Tips to Help You Avoid Distracted Driving

Distracted driving accidents resulted in 3,308 traffic fatalities nationwide. Every single one of these deaths could have been completely avoided, but that;s not the worst part about that massive number. No, the worst part is that it’s only going to get bigger. It’s easy to see why, too. If you look at any new car or truck at a dealership and you’re very likely to see a missive tablet sticking out from where the radio used to sit. 

Time is a commodity that’s being taken up by important things more and more. You probably rush to get to and from work as quickly as possible just to try and give yourself 15 more minutes to think and decompress. 

Social media is becoming  more important in your life every year and you’ve probably gotten addicted to scrolling because of it. With so much demanding your attention at all times, it’s hard to focus on the few things that actually matter, like driving. Hopefully the tips below will help you with that, even if just a little.

Plan Ahead

Your life is busy, so you rush. You brush your teeth quicker, you grab the quickest breakfast and coffee you can, etc. The last thing you need is for something to frustrate you or slow you down. Luckily, these can both be at least mitigated by planning ahead.

The best thing to do when planning your work route is to see which roads you can take to get to wherever you need to go and then look at the traffic reports for each road. Main roads and highways will typically have at least one time when they’re much busier than normal, called rush hours. Lunch is the most common rush hour but is far from the only one. Another occurs in the morning when people are on their way to work and another occurs when the workday ends. 

Yet another one to be aware of, especially if you live in a neighborhood with kids, is the local school’s starting and ending times since this will determine when the buses run. While you can’t change the times when you have to be at and leave work, you can change how long it takes you to get there by seeing when roads are busy and planning to avoid them at those times.

Prepare at Home

Preparing at home is different from planning ahead. When you make a plan, you’re determining what you’ll do and when to make the next day more structured and clear. Preparing is actually doing those things, like eating at home. If you eat before you leave for work then you’ll be less tempted to stop at a coffee shop, gas station or restaurant drive-thru to pick up a meal to eat while you’re driving, which is dangerous. If you do get hungry then stop and get your food; do not eat while driving.

Get fully dressed before elevating the house. This includes makeup for those who wear it because doing your makeup in the car will take your attention away from the road completely and may result in you ending up in a crash. Once you’re actually in the car then adjust it before turning it on. 

Move the seat belt to where it needs to be, pull the seat further forward or push it back, raise or lower the steering wheel, mess with your mirrors, etc. While there are a ton of benefits to doing this now, the biggest is that you won’t be distracted and try to do these things while driving.

Use Your Phone Safely

While phones can make driving easier it’s better to not use them for that. If you do then you’ll just be more tempted to pick it up and scroll to other apps. Get a GPS especially for the car instead and you’ll take quite a few distractions away immediately. This would also make it easy to reserve your phone for emergency purposes.

You have likely been told to turn off your phone while you drive, but this can actually put you in danger if you end up needing to call 911. What you should at least consider instead is apps that lock others for certain times which would prevent you from opening social media apps at certain times of day and/or an app that prevents you from calling or texting while driving. 

Whether you decide to do these or simply put your phone far out of reach, be sure to warn people who may call or text you that you’ll be busy and won’t be able to answer or respond right away. If you not answering their calls annoys them, then you can point out that more states are making it illegal to talk on the phone while driving due to the danger and that you simply won’t take the risk.

Understand Multitasking

You may not believe any of the advice present so far, especially that of not talking on the phone, applies to you because you’re a good multitasker. Unfortunately, that won’t help you. Multitasking isn’t actually real, at least, not the way that you think it is. It actually refers to how well you can switch from one task to another. 

The problem with this is that instead of fully focusing your attention on one of the activities the way you would if you could do them one at a time, you instead dedicate some of your brainpower to each task, making fully focusing on either one of them completely impossible. This translates to you noticing less when you’re driving and ultimately being in more danger than you realize. This is why many states are making it illegal to do things like talking on the phone while driving; it’s just not safe. 

It’s also a big reason why so many people are being vocal about putting massive screens in the car that you have to interact with for many key features. They’re basically giant phones, and you already know how distracting phones are. A giant one you have to look at is only going to cause problems.