I've recently moved out of London to a rural area known as Bough Beech, near Edenbridge in Kent. I had been dreading the commute as I've planned it out to be between 75 and 90 minutes each way.
The route is basically a 5 minute drive to Hever Station, 45 minute train into London Bridge, 10 - 15 minute tube to Old Street, 5 minute walk to Paul street. I've now been doing this route for 3 days and have managed to shave about 10 minutes out of it already.
I'm fortunate I think as I'm far enough out so that the train is fairly empty if I get one after 9am which allows me to get 45 minutes of work done in the morning and the evening. An hour and a half of uninterrupted work is something I haven't been able to do for some years now. There is no Internet coverage for the most part and no phone signal in the more rural areas meaning completely no distractions, not even email.
In the 3 days I have been doing this I have managed to write the content for our new Hoxton Mix website, our Solid State Group newsletter, a couple of blog posts (including this one), tag up and load of photos with meta data and compose a requirements spreadsheet for one of our clients.
There are definitely some tech tips for working offline efficiently like evernote and dropbox but I'm not sure my setup is perfect yet, so I'm saving that for another post.
Bear in mind that I have a 2 year old son and another on the way in a few weeks, so time at home is extremely limited. Time at work is mostly coordination meetings, finance related admin, new business work etc. This offline work time is really starting to make a difference to getting large bit of work actually done.
It may actually have improved my efficiency having a large commute. Add to that the fact I feel more relaxed pulling into a seemingly abandoned leafy station at the end of the day, and I can honestly say that making the move out of London is a breath of fresh air. Quite literally.
Comments
Rich says:
Matthew Evans says: