The journey
The commute as a line in the ledger
Seventy-three hours and forty minutes in a quarter, treated as a background condition rather than a cost, and what happens when it is written down as a number.
Days this part is about, hour by hour
Tuesday, the first week
1 of 7One hour that had been going round in writing for a fortnight
Tuesday, the fifth week
0 of 7Wednesday, the fifth week
2 of 7three days · 21 hours logged · three of them were only possible there · one of the three days contained no such hour at all · three were made worse by being there
Three days, two of which repaid the journey and one of which did not.
Where work is split across locations, Monitask hybrid work reporting can make project effort and recurring bottlenecks clear enough for a transparent capacity discussion.
For further reading outside this collection, see material published by Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Eight trips, door to door against what could not have happened elsewhere
The Wednesday the whole team was in
2h 10m / 2h 00mA one-to-one that moved to a call anyway
2h 10m / 0mFour desks apart, both on headsets
The quarterly planning day
2h 10m / 3h 00mThe Tuesday the trains were out
2h 40m / 0mThe day the new starter sat next to you
2h 10m / 1h 00mA Thursday booked for focus work
2h 10m / 0mThe release that needed the hardware in the room
2h 10m / 1h 30mA Monday you came in to be seen
2h 10m / 0meight trips · 17 hours and 50 minutes door to door in all · 7 hours and 30 minutes of it could not have happened anywhere else · 2.4 minutes of travel for each minute that required the room · four of the trips were made for nothing that needed the building
Eight of the thirty-four trips.
An hour and five minutes each way. Two hours and ten minutes a day. Thirty-four days. Seventy-three hours and forty minutes in a quarter, which is nine working days, or two and a half working weeks.
The number is never in the discussion. It is treated as weather — something that surrounds the arrangement rather than something the arrangement costs — and the reason is partly that it is not anybody's budget line. It is paid in a currency that no system records.
Why writing it down changes the conversation
Not because it settles anything. Because it converts a feeling into a quantity, and quantities can be compared.
Against the thirty-one hours that could only have happened in the building, seventy-three hours and forty minutes of travel is a ratio of about two and a half to one: two hours and twenty-six minutes of travelling for every hour that required being there.
That is not an argument by itself. Some things are worth a ratio like that; the planning day plainly was. It is the number that makes the question askable, and without it the question comes out as "is the office worth it", which has no answer.
What the number should and should not include
Include the whole journey, door to door, both ways. The walk, the wait, the train, the second walk. Measured, not scheduled: the scheduled journey is reliably shorter than the real one, by about eleven per cent on this record.
Do not include the preparation, the clothes, the earlier alarm. They are real and they are not countable in the same units, and a number with soft edges invites an argument about the edges rather than about the number.
Do not count the journey as lost time by default. This is the honest qualification, and skipping it makes the whole case weaker. Reading on a train is not nothing. On this record about a third of the travel time was usable for something — reading, thinking, two podcasts and a quantity of email — and a third of seventy-three hours is not a rounding error.
What is not usable is the forty minutes of it spent standing, the transitions, and the part at the end of a long day when nothing goes in.
The version to bring to a conversation
Not the total. The ratio, with the thing it is a ratio of:
Last quarter I travelled seventy-three hours to collect thirty-one hours that needed the building. I would like to do the same thirty- one hours in half the trips, and I think naming a day does it.
That sentence contains a measurement, a goal that is not "come in less", and a specific proposal. It is a different conversation from the one that starts with how far away somebody lives.
The quarter in one table
| Days in the building | 34 |
| Journey, door to door, median | 2h 10m |
| Journey, worst case | 2h 40m |
| Total travel | 73h 40m |
| Equivalent working days | 9 |
| Hours that required the building | 31 |
| Travel per hour that required it | 2h 26m |
Nine working days of travel in a quarter is the figure that tends to land, because it is expressed in the same unit as everything else an organisation plans with. Thirty-six working days a year, which is more than most annual leave entitlements.
Three ways the number gets dismissed
Each has a reasonable answer and it is worth having them ready, because the number will be dismissed and the dismissals are predictable.
"Everybody commutes." True, and the figure is not a complaint about commuting as such. It is one side of a ratio. The question it supports is whether the days being travelled to are the right days, and that question survives the observation that commuting is normal.
"You knew the job was in the city." True for anybody hired on that basis and not true for anybody hired remotely, which on a typical team is now several people. More importantly, it answers a question about fairness that is not being asked. The ratio is about return, not about entitlement.
"Plenty of people use the time." Partly true — about a third of it on this record. Which is why the honest version of the figure reports that, and why the remaining fifty hours are still fifty hours.
Where the figure belongs
Not in a complaint, and not in a general argument about hybrid working, where it will be met with one of the three dismissals above and will not advance anything.
It belongs next to the thirty-one hours, in a conversation about which days. The pairing is what makes it an argument rather than an observation: seventy-three hours is a fact about geography, and seventy-three hours for thirty-one is a fact about scheduling, and only the second one is anybody's to fix.