240 Hours a Year

240 hours. 10 whole days. That is the amount of time a student who lives in the city (Zhujiang New Town and Tianhe) spends on the bus every school year. While it may not sound like a lot, 240 hours is a long time. In 240 hours, you can: watch all nine seasons of The Office three times, get eight hours of sleep every single day for a whole month, watch all three High School Musical Movies 43 times, and probably eat 1200 cookies without getting sick. In comparison to students who live in Science Park and walk to and from school, they only spend around 1.25 days which is only a little over 30 hours of travel time in an entire school year. There are also students who live even further away, like in Dongguan, where they spend around three hours a day on their bus.

While these 240 hours could be spent doing enjoyable things like the ones I listed above or hanging out with friends, it also could be spent productively. Yes, by “productively” I do mean studying and getting homework done. Yes, it definitely is not fun. 

A lot of students have a friend on the bus that they can talk to but that’s not always the case. For example, I don’t have any friends on my bus so I don’t have anything fun to do. So instead of spending these 240 hours on the bus sleeping or simply just spacing out, I found it efficient to get my homework done. Doing work on the bus definitely isn’t fun but in the long run, it is really beneficial. Finishing even just some of your homework beforehand gives you more free time at home to do stress relieving things like watch YouTube or video call friends. 

A small problem with going on the laptop or reading on the bus is being carsick. While it doesn’t apply to everyone, I know some people (including me) who are quite unlucky and feel carsick easily. In that case, there isn’t much that can be done. But if you are blessed and do not have this problem, I think it would be advantageous to get ahead on some work. 

I know that most people reading this article probably won’t even think twice about doing things on the bus but I suggest that you give it a shot and if it’s not for you, then that’s understandable. Instead of wasting 240 hours, why not spend it efficiently? (Or you could just watch more of your favorite TV show on the bus, that’s totally understandable too.) There is nothing we can really do to change how far away we live from school so instead of thinking about the time that could be spent doing fun things, it would be better to get things done.