Remote Workers Are Missing One Subtle But Powerful Commute Benefit
Remote workers have all the time in the world — but fewer boundaries than ever.
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I Would Give Anything To Do Nothing (For 5 Minutes)
It’s 6-something on a Wednesday evening and I’m working 500+ miles from my usual desk. I clock out after a particularly tough day of data engineering and play on my phone for about 5 minutes before my “office” (my wife’s childhood bedroom) door bursts open and one of my many nieces and nephews screams “Dinner time!” and walks out. I don’t fault the short (and possibly redundant) interaction because it will still be years until they learn the value of condensing the content of such a meeting into an email.
You’d think being locked in a bedroom coding for 8+ hours would make you crave at least some human interaction. But what I really wanted was 5 more minutes on my phone.
My precious decompression time.
Time that quickly evaporates as soon as someone sees my not feverishly coding or frustratingly clicking away in my office. Time I would normally get during a mindless commute.
Car On, Brain Off
One of remote work’s selling points, the lack of a commute, is, incidentally enough, also one of its toughest adjustments.
Although I am significantly less stressed not having to chart routes home and dodge other exhausted drivers, I no longer have that “other” time afforded to us when in transit.
Not commuting for close to two years now means I don’t have “spare” hours that can be channeled into things that can be both productive and bring us joy like listening to an audiobook, becoming immersed in a true crime podcast or getting irrationally angry at local sports talk radio.
And if you’re rolling your eyes at my characterization or even romanticization of a typical American commute and drafting a comment about how you’d kill to not have to transport yourself, half asleep, on a daily basis, then I’d first ask you to consider the value of your time away from it all.
Commuter limbo, while unpleasant in larger cities, allows our bodies and mindsets…
