One of the reasons that I’m waking up earlier nowadays is because I can take my commute an hour earlier. I get up at about 4:30, then finish all my prep in an hour, so that I can be on the road by 5:40 at the latest. This means that I’m using the highway much earlier than the rest of the population. There are still a decent number of cars on the road, but it makes the drive easier.

This week I also discovered that it cuts my commute time for the day by at least one third. I woke up an hour later than normal, because for some reason my alarm wasn’t going off that day. I thought I would just do everything an hour later in the day and everything was going good up until I got onto the highway at 6:40. Suddenly there was a lot of traffic on the road, and all of the congestion traffic controls were in effect. It lengthened my commute from a normal 20 minutes to 35, and made me even later than I was in the first place.

An hour later in the morning is 75 minutes. It put my whole day back even farther than normal. I ended up taking an early day because I know that on the other direction it’s also at least 15 minutes more when I have left late because I was busy at work, sometimes it’s even as long as double. Suddenly my day would be 23 hours.

With the amount of time I have, I am making sure for as long as I can that I will be up on time. Of course, the ideal commute might be from the bedroom three steps to the office - at some point I might want to try that once a week. There are other advantages to going into the office though, especially at my work where there is a whole lab of equipment needed sometimes.