Since Covid made its mark on society we have experienced a major cultural shift. Working remotely became normal very quickly. Recently many companies have begun to call employees back to the office. Losing the freedom and convenience of remote work doesn’t seem ideal. There’s no doubt that something is lost in working remotely (Whether or not you believe Elon Musk that no one working remotely is actually working). Here we’ll highlight some of the pros and cons of working from home and how commuting may be necessary to unlock your full career potential.
There are three primary benefits of working from home instead of commuting.
You’ll enhance a certain kind of productivity. That is, though there may be different distractions you’re able to control them in your home. You’ll need to be thoughtful about the distractions you have at home. You must commit to working instead of casually watching television or doing household chores.
You can flex your schedule– if you or your child need to visit a doctor you can trade working hours and catch up later in the night (as long as that’s a part of the agreement, which it should be). If you have some pull in the working relationship you may even be able to adjust your entire schedule, allowing you to work an off shift with an agreement to be working during say, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. but with the latitude decide when you will work the other four hours of the workday.
You’ll save money– cars are expensive. The IRS doesn’t give 62.5 cents per mile just because of gasoline prices but because of wear and tear on the vehicle itself. At current costs of about $3.50 per gallon of gasoline a vehicle that gets 30 MPG is only using 11 cents per mile of gasoline. The remaining 51.5 cents are related to things like oil changes, tires, and general degradation of the vehicle. The average commute length is 20.5 miles each way which is over $25 per day in costs at IRS rates. Imagine finding an extra $25 dollars in your pocket 5 days a week! Not to belabor the simple math but that’s $6,500 per year!
Though working remotely can have great benefits you are seeing short term reward and long term risk to your physical and mental health and your career.
First off, working from home is isolating. That’s why there was such an increase in dog ownership during the pandemic, no one wanted to feel alone. Humans are social animals. It might feel good to be alone for a while to enter goblin mode but long term you’ll feel terrible about yourself. That’s the best case scenario. The other path is you’ll develop a drug dependency. You’ll narrow how you generate dopamine to one thing and obsess about it. You’ll really be in a world of hurt. The point is, coming in the office forces you to take at least some care for yourself and your appearance. If you’d rather not do that then you are headed down a dark path.
Following this ‘Drug” dependency line of thinking, distraction will tempt you. In an office setting it’s easier to focus because everyone around you is focused (at least in a healthy organization). When you’re at home and alone there is no one to benchmark against in terms of productivity or behavior. What’s appropriate is completely up to you. Scroll FB? No one is watching you. Put on The Price is Right? Hey, you’re getting your work done. You’re going through the motions but not getting into flow. You’re not doing really interesting work or using the full breadth of your abilities. You can overcome these issues by curating your home office for productivity but that can be financially costly.
On the flip side of flexibility in your work hours you can also experience blurry boundaries in your working time. According to Parkinsons’s Law: “work expands to fill the time allotted to it.” If you spend the day distracted and don’t allot time to your work you’ll procrastinate. You’ll think you can always catch up later that night, after dinner, after your children are in bed, etc. The problem is that will begin to creep into your sleep and time with others. At that point you have a very uncomfortable decision to make around your health and your work. Bring these focuses into harmony. Being in an office solves this because you can take your cues from others you work with. There’s always some downtime but seeing others in the weeds makes it easy for you to join.
Opportunity Costs and Benefits
So what do you do? Accept WFH and the withering of social connections or commute and spend the time and money you could save? The reason for this blog is to maximize the amount of cake you can have and eat. Commuting has costs and so does working in an office. You can maximize the benefits of commuting and minimize the costs.