Time v money

Here’s a sort of math equation for you. Let’s say you can cut 15 minutes off your 80 minute commute—but it will cost you an extra $2.50 every day. Now let’s say that in addition to shortening that commute by 15 minutes a day, you can also avoid the one interstate you hate with the white hot passion of 10,000 suns—for that same $2.50 a day.

Would you spend the money?

You’re looking at spending an additional $12.50 a week for each week you drive all five days. Or put another way, you’ll spend about an extra $615 a year assuming you drive five days a week for 49 weeks.

You’ll get back around 75 minutes a week or just over 61 hours if you drive five days a week for 49 weeks. Plus you’ll drive almost 7 miles less a day—or 35 miles fewer each week or 1715 fewer miles for the year.

If I take the Tobin Bridge route to work, I spend the money and save the time and miles. I started taking that route last Thursday and so far it’s worth the money. We’ll see how the situation plays out if Kent remains unemployed after his severance package runs out. Then I’ll probably need to look at what gas, and wear and tear costs and see if I’m saving enough there to cover the toll.

Where are my slippers?

After 25 months, I’m back among the fully employed. I was underemployed (love that term) for 12 months and flat out unemployed the rest of the time. The adjustment has been about what I expected—I’m tired, my brain is full, my feet want to know where my slippers are and I’m getting used to driving a lot again.

I thought I’d be able to work out at night when I get home from work but that’s just not the case. Let’s face it, I’m wired as an early bird, I’ve been that way since I was a teen and even when not working, the latest I “slept in” was 6 AM. Since I need a solid eight or nine hours of sleep every night, that puts me to bed around 9. Now that I’m getting up a lot earlier, my bedtime has shifted too. When I get home, Kent and I eat dinner and I’m in bed about an hour later. So I don’t have time or energy to work out at night. I’ve shifted my wake up time to a half hour earlier so I can get a work out in before I go to work. It’s always been far easier for me to get up a half hour earlier than to stay up even five minutes later.

I’m also learning a lot at work, both about the processes, the clients and how we work with them. My start date came at a really good time since we’ve got the adjunct faculty (who work with our clients) in for a two day workshop. I’ve had a chance to meet those who attended and I’ve started getting a better sense of who they are and how they operate.

We were on tap to get a lot of snow yesterday, so I prudently packed an overnight bag just in case I needed to stay in Portsmouth. Mayor Merino (Boston) declared a snow emergency for yesterday a day early and we got pretty much no snow. Because of the snow emergency though, my commute home yesterday was the easiest yet—no traffic at all!

So about that job I mentioned

On February 8, I start working for Dare Mighty Things as their senior consultant. DMT is a management consulting company that specializes in working with non-profits to help them be as efficient and effective as possible in serving their target groups.

I could copy and paste the job description but as a friend of mine says, small words are better and the description was on the long side. But the Reader’s Digest version is this: I’ll:

*Consult in areas like organizational development, capacity building, skills training, change management, program design and development
*Train the people who actually offer the training to the target groups,
*Conduct needs assessments to identify and solve problem areas of organizational and program effectiveness
*Identify and capture research findings, best practices, innovations and so on so that all clients have access to this information.

I’m pretty excited, to be honest. This is exactly the career path I started on way back in 2005 when I was accepted to the MIOP program at KSU. The single drawback is the commute—DMT is located in Portsmouth, NH which is about 60 miles north of where we live. But I’ll also be traveling about 50% of the time, and as I told DMT, Logan International is a lot closer to my house than Portsmouth!