by Serguey Shinder
I drive to our head office three days a week, about fifty minutes each way. For years those drives were silent. I did not think of them as anything in particular. I listened to nothing, thought about whatever was in front of me, and arrived knowing what the day was for.
In 2023, as more colleagues worked from home on different days, people began asking whether we could catch up while I was driving. It seemed an obvious use of dead time. By the autumn almost every drive had a call on it, and some had two. My diary called them car calls, and I was quietly pleased with how much more I was getting through.
That November I was supposed to write a proposal for reorganising our support teams. It had been on my list for seven weeks. I had blocked time for it four times and each time produced half a page that I deleted. Over the same months, the note I write every Monday about what I want from the week, which used to fill a page, had shrunk to three lines, and two of them were meetings.
I only worked out what had changed when I looked at dates. The last proposal I had written well, early in 2023, I had more or less composed in the car over a fortnight and then typed up in an evening. The drive was where I decided things. I had never scheduled it for that, so when the calls arrived nothing told me what they were pushing out. The thinking simply had nowhere left to happen, and I kept sitting down at a desk expecting to find it already done.
So I counted the calls for a month. There were twenty seven. Nineteen were updates that could have been a written note, and most had been booked into my drive precisely because people knew I was free and could not be doing anything else. Which was true. That was the whole problem.
The drive in is silent again. No calls, no podcasts, no radio. When I park, before I go inside, I record a voice memo of whatever I have decided, usually under two minutes, and it is the first thing I listen to at my desk. The drive home allows one call, booked in advance, and only with somebody who genuinely needs a conversation. The updates arrive in writing now, and I read them in about a quarter of the time the calls used to take.
The proposal was finished three weeks later. Most of it was worked out somewhere between the motorway and the office car park.
Time with nothing booked into it was never empty. It was doing the work I had never thought to schedule.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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