My phone just woke up to ask me a simple question, “How happy do you feel now?” It’s the second time today that I’ve answered a brief survey about how I feel, what I’m doing and where I am. It’s triggered by an app called Mappiness, which is building up a profile of where and when I am most happy. I also have apps on my phone for tracking my expenses, weight, fitness, caffeine consumption, sleep, heart rate and even my posture!
All of these apps are designed to help me learn about myself and my behavior without subjective bias, selective memory or excuses, and to hopefully trigger a life-improving behavioral change. This is the aim of the Quantified Self movement, which has been growing in popularity since the phrase was coined in 2007 and with the convergence of smartphones, cloud computing, social networking and wearable technology. Nobody has mastered the art of self-analytics more than Nicholas Felton, who each year publishes a personal annual report that documents his daily routines over the course of the year.
And yet, one important aspect of our lives still remains poorly understood by most of us – our personal commute. How much does your commute cost you each week? Most drivers, when answering this question, simply think of their typical fuel costs, but completely neglect the other true costs of driving such as maintenance, tires, insurance, license, registration, taxes, depreciation, parking, tolls, travel time, etc. In fact, the average cost in the US of driving to work each week is $175!
Similarly, most people don’t visualize their commute time. In the US, commuters spend on average more than 4 hours every week traveling to and from their workplace. And 76% drive alone, wasting on average 30 seats per week – equivelent to 3.2 jumbo jets of wasted seats each per year. Most of us share this problem that so aggressively eats up our time and our income every week, but we also each have a unique commuting fingerprint. Isn’t it worth investing some time and effort to better understand and ultimately improve our own commutes?
Recently I’ve enjoyed Carma carpooling with people whose commutes have been transformed by sharing commute costs with other commuters, reducing commute times by accessing carpool lanes and having a more enjoyable commute through meeting interesting new people in their communities. Carma is the first app to provide a verifiable audit trail for carpooling, with accurate data about commute times, duration, distances and costs. Why not take the first step today by contacting someone with a matching commute and see how you can reboot your commute.
Emmett @ Team Carma
P.S. this blog post included 263 words, 203 unique words and 88 four-letter words. 223 had a lexical density of 77.2%. The post also had a readability score of 11 on the Gunning-Fog Index and used 2588 characters, of which 1647 were non-spaces. The post averaged 1.74 syllables per word and comprised 21 sentences, with an average length of 21.75 words per sentence. The word I used most is “commute” (10 occurences). Hmm.
P.P.S. For more about the Quantified Self movement, check out Gary Wolf’s New York Times article and TED talk.