Change Your Work Hours - and reduce fuel costs

If you have a long commute, try to change your work hours to give all the traffic "the slip." What could it hurt to ask? All you have to lose is a commute with hundreds of others crawling along at the speed of exhaust fumes.

The relative difficulty or cost of this tip is rated 1 to 10. A rating of 10 suggests that this tip is the most difficult or most costly. Expected savings are also rated 1 to 10. A rating of 10 suggests that this tip will provide substantial savings in fuel, money or both.

Change work hours. When I lived in California, I traveled Treat Boulevard from Concord to Walnut Creek each day where traffic crawled along in between stop lights. The closer to Walnut Creek, the more congested it became. It was about a 40 minute commute as I recall.

To address the issue, I thought "why don't you change your work hours" and help alleviate the frustration caused by the snail-paced traffic? As a manager, I could do something like this without approval, and it worked. It minimized time wasted in the car, and helped me use fuel more efficiently.

My new work hours had me arriving at 6am and leaving at 6pm. Yes, it was 12 hours of work everyday, but it was wonderful to have the car move along at a good clip instead of all this creeping along in high density traffic. I knew how to save gas and save my sanity at the same time.

I used my early morning hours to get things done without interruption, and to contact customers on the east coast. I used the regular work day to interface with staff and colleagues. I used the after hours time to wrap things up and plan for the next work day.

In an office where phones might need to be covered early or later, or in a business where your customers are in different time zones, you might change your work hours and provide a benefit to both you and your employer - save gas and get more done.

If you can convince management that your work days are 12 hours long, then you have yourself a work week that is only three and one half days. Wouldn’t it be nice to leave the office each week at 10am on Thursday? What a nice head start on the weekend.

All right, leave at noon and let them have another 2 hours of your time, gratis. That ought to make ‘em happy.

Not every position in a company is conducive to “flex time” but you might just have the perfect job to pitch the proposal to change your work hours. Better yet, if you are management, it shouldn’t be hard to see your way clear to letting your favorite employee work flexible hours. That would be you.

Even if you can’t change your work hours, if you can work flexible hours a few days a week, that will provide some relief from the snail-paced commute.

I know how to save gas, but I don’t know how to convince management to institute policies that help others save gas. As a colleague of mine is fond of saying: management either makes the right decisions, or they make the wrong decisions.

Cost or difficulty: 6
Savings: 4

Done with Change Your Work Hours, take me back to Save Gas