What do you do on the subway?
I just moved to Park Slope
in Brooklyn from
I've tried reading a book
and it is OK, but all the motion makes me a little ill. Newspapers take up too much space on a
crowded train and also tend to make me nauseated.
That is seven and a half
hours per week - the better part of a full work day. How can I make it productive?
Looking around a given
subway car there are likely between 50 and 75 people. Are they also wasting the equivalent of a day
a week? That would be about the same as two months per year, per person. That is 100 months per year, per car of folks
or the same as eight years worth of productivity down the drain for one subway
car alone. On a ten car train you have two entire careers worth of time
represented.
As a Pro Bono Junkie, I
immediately wonder how this time could be harnessed for the public good. I often see graffiti scratched into the seats
using a key. I guess that is a way to
create pro bono public art. There are
occasional preachers on subway cars that provide services for the religious
types on the car. For the faithful, this might count as some kind of productive
social benefit activity. Neither does it for me.
How can I use my time on the
subway productively?
P.S.
Does anyone live in
What about listening to an iPod? On my subway ride, I listen to daily news podcasts from the BBC, NPR, and headlines from the New York Times. I subscribe to a weekly analysis on various topics from the Economist. In the nonprofit arena, you might want to check out these podcasts: Idealist.org, Craiglist Foundation’s Nonprofit Boot Camp, or the 501c3 cast. I also like iTunesU (iTunes University), which allows you to download lectures from universities across the country. For the business folks out there, I’ve seen a range of lectures and podcasts as well. Oh! One more idea: learn a new language. I subscribed to the Spanish 101 podcast, but I haven’t yet been motivated to start. As you sound out new words, your fellow passengers (especially native speakers of the chosen language) will have the pleasure of listening to the crazy guy repeating phrases and numbers with a nice American accent.
As far as harnessing the public good, what about befriending fellow subway riders and trying to learn something from them? Choose a couple people that look bored and approachable, and ask them if they could spare a few minutes to talk to you. Ask them what they do, explain pro bono/the mission of the Taproot Foundation, see if there’s an opportunity to do pro bono work in their industry, get feedback...maybe you could get some good insights? You could even ask them how we might use all those hours lost in the subway ride to benefit society. Maybe you could find some new volunteers this way. OK, clearly I just moved to NYC and maybe befriending strangers won’t work well here, but it could work where I’m from. I thought I’d throw it out there!