Things You Can Do During Your Commute
If you are a commuter, probably you have to go some good number of minutes or hours on the trip to your place of work or school every day, and when returning back, the same thing. Then those hours that you spend on the trip to your place of work or wherever should be put to productive use. It is important that you make the best use of those times because those minutes are also part of your day. Just commuting every day without doing anything productive in those minutes or hours you spend in the commute is not the best. Find out great ideas you can use during your commute.
You need to find a way to make all those commuting times to also count for productive things and once you put this in mind to bring in productive activities into your commute time, and you do so, then it will likely help you to be able to achieve some more things, no matter how little. Time should not be wasted. What are some of the productive things that you can do during your commute time? This article discusses some of those things that you can do, you can just choose the one that is best for you at particular time and see how you can integrate it into your commute time to at least be more productive and make better use of the time.
1. Attend to mails and messages
If you are a kind of person that gets a lot of emails or WhatsApp messages or even WhatsApp voice notes and maybe you don’t have enough time to attend to all of these messages during your working hours or during the day. Probably in the morning you are busy trying to prepare for work and then in the evening when you return from work maybe you are tired and you have to still do some things before sleeping, then your commute time is a good time for you to check up on some of those emails and messages and respond to the ones that are needful, the ones that are relevant so that you can keep up with people and things you need to keep up with.
2. Put down your to-do list
Your commute time is a good time to create your to-do list, to put all the activities that you will have to do during the day on paper. If you are not the one that is driving the car or bus, you can just bring out a piece of paper and then begin to list out some of the important tasks and activities that you will have to do during the day. It is a good time to do the planning of your day if you’ve not done it, just think through what things you will need to do during the day, the important ones, the less important ones and you can try to put the things to do on paper. By that you are already planning your day and you are saving yourself from forgetting some things you will rather have forgotten. During the morning commute, at that time your brain is still likely to be fresh and you are likely to be calm and able to remember more things easily than when you are already busy during the day.
3. Audiobooks/music
During your commute time you can decide to listen to audiobooks or listen to music. It is a productive thing to do, especially when you listen to something that adds value to you. If you are the type of person who is an avid reader, loving to read very well, then it is a good time for you to keep up with you reading habit. Even if you do not want to read normally from the hard copy, you can just plug in your earpiece and listen to audiobooks, or you may download apps that can read e-books to you. By listening to an audiobook or using an app to read e-book during your commute time, you may even be able to cover more pages of the book than when you are reading from the hard copy. Ensure that your earpiece is such that you can still be able to catch the sound even while you are within traffic.
4. Rest and relax
You can actually take your commute time to sleep and rest. Especially in the evenings during the evening trip back home, you know at that time you are probably tired, you can just take some time to sleep or rest. You do not necessarily have to really sleep off, so that you don’t oversleep and miss where you are supposed to alight from the bus or cab but you can just take a rest and relax and just have some time to rest a little before getting home. Maybe you are a kind of person that once you get back home you have a lot of work to do again back at home, then you should just take the commute time back home as a real opportunity to at least try to rest and relax before getting back home.
5. Meet people
There may be days when you may meet some interesting people on board while you are on your trip to work or back home, likeable people or people you just think you should connect with, it’s a good time for you to get to broaden your social circle, you can even make friends with people around you in the bus are in the cab and you can talk together. This way you get to meet and relate with new people. And, somehow, you are indirectly helping yourself to be able to speak with strangers better, and able to relate better with strangers. The more you do it, the better you get at relating with strangers, so it may also be a good way of improving your social life.
6. Go through the news
Another thing you can do is to catch up with news during your commute time, in the morning or in the evening. It can be a good time to go through the news of the day, you can just use that time to scroll through the news on your phone or your whatever device you are using and then check through the news to be aware of latest happenings, because it is important for you to be aware of things that are happening in your environment. Life is not just about work or about jobs, but you should also be well informed about the things happening around you. The better informed you are, the better you will be able to respond to situations around.
You should try to keep up with the news around you, and a good time to do that is when you are probably in the cab or in the bus to work or in your way from work. You can decide to make it a deliberate thing and can decide to be doing it regularly to keep up with new things or events and happenings all around you.
If you are the type of person that likes to meditate and take time to think, and to probably reflect and refresh your mind, even if you are not used to meditation, you may decide to start practicing the habit. Your commute time could be a good time to try this out and try to meditate and refresh your mind -reflect on things, thing forward, think into the past, think into the future, think about the present and meditate as much as you can and from there you may try to gain some perspective about things going on in your life. If you are a religious person, you may even use the opportunity to say some silent prayers.