Blog Action Day: The Environment

Today is Blog Action Day and the topic of choice is The Envi­ron­ment. The idea is for folks to dis­cuss the envi­ron­ment as it relates to our cur­rent blog topic. Since my blog topic is.…well.…me this is going to be easy.

After some thought­ful dis­cus­sion with John, I’ve decided to share where I think we, as a home-based busi­ness own­ers and a home­school fam­ily, do in our daily lives to reduce our impact on the environment.

Dur­ing the morn­ing news we hear all about the traf­fic jams for those com­mut­ing to their place of work. In our busi­ness we com­mute from our down­stairs bed­room to our upstairs offices. The only traf­fic jam you’ll find in our home is at the cof­fee pot. Just try putting your cof­fee cup in before mine and you’ll get an ear­ful. Same as you would if you tried to cut me off on the freeway.

All kid­ding aside, because we don’t par­tic­i­pate in the mad dash to an office out­side of our home we as a sin­gle fam­ily are doing our part to help the envi­ron­ment. This is not to say that we never leave the house. Of course we do. We have out­side appoint­ments and our kids have out­side activ­i­ties. How­ever when we travel is entirely up to us. It’s not often that you find us in rush hour traf­fic. We try to sched­ule morn­ing appoint­ments after 9am and after­noon appoint­ments before 4:30pm.

I know that work­ing from home is not an option for every­one. But there is an alter­na­tive to every­one trav­el­ing to work at the same time. Com­pa­nies could stag­ger their employee arrival/exit times to alle­vi­ate traf­fic. Some folks are nat­u­rally early birds and oth­ers not so much. Those who are chirpy in the a.m. could work the 7am-3pm sched­ule and then oth­ers from 8am-4pm and lastly the night owls could wan­der in from 9am-6pm.

Sched­ul­ing employ­ees into their nat­ural pro­duc­tive time would be an addi­tional bonus. I for exam­ple am the night owl in the group. While my sis­ter Jackie is chirpy in the early a.m. hours. It would make sense to slot us into dif­fer­ent work sched­ules since we are both pro­duc­tive at dif­fer­ent times of the day.

What does this have to do with the envi­ron­ment? With less folks stuck in traf­fic at the same time there would be less smog, less stress and hap­pier peo­ple over­all. So I would be inter­ested to hear what you are doing in your fam­ily to help with the environment.