For the past year, I’ve deliberately chosen a slower route when commuting between headquarters and home. Here’s why.
By Steffen Nielsen, Lolle & Nielsen Inventions
Getting from home to Lolle & Nielsen’s headquarters can be a 10-minute bike ride with fellow commuters rushing from A to B alongside cars and trucks.
Or it can be a 20-minute drive through Vestre Kirkegård, Karens Minde and Sydhavnstippen. A much more scenic route where you have the quiet, green and fresh route mostly to yourself.
for the past year, I’ve chosen the latter 9 out of 10 days. And prioritizing the slower route has paid off.
10 minutes for reflection
It’s always tempting to go for the faster solution. But taking the time and space to enjoy the scenic route actually allows me to recharge on the way to work. Your brain approaches the day in a calm way. You get the opportunity to think about what’s going to happen during the day, how to approach it and work out some of the kinks before they present themselves.
The same is true for the way home: A calmer route marks a break between work and leisure time, where a lot of things tend to fall into place. Sometimes I even stop to take notes on the way home; then it’s out of my head and ready for the next day.
While this choice is, in reality, quite small, most people I talk to about the deliberate detour respond somewhere along the lines of: “Oh man, why didn’t I do that?”. And then they’ll quickly come up with another route to work that’s more fun to drive.
And it’s seriously a question of prioritising 10 minutes extra at each end of the commute.