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I started to walk to work more than a year ago (5km one way, about 45mins). Makes a world of a difference, as it gives me more or less two hours of exercise per day, time to get my mind on/off of work, call family/friends and other stuff. Bottom line for me - it's less the time spent commuting, than whether you can spend it in a useful way.

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Exactly. I have a ~30 minute commute by bike. It is built-in exercise for the day and a major stress reliever.

Not to compete, but a 2013 study found bike commuters to happiest. Walkers were #2. :)

http://www.outsideonline.com/1795631/study-bike-commuters-ar...

I agree completely. I take the shuttle from SF to Mountain View every day (I work at Google). It's about 70m door to door each way. For the first 6 months of work I was miserable, 70 minutes is way more time than I wanted to check my RSS and Email so I was bored. Boredom kept my mind on the commute, and thinking about the time made me angry.

I decided to use the time to read books as a new years resolution. Having at least 2h a day, 5 days a week to read books has made me fly through books faster than any other time in my life. I've already read 21 books since January and I actually look forward to my reading time now! I think if I had this time at home I would not be using it so peacefully/productively, I'd probably waste it on Netflix.

That said, 70m each way is more than I need. I think 30m each way would be the ideal balance of forced mind-clearing and reasonable work-life balance.

Why not do actual work on the shuttle ride?

I do enough work at work. Plus I am not very productive on a 13" computer SSHing over flaky highway WiFi while bumping down the highway compared to sitting at a workstation with two 24" monitors, gigabit internet, 12cores, and 64GB RAM.

I ride the metro for about 1:30 a day (part of which is walking to and fro), which I prefer to my prior driving commute of 25-30 minutes. I have had to increase my fantasy and sci-fi novel budget, however.

Good point. I have a standing desk, so always looking for ways to turn work into some health benefits. Also reminds me of my commute in London via tube from Putney to Canary Wharf which was over an hour each way. I learned two new programming languages while doing that commute.

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