Trip chaining - or how to manage your time better

Many people who know me think I am not the best manager of time, in fact a bit of a dawdler. However, when it comes to doing the Saturday morning shopping, I am highly motivated to spend as little time as possible in the exhausting and stressful environment of shopping.

This is what leads me to write about the delights of trip chaining. Even though the link is American, there are 10 useful tips to organising yourself to try and do all the weekend shopping in one trip, rather than multiple trips.

We are fortunate in that where we live there is a good public transport-based shopping centre that contains supermarkets, specialty food stores and specialised businesses that we don't use all the time, but are nice to have. Today we needed to go to all three to do our weekly shop, get some special foods from the delicatessen and drop some clothes off for alterations and finally, pick up our bikes from the bike shop.

It only took about 2 and a half hours to do all the shopping, drop the clothes off at the tailors, pick up our bikes and still have time left over for a coffee and some cake for morning tea. Trip chaining is great, and the 'tasting plate' of cheese, dolmades, marinated mushrooms, Sicilian green olives and tzatziki we made for lunch was delicious!

LS

A new model of car use.

A few weeks into the experiment of living without a car, we activated our membership with Flexicar. It's a good way to enjoy many of the benefits of car ownership, but without the sunk costs of insurance, registration, maintenance and petrol. Not to mention the repayments on a car loan. In many ways the system runs like a car fleet - filling out logbooks, booking vehicles and centralised fleet management.

Instead of having the fleet garaged centrally, the Flexicar fleet is dispersed among council car parks in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. Fortunately, we have a car park near us, about a 20 minute walk or a 15 minute walk/tram ride away. The Flexicar fleet has gradually been working its way up Sydney Road and it would seem that as demand grows, they'll cross Moreland Road and be even closer. Hopefully our membership of Flexicar will mean there's more demand for a Flexicar to come up our way soon.

While all the cars in our area are Honda Jazz (which by the way are great to drive), Flexicar have a number of car models in their fleet. Like the work car fleet, where I've had a chance to drive lots of different models of cars, Flexicar has given us the opportunity to try some different cars. If we decided to go back to owning a car again, the Honda Jazz would be at the top of list.

The day they took the car away

It was a bit sad when they took the car away. It was all over so quickly. The tow truck man turned up, winched the car up onto the tray and then drove away. All over in minutes. One door closes and another door opens.