and wife for goodbye kisses.  Actually, "chase them down one by one" is more accurate.  Except for the 3yr old who is adamantly yelling "Don't forget to give me kiss!" as I'm getting closer to getting out the door.
11. Out the door by 7:35.

Keep in mind that I catch an 8:15 train, so it's pretty crucial that I hit that window just right.  Too early and I'm sitting around at the station with no productive time at all, but too much time spent at home and I miss the train altogether.

The most important thing is working together to get everything done to the best of your abilities.  For instance, I'm lousy at picking out clothes for my daughters.  Seriously, my oldest is 5 years old and I've never managed to pick something on the first try that my wife approves.  So instead I simply don't even try.  I do the tasks I'm good at (or, at least, capable of doing) and my wife does what she's good at, and we both get where we need to be.

 

Technorati tags: commuter, tips, productivity, scheduling, parenthacks

Oh the weather outside is frightful...

Over at Jobacle.com, Andrew's got a rant up about why commuting in horrible weather is a bad idea.  More to the point, he wants more snow days from his employer and has some great reasons backing him up:

• 25% of car accidents are weather related
• It's stressful (I'm going to be late anyway!  I need to get someone to watch the kids since school is closed!)
• It's distracting.  Is anybody's productivity good on days like these?  Half the workforce decided to stay home, and the rest of us are, I don't know... posting to our blogs or something.

Personally I did hike it into work.  Me in Massachusetts with the hour and a half commute on a good day.  Here's how I described the drive to my wife:  "Not treacherous.  I didn't spin out or have to hit the brakes and hope I skid to a stop in time."  She responded by saying, "That's how you judge a snow day?  Near death experience?"

Truthfully I dragged myself into the office because I plan on taking a work from home tomorrow and I didn't want to be seen as the guy that abuses that privilege. 

 

Technorati tags: commuter, winter, weather, rant, job

Five (More) Things To Do With No Net Connection

Last week, Speaking Freely had a popular post on what do with a PC when you have no internet connection.  Tips included cleaning out your bookmarks, deleting old programs, and physically opening your computer to clean the dust out.

"Well," I thought, "I have a good half hour twice a day with no net connection while I'm on the train.  I could use this."  Some of the tips, sure, like cleaning the bookmarks.  But most of those maintenance programs take longer than 20 minutes or so to run, and hibernating your computer in the middle tends to be a bad thing :).  So I've got my own list of shorter tasks you can do when you're only briefly offline:

1) Clean up disk space.  This is different from going in to Add/Remove programs, I'm talking about getting rid of all those old partial downloads that never completed, archive files that you've long since installed, and those various movies that you have no idea how they got on your hard drive.  In Windows, go to Start, Search, All Files and Folders, then under What Size Is It, choose "Large" and hit Search.  Results will start coming up immediately.  Sort by size descending and take a trip down memory lane while deleting all the big ones.  You'll be reclaiming gigs of space in no time.

2) Better iTunes playlists.  I don't know about you, but I'm lousy with my playlists. I have one for "Work Music", for example, but more than half of it I will skip past if I'm not in the mood.  Sitting on the train is a great opportunity to dig into setting up some smarter playlists to track things like 'Only include music that I haven't skipped 10 times' or 'Keep all my newest podcasts together and then sort by date'.

3) Write an eBook.  Face it, your blog isn't making you any money and it isn't likely to anytime soon.  But if you can find a niche where you have enough info to bang out more than a few pages, then there are lots and lots (and lots!) of opportunities to get into selling what are called "information products."   Naturally this isn't the sort of thing you can do in one half hour sitting, but it's a project you can work on if you're regularly without your net connection, as I am.  Heck, you could work on a novel if that's your thing. 

4)  Write some code.  I suppose this only applies to coders, but I'm betting that a large portion of the audience reading blogs these days and hacking their laptop on the train are capable of writing code.  Set yourself up a development environment - IDE, database, language of choice - and have a pet project to work on.  Very few programmers who do it for a living really get to say that they love the particular project that they're paid to work on.  Getting some time every day to work on a project that really does scratch a personal itch for you tends to recharge your batteries for when it comes to banging out code for the day job.  (If you don't have a new project, then dig out an old one and make it better.  Write some unit tests, write some documentation, improve the API.  There's always code to write.)

5)  Brainstorm.  Have some sort of wiki or other "scratch pad" on your machine where you can just write stuff.  It could be your todo list for the day, a budget for next month, or a business plan for your hypothetical dotcom.  It could be ideas to present to your boss for how to enhance the product.  In other words spend the time using your brain, and use your laptop as a way to record it.  If you can get into the rhythm of it you end up in a stream of consciousness loop where the ideas get documented literally as fast as you can type them.  Much, much better than staring out the window, getting an idea and simply telling yourself, "I have to remember to email that to the boss when I get home."

