Stars over El Capitan in Guadalupe Mountains National Park (Texas).  35 minute exposure.

1. Put in up to 10 origin addresses (these are locations you might potentially choose to live)
2. Put in up to 10 regular destinations (work, gym, neighborhoods, whatever) and how many one way trips you make to each of them each week
3. Click the blue button and wait a minute or two while the macro goes to Google Maps to find the drive time between each pair of address (up to 10×10, or 100 pairs)
4. Look at the pivot table to see the total minutes per week you’ll spend in the car

This might seem excessive but it actually shifted our thinking substantially as we considered moving to different neighborhoods.  Places that seemed nice and only slightly out of the way ended up incurring another 2-3 hours of commuting time every week while the neighborhood we’re in already emerged as the clear winner in terms of convenience – and by a much larger margin than I would have thought.

This is not a very sophisticated macro, so if Google changes the layout of their maps page it will probably break…but at least you can use it for a proof of concept.

Download the model in Excel