12 weeks

I was talking to my cousin from Toronto and she was telling me that her decision to work from home means that she gets the equivalent of 12 40-hour weeks of time since she no longer commutes. That sounded ridiculous to me, so I had to redo the math.

Looking at some random websites, they say there is 250 working days a year. Take off 10 fed holidays, and 15 days (3 weeks) of holidays, that works out to 225 days per year. 12 weeks * 40 hours / week gives 480 hours. 480 hours / 225 days gives a total commuting time per day of 2.1333 hours per day, or 64 minutes per direction.

That's sad.

Let's go the other way. When I was going to school downtown, at best my commute was 48 minutes. When I starting driving the whole way it was closer (or more) than an hour each way. Worst time was during a snowstorm and it was 2 hours one way. Assume the same number of working days, 48 minutes per way works out to 1.6 hours / day which gives us... 9 weeks per year as a lower bound. Just commuting.

These days I bike or take the bus to work. Both usually take 20 minutes, although the bus can take much longer if there is traffic. Assuming that I work 5 days a week, that works out to 3.75 weeks per year. I actually work compressed (I work longer per day, taking every other Friday off), so let's reduce the number of working days from 225 to 200. That drops the number to 3.33 weeks per year.

Looking at the stats for average salaries, let's assume that people are working for 60k $ / year. 12 weeks of time works out to 13846.15 $ / year. Let's say you are making 100k $ / year, that works out to 23076.92 $ / year. Redoing that calculation for 3.75 weeks / year gives me 4326.92 (for 60k) or 7211.53 (for 100k). Interesting numbers, but made up numbers.

If you consider your commute to be "your time" and you value it at practically zero these numbers don't really make sense. If you consider a commute to be unpaid employer time, well that sucks and here are some numbers about that.

Sometimes it's just fun to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations.