How to Make the Most of Your Tedious Commute

A: What about a book? No, but really, I see where you’re coming from. It has been rough to resume spending 50 minutes crammed between anxious suits and someone wailing on a saxophone. Sometimes, I’m so bored, I even consider doing actual work, but I’m blissfully stymied by frequent data dead zones. But even if I were taking the aboveground “L” in Chicago or carpooling in Atlanta, I would never suggest spending off hours answering emails.

Beyond the obvious, like talky podcasts or new music, try starting your commute by simply looking around. I like to note any backpacks I’ve never seen before, what headphones people are using—Apple AirPods seem to be in decline while beefier noise cancellers are on the rise—and all the weird sneakers people are wearing.

If I’m lucky, that gets me through the first 10 minutes. Then I have to get creative. At the suggestion of my colleague, Off Duty art director Marlene Szczesny, I recently downloaded a few apps that let me make actual art out of random photos in my camera roll. Union ($6 a month) lets you superimpose anything you have downloaded (or pulled from its very large library) to make funny compositions and collages. I combined a photo of my friend’s Corgi with one of an islet I saw in the Azores. It looks like Dr. Doom (yes, that is his government name) is about to lick the island. Ms. Szczesny also suggests VideoLeap ($10 a month) for adding fun filters, music and text to your videos or WordFoto ($2) for splicing short word phrases artfully into your pictures.

When I think I’ll have more energy, I pack a set of wired headphones and one of Teenage Engineering’s Pocket Operators like the PO-33 K.O! ($99). These calculator-shaped doohickeys are extremely powerful music-making machines. You can use their built-in microphones to record random noises around you, then use the buttons and knobs to manipulate and play them back as pleasant loops. After watching a couple of people use it on YouTube, I found myself creating endless goofy beats. My favorite involved several different chops of a classic MTA safety announcement, “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

If you want to do something slightly more productive, the commute can be a good time to read shorter things, like magazine or (cough) newspaper stories. I use the app Pocket to save stories I want to read later. I also use the service Pocket to Kindle to get downloaded versions of these sent to my e-reader (and the free Kindle app on my iPhone) to read offline. If this is your plan, though, it’s probably a good idea to join the New Yorkers investing in sound-isolating earpieces. Those sax players are loud!

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