Commuting Kills

However, I am not sure the analysis method used in this article is really the way to look at this issue. The fact that lots of people spend 15 minutes sitting on their rear is not a serious problem, despite the fact that you can multiply that 15 minutes by millions of people to get a large number.

The problem is that some people have very long commutes. 30 minutes or more is a problem. An hour or more is a serious problem. 90 minutes or more is, for most jobs, ridiculous.

Actually, I see rather more good news than bad news in the referenced statistics. According to the source ([1], see the table on page 2) only 2.3% of Americans have a one-way commute of 90 or more minutes. Only 7.5% have an hour or more. But 33.5% -- more than a third -- have 30 minutes or more; that is troubling.

By the way, the statistics in the source[1] strike me as a little suspect. In particular, the big bump at "30 to 34 minutes" suggests that a lot of people were thinking, "Oh, about 30 minutes." That kind of estimation is not mentioned among the possible sources of error. Someone was not thinking clearly enough when that Census Bureau report was written.

[1] https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-15.pdf

What.

This sentiment is exactly what's wrong with trying to push for more remote work. I don't think we have the tools, either technical or managerial, to build fully-remote companies that are as effective as in-person companies. There are niches where this is true, but they're not particularly fun places to work: call centers come to mind. Companies are living, breathing, organic organizations.

The fundamental assumption that I'd challenge is that productivity towards a goal is what's hold back most organizations (or divisions / teams). I think productivity can be a bottleneck, but most of what makes companies successful is doing the right thing, not the most things. (Otherwise, startups could never compete.) As of 2015, I don't believe we have ways to get everybody in a company aligned in ways to make that happen. One of the most powerful ways of getting people working on the right things is to have them hang out with each other. Sitting next to each other, getting coffee with each other, BSing with each other before / after meetings, etc. There's a lot of unstructured communication that's simply lost, even with tools like Slack.

If that direction is there, then you can start to complain about things like lost productivity and commutes. But if there's isn't a strong sense of direction and consensus on where we're going, it doesn't matter how fast everybody is running.

(FWIW, I put my money where my mouth is on this one. I did a 3.5 hour daily commute for 2.5 years, in spite of an office 5 minutes away, because it made things better for me team.)