An Average Worker In Lagos Spends At Least 4 Hours In Traffic Every Day

An average worker in Lagos spends at least 4 hours in traffic every day. This amounts to 20 hours a week and about 1,000 hours in a year. That’s a lot of hours that could be invested. Thus, my question this morning is how much of this time are you investing?

Let me introduce to you a concept I called Return-on -Traffic-Time®. Most of us are familiar with financial ratios such as returns on sales, returns on capital employed etc. but how can you evaluate returns on time spent in traffic?

Return-on -Traffic-Time® = Number of hours spent on personal development / Total number of hours spent in Traffic

Like any productivity ratio, the best return will be achieved by maximizing the numerator while minimizing the denominator. Let’s focus on the numerator because it will cost some money to minimize the denominator.

Let’s say you read or listen to a book/podcast for 1 hour out of the 4-hour traffic time, your return is 25%. Doing this will also reduce the time spent in traffic to 3 hours at no cost to you. Now Imagine investing 2 or 3 hours daily!

Almost 50% of the time I spent studying for my MBA was in traffic. There was even an exam I wrote inside traffic. Moving closer to work is the perfect solution but if you can’t afford that for now, you may want to consider having a sound Return-on -Traffic-Time®.