The Commute: Your Day Leaks in the Switching

This one is for the leader who loses half an hour every time the day changes shape. Meeting ends, next thing starts, and somewhere in between you are not really in either one. It comes from The Part That Doesn’t Fit, the work I do with leaders whose wiring runs a little different, and it is a tool called the Commute.

Here is the idea. A commute used to do something for people. Twenty minutes in a car or on a train, and by the time you walked in you had put the last thing down and picked the next one up. Most leaders lost that when the commute went to zero, and nobody replaced it. Now the transitions in your day, from deep work to a meeting, from the meeting to the hard email, from work to home, happen with no commute at all. For a lot of wiring, that is where the day leaks. Not in the work. In the switching.

So the tool. First, rate the transitions in your day, one to five, on what each one costs you. Not the activities. The seams between them. Second, pick the most expensive seam, the one where you reliably arrive at the next thing still carrying the last one. Third, build a commute for it: a close, a mark, an open. Close is how you put the last thing down, a line in a notebook, a sentence to yourself about where you left it. Mark is the signal that the transition is happening, standing up, a walk to the window, the same song. Open is how you pick up the next thing, reading its one-line purpose before you start. Three minutes, same order, every time.

Then the move, because the tool asks for it. Name the trigger that starts your commute and name the thing that will tempt you to skip it. The skip is usually running late, so decide now what you do when you are running late: you run the short version, not no version. A commute you only take on calm days is not a commute.

You will not get the half hour back on day one. You will get it back the week your most expensive seam stops costing what it did, and you will know exactly which seam that was.

https://youtu.be/qxqq2ydyW98

The Part That Doesn’t Fit. Working with your wiring, not against it. thepartthatdoesntfit.com