If you commute by train it’s not all necessarily wasted time. You can read, play games, listen to podcasts, etc.

I always read many more books when I commuted than when I didn’t commute. I find myself making new year’s resolutions to read more. But it was easy when I had the commute as a forcing function. (Not having internet on the subway probably helped...)

If you don’t think reading books is valuable enough to do when you aren’t commuting, is it really valuable to you? Or are you just doing the best you can to salvage a shitty situation?

(I audiobook when running so I’m no better)

I always find other more pertinent/alarming things I need to do at home and the forced lack of internet makes me focus more than I normally would.

Admittedly this doesn't say great things about my attention span...

I think it is valuable, I’m just bad at organising and prioritising my spare time!

300k a year post tax, 50 weeks a year, 50 hours a week, that's $120 an hour.

If it takes an extra hour a day and $500 a month that's $3000 to save a month in housing costs

Don’t forget to take transportation cost out of your $3000 per month.

I live across the street from the office and yes the rent is stupid, but my commute is a 5 minute walk.

And rent is still stupid in a 30min radius (for a total of 1h/day). You really have to go 1h+ radius to make a significant dent in rent around here (SF).

I did - $500 a month. I have no idea what communitng costs, and little idea about rent.

I have a 5 second commute from the bedroom to the office (3 minutes if I go downstairs and boil the kettle first), far easier. Monthly Mortgage is less than the weekly rent that one colleague pays in London, and he still has a 45 minute commute each way.

If you are working for somebody else, you can't exactly make any extra money by working extra hours. At least in a programmers case.

The only real thing to gain in this case is convenience.

I work full time in software engineering and do occasional paid freelancing work. It's quite possible to be full time and work extra.

Depends on your contract and whether you get paid overtime.

It's essentially unpaid work. So you "upgrade" your 40 hour week to a 50 hour week.