How I utilize my travel time

In the modern day almost all the people travel long distances to get to their workplace, school, or may be on vacations and so on. Have you ever wondered how much of your time is spent on travelling alone?

Well, in Sri Lanka, travelling even short distances takes a considerable amount of time. For example to get to my workplace by bus it takes around 1 ½ hours and to come back it takes nearly 2 hours. This is merely a 25 km ride. Doing a small calculation I found out that it is approximately 20% of my active day time.

When travelling I see that most of the people just do nothing while they are travelling. This article is about the way I utilize my travel time and if you agree with me you could also do the same or do something better.

So what activities could you do while travelling in the bus, train or even in Aero plane? I don’t travel at all by plane or by train. My usual method of public transport is by bus. And the following are the activities that I do while travelling in the bus.

1. Read a book
2. Sleep
3. Thinking about articles to write on

From what I see, handful of people sleeps, like I do while some listen to music or radio stations on the phone. But I hardly see people reading in the bus.

Sir Francis Bacon once said that “Reading maketh a full man”. In this age of information technology fewer people have an interest in reading. Even I, a software engineer by profession, (just started) am having a very hard time in reading. If I do get my hands on a good novel I can read it without much of a problem. But when it comes to text books and the newspapers it’s not easy to sit and read. But that is something that I should improve on.

When I tell people that I read in the bus, they tell me that it gives them a headache. It is not surprising that people get headaches because the roads in Sri Lanka aren’t the best in the world. Even in the city of Colombo you can find roads with pot holes right in the middle. Therefore it is not surprising people having headaches while reading in the bus. I also do get them from time to time but that doesn’t make me stop reading.

I have heard my mother telling me that in Japan people read newspapers while going in the bus. Since the text is in small columns, what they do is fold the paper as much as they can so that they can read it column wise and also not disturbing the person seated beside. She has also told me that in England, when the harry potter mania was at its peak she has seen people of various ages read it while travelling in the bus.

You might think that how come sleeping in the bus isn’t a waste of time. The profession I do involves in me looking at the monitor screen full 8 hours. And also when I go home most of the time I’m on the computer. This makes your eyes really tired and sleeping that hour in the bus makes a lot of difference. And on top of it when you wake up you feel refreshed. I mostly sleep on the way home, when it is too dark to read. Another thing that people say is what if you miss the stop? Over the years of travelling in the bus I have figured out that people have a sense of where they should wake up even while sleeping. For example, if I happen to fall asleep while going to work, I wake a halt or before the halt that I should get down. The fact that Sri Lankan buses travelling in extremely slow pace may also be one fact that I don’t miss the halt. But on the way home I get down at the bus station there it is perfectly ok to sleep to my heart’s content. But even so, I wake up before it stops at the station.

I should also mention that, some of the most creative ideas come when you travel. There are numerous incidents where people have come up with such ideas. One such incident that I can think of is where J.K. Rowling came up with her life changing idea of “Harry Potter”. It was when she was travelling from Manchester to London on the train (flowrider, 2008). May be you could also come up with an idea worth multi-millions. All you need is a creative mind and time to think. Travelling time is ideal for it.

Taking that into consideration, I also think about that what articles to write from time to time, while travelling. Most of them are just ideas, sometimes I write them but I don’t feel like putting them up for display.

So don’t waste precious travel time chatting nonsense with people, hanging on the phone chatting or staring outside aimlessly. Do something worthwhile.