How to beat traffic (and exercise too)
Shift your schedule to claw back some time
Even with a reasonable number of people working from home, no one has solved the problem of rush hour traffic. If you are on the road on a weekday between 8-9 a.m., or 5-6 p.m., you’re going to have lots of folks on the road with you.
In studying time logs, I’ve seen that length of commute and propensity to exercise are often inversely related. This makes sense. If it takes you 45 minutes to get home, vs. 15, you may feel out of energy — and out of time — for a workout. Same in the other direction. The longer the commute, the earlier you’d have to get up to fit in a workout before you leave.
It’s frustrating, but there is one way to save at least a little time. The same commute can often be a lot shorter without rush hour traffic. So if you’d like to exercise on your in-office days, you can exercise near your office, and then commute when there are fewer folks on the road.
For instance, if you leave work at 5:30 p.m., and it takes 45 minutes to get home, you’d arrive home at 6:15 p.m. If it would then take you 15 minutes to transition into workout gear and get going, a half hour workout would take you to 7:00 p.m. But if you go to a gym next to your office (or just change and run near your office) from 5:45-6:15 p.m., and it only takes you 25 minutes to get home then, you’re home at 6:40 and you’ve already done your workout.
This is a little more complicated in the other direction (that is, in the morning), as most people would need to shower and get ready after a workout, but if your gym had facilities and you don’t have a complicated routine, it could work. Many years ago in one of my office jobs, the head of our department would do this — commuting to work to get there around 7:30 a.m. (when there was a lot less traffic), working out in the attached corporate gym until 8:15 a.m., showering and dressing and being in the office around 8:45 a.m.
Now I realize this doesn’t work for everyone (if your kid’s daycare closes at 6:00 p.m., then there’s no pushing pick-up to 6:15 after your workout). But if you have some more discretion over your evening or morning hours, shifting your commute and where you exercise can buy back time, even on a busy workday.