It's been about a month and a few weeks since making the move from the company dorms. I pay a higher rent now but having my own place where I can invite people over is nice. I now live about 20 minutes outside of Tokyo, instead of 1 hour. The trade off, however, is that it now takes me an hour to get to work instead of the 10 minutes I used to spend before. The time delta of 50 minutes times 2 is actually quite significant. The slate has an article on commuting entitled "your commute is killing you," explaining that the further away you live, the more your health, social life, productivity and marriage suffers. Fairly obvious stuff, considering that you have less time to do everything else. 2 hours out of 16 waking hours spent on commuting is more than a 10% of productive time, which is painful.
On the flip side however, I do enjoy living closer to Tokyo and it has made getting out into the city on the weekends far more convenient instead of the 1 hour ride if I wanted to get out there. I can spend more time with friends compared to what I used to be able to do before. Just as important, however, is my ability to network with people in Tokyo will improve as Tokyo is far more accessible to me.
What I'll be looking forward to doing over the course of the next year is to get acquainted with the hacker community in Tokyo, hopefully find some intelligent, driven people to work on some projects and bounce around ideas. I've already found the Tokyo Hacker space where they do meet ups and work on projects and also a Tokyo Startup Weekend event which happened last week. Unfortunately I wasn't aware about it and it ended just a few weeks ago but I'll be looking to become more involved with the entrepreneurial communities here to find cool people to do stuff with.
I've been meeting lots of people recently, but there aren't a lot of people that are interested in doing business or have a business like mind so I'll be spending this year searching for entrepreneurial communities.
