Waste 2 Minutes? Don't Sweat It

I do school drop-off on Thursdays and Fridays in my family. As you drive out of my younger son's school parking lot, it's pretty hard not to see a sign indicating that there are no left turns until after 9:05AM (shortly after school starts). There is a simple reason for this. It's a busy road, and when people turn left, they take longer, and make the whole drop-off line back-up.
So what do I see every time I'm there? Someone turning left.

As I'm sitting in the backed-up line, I always ponder what, exactly, these miscreants are thinking. Are they blind? Do they think the sign applies only to other cars? Do they think it's OK to turn left despite a no-left-turn sign if they have a good reason? Is it civil disobedience because they don't believe that anyone should trample upon a fundamental right to turn left? There is a turn-around spot roughly one-tenth of a mile away, and so, after turning right, I've timed myself and discovered that the cost of turning right when you ultimately want to go left is approximately two minutes. But because a certain number of people are trying to "save" those two minutes, the line takes more than two minutes longer for everyone else.

This twice-weekly lesson in human nature always reminds me of two philosophical points about how we spend our time.

First, living an ethical life is largely about asking what would happen if everyone behaved in a way you are about to behave. You may be able to save time by running a red light, or not cleaning up after a picnic, or cutting through a flower display in a public garden, but if everyone did it, there would be more accidents, parks overrun with raccoons or bears and a rather sad looking patch of beheaded plants in what used to be a flower bed. The fact that turning left is "quicker" is not sufficient justification to do it, because lots of people doing it is precisely what makes people late to places after school drop-off in the first place.

And second, why are we so obsessed with saving a few minutes here and there? There are 168 hours in a week. That's 10,080 minutes. Yes, a 2-minute short cut is tempting, but unless you have no other 2-minute gaps in your life - no commercials, no last minute outfit changes, no time spent "liking" idiotic videos on Facebook - it's hard to see how saving two minutes by doing something anti-social is a big win. As with money, it's far better to get the big things right - being happy with your job, being happy with your family life, even moving somewhere that you don't have to spend so much time commuting - rather than obsessing about the small stuff.

What "time saver" annoys you the most when you see people do it?

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