How Many Hours Do You Spend in the Car?
The first moment I realized I was spending serious hours in the car came right after I finished an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast that ran over two hours.
A question came to me afterward: how many hours do I actually spend in the car?
To be clear, I'm not trying to make any change or decision based on the answer. The goal here is simply to be aware of the time I'm spending. I believe that to deal well with many things, you first need a stage of awareness.
I decided to count the time in the simplest way possible: the moment I get in the car, I log the time in a notes app, then log the arrival time, and at the end of the week I add it all up. Sadly, the method failed, mostly because I often forgot to log anything, not to mention that logging and tracking this way is fairly impractical.
I forgot about the whole thing, or pretended to 😅, until I renewed my car insurance recently. The insurance company gave me a device to leave in the car and pair with an app on my phone. The device tracks the car's movement, rates my driving, and sends the results to the insurance company, which hands out small periodic rewards based on driving quality.
Looking through the app's interface, I noticed the data on screen was exactly the data I needed to figure out how many hours I spend in the car. The app displays it, but as a user you can't get your hands on it directly. I found a certain way to pull the data I needed, and I preferred to talk about it in a separate post since it's somewhat technical and outside the scope of this one
After collecting, cleaning, and organizing the data, I ended up with 578 trips (I called every car ride a trip 🏃♂️) across roughly 10 weeks. The raw data was actually bigger, but I tried to make sure it was sound. I verified it, removed any duplicates, and checked for gaps or problems. And since I'd be calculating a weekly average, I dropped the first and last weeks, worried they might have started midweek and left the numbers incomplete.
That gave me this chart, showing the week number against the time I spend in the car, in minutes.
Taking the average, I got 929.65 minutes per week, roughly 15 and a half hours.😦
That's no less than two hours a day. Once I landed on that, a second question came up: workdays must involve more car time, since I drop off my family and then head to work. So I made a second chart by day of the week. The numbers run from 0, which is Monday, to 6, which is Sunday, so the weekend falls on 4 and 5
The chart makes pretty good sense. Weekdays are packed with time spent in the car, and on weekends it seems I prefer staying home 😂
The stage of awareness, or noticing, or paying attention, is where you land when you focus on things you used to do without thinking, on autopilot so to speak. I noticed that the time I spend in the car is far from trivial, and dealing with it could matter in more ways than one.
The question now is: how could these hours be useful?
The idea that always comes to mind for making use of car time is audiobooks and podcasts, but I'm quite convinced that's the standard answer, and there's definitely room for other ideas. For example, I see it as a good time for work calls, or for calling people just to stay in touch. Could it be a good time for family conversations? Maybe, I don't know. Reviewing the Quran for someone who has memorized it? Memorizing the Quran through listening and repetition? I remember as a kid I memorized a big chunk of a surah because we had a tape in the car player that started the moment we got in and looped back when it ended.
Anyway, I think there are questions and ideas here. Questions like: are there ways to cut down the time I spend in the car? And ideas about using the time in different ways. So if you have an idea for something a person could get out of their time in the car, know that I'm very interested in the answer, given that every week I sit a full day in the car (if we count 8 hours of sleep 😂).
If you're curious, the devices that track cars are called telematics devices. Honestly, I have no experience with them beyond the preconfigured device the insurance company gave me.
See you around 🏃♂️