BONUS!

6) Catch up on your RSS feeds.  I use a client side reader (Newsgator) for all my RSS needs.  I don't like the server-side ones like Bloglines and Google Reader for exactly this reason, I wouldn't have access.  Before I leave for work in the morning, and again before I leave the office, I make sure to hit the "Get new news items" button and then take off for the train.  Depending on how far behind I am I'll have several hundred posts to scan through.   Without a net connection it's not like I can link back to the story and comment on it, but I can certainly flag it for later.  I don't get images or other embedded objects (like video) either, but luckily that very rarely makes the post unreadable.  Sobasically when I do get back to my net connection I've narrowed down my few hundred posts to just a handful that I want to explore further (or comment on, or link back to).

 

Technorati tags: computer, tips, productivity, laptop, internet, wireless, commute, e-book, brainstorm

Drivers get more of a certain type of cancer

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070201/hl_nm/drivers_dc

I suppose this makes sense.  Spend lots of time driving the car, particularly with your window down, and you're at a higher risk for cancer.  How long before they tell us we need to put on sunscreen before we get behind the wheel?

Get More Done

I just discovered Open Loops, but it's going right into my list of daily reads.  With the tag line "Because it's your time", you know it's going to have useful stuff for road warriors like us.

Start with Going Home On Time.  It's too tempting to always push the clock-punch moment just a few more minutes, and a few more minutes, and a few more... but what the author points out is that as you do this you subconsciously reprioritize the rest of your day, making the other hours less important. 

Looking at it from the commuter's perspective, you want to punctuate the end of your work day with some structure.  Those who ride the train are not going to have much choice in the matter - staying an extra 5 minutes could mean waiting an hour for the next train to come.  But even if you're driving, you'll rapidly find that there are patterns in the traffic.  You know what time you like to get home.  Staying late means starting for home at random times, which means getting home at random times.  Whether you've got family or not, it's hard to develop a comfortable rhythm without some sort of schedule to look forward to. 

Schedule your morning like a CEO

I found this on Yahoo! Personal Finance.  Jim Citrin, in his Leadership by Example column, discusses the morning routine of the CEO.  Some of them leapt right out at me:

• Start early.  The latest anyone started their day was 6am.
• "Be thoughtful about the source, form and timing of your news."  I check my newsfeeds (just about 100 of them) multiple times throughout the day.  Most importantly I make sure, before grabbing the laptop and heading in to work, that I've hit the "get news" button so I've got the freshest set of headlines before sitting on the train to browse through them.
• Problem-solve.  I like this.  Morning time is the quietest time of the day for some of the most powerful people in business.  If you embrace it, it can easily be some of your most productive time as well.  My wife once described my 90minute commute every morning as my peace and quiet time.  I'd never really thought of it like that until then, but she's right.  Nobody's bothering me, my phone's not ringing.  Perfect time to get things done, even if that means just thinking of solutions to problems that I'm going to tackle once I get to the office.
• Make family time.  I'm sure this is different for everybody, but I can tell you what I do.  Every morning I make time to help get my kids dressed, and I make sure everybody gets a kiss before I head out the door.  If we're running early they'll be downstairs to start breakfast before I leave, but that's not the regular schedule.

Check out the whole article.  What I've listed above is just some of the bullets, not all, and my spin on them at that.  And I'm not a bigtime CEO, I'm just a guy taking the train in the morning. :)

 

Technorati tags: CEO, habits, morning, commuter, yahoo, finance, leadership

Look, it's a bird, a plane, it's Superman! No, really!

So on the drive to work today I saw Superman.

Not the movie, or a picture.  An actual guy dressed up like Superman, complete with fake muscle padding.  I was driving down Rt125 heading for the expressway, and he was walking the other way with three other guys.  "That's different," I thought.  "Maybe he's part of that fathers group that dresses up in costume to get attention for their cause."

Sure enough I see that they've hung a banner on the overpass.  I can't remember the exact wording (and wasn't prepared with my cellphone, though I will be next time!) but I did spot the link:  FathersUnite.org.  The actual group that's famous for the costumes is Fathers 4 Justice who are based out of the UK.

The funny thing is that Superman was wearing gloves and a winter hat.  Whassup with Superman needing gloves and a hat?  Wimpy Supermen they're making these days, I tell ya.

 

Technorati tags: publicity, stunt, superman, work, commute, father, fathers, justice