Even if I could walk to work, I’d still want to work from home.
Yes, I hate the job with the passion of a million burning suns. But, the noise, noise, noise from open office drives me insane.
Also, I could deal with less office culture such as a non stop discussion of golf doing the summer and non stop talk about sports gambling year round
My commute is ~40 minutes each way. The thing I liked about working from home was not having that commute and getting nearly an extra hour and a half of free time in my day. But I do see a benefit in being able to actually talk to my coworkers in person rather than over IM or a Teams meeting. So yes, if work was closer I would definitely be more willing to go to the office since it wouldn’t mean sacrificing so much time out of my day just getting there and back.
Before I retired, I would walk the 4 miles to my office to teach and meet students, then take the commuter train home and do my research there. So I always did a large part of my work at home. Even with kids running around. In fact it seemed so normal to work at home that they did their homework unbidden. And with liitle or no help from us.
Never had a job where work from home was even possible. It would be nice to not have a commute.
I currently have a 20-30 minute commute, depending on traffic, and I much prefer to go in to work rather than work at home. It helps that I have my own, good sized office and also that I have a reverse commute, so I’m not in the bumper-to-bumper traffic I see going the other way. But, mainly, I prefer to keep work and home separate. When we were WFH during COVID, as soon as I was allowed I went back in to the office. I’ve been working from home the past couple of days because of renovations going on in my office suite, and I’m really looking forward to returning tomorrow.
Like @Hari_Seldon, I’m a mathematician, so when I say I don’t like working from home, I’m talking about the non-research aspects of work (I’ve mainly been an academic administrator for many years). Research I do at home, while driving, when my administrative work slows down, any time I can. That’s not work, that’s my life.
This 100%. I’m 40 minutes and 25 miles of mountain roads and just for fun the continental divide at 11,500 feet. That would be my drive to work. Did it for 28 years, so I know it quite well.
My dogs love being home with me and visa/versa. I got a great work space that they don’t interrupt me in.
I can give them a walk at any time of the day. And I don’t have to plow snow in the pitch black and walk up the driveway to do it. That’s just great. Pitch black in a storm and you now have walk to your plow truck and leave your 4x4 on the road. Sucked move vehicles around.
Now I work more hours in a way. I start very early, but I can take a long lunch and plow/walk dogs or whatever.
I get more done in that I can work whenever I want/can/need to. But the interruptions now are nearly non-stop. Teams. And I get freaking email messages when someone pings me on teams.
That has to be fixed. Instant messages that also send you an email. Um, NO.
I had one of the best offices in our building (my wife thinks it was the best). But screw that. My office is now right here, at home. I am looking at retirement, so in a very weird way, this is sort of semi-retirement.
Now some people can’t handle this set up and I understand that. They need a hard line between work and home. I don’t.
I have a roughly 10 minute commute and a very flexible WFH situation. I go in if I want to and don’t if I don’t. If the weather is looking bad I stay home. I have bigger monitors and a more comfortable chair at the office and a really good ice machine (the crumbly cube kind) so I do go in more often than not. I worked from home full time during COVID and I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would. I gotta get out of the house and have some social interaction sometimes.
The weather is always bad at elevation, but we are used to it. When COVID hit I saw the writing on the wall and spent ~$4000 for a new home system. I know that’s out of reach for many.
I certainly did not and won’t go back into their office. No point in it. It got completely re-designed. My space to someone else, and ‘Hot cubes’. Share it with some one.
Ummm. No. Hard Stop.
Basically this.
I retired because i didn’t want to go back to the office. I didn’t hate the commute. I read the sdmb in the train for most of my commute. What i hated was “flex space”. We lost assigned desks a couple years before covid, and i hated it. Really hated it. It turns out I’m territorial, and i like having a little patch of my own space, even if it’s just a cube.
When they sent us home for covid (my job was easy to do from home) we got all sorts of concerned letters from HR and our management. “Are you okay? How can we support you?” I replied that I’m not okay, my social life is in shambles, but work is the one bright spot keeping me going. I loved working from home. My own desk. A view of an oak tree, with squirrels and the occasional hawk or fox, instead of a view of more cubes. The ms teams chat app told me who was at their desk, who was at a meeting, and who was “away”. (Defined by not having interacted with the keyboard for some period of time.) So it was easy to reach my co-workers when they were at their desks.
Anyway, when they told us we all had to go back, and not only did i need to cope with the emotional stress of hot-desking, but also the physical stress of no where i felt safe to eat (or do anything else unmasked) i looked at my finances and decided i could retire.
The commute had little to do with it.
But… To the extent it did, I’d be happier to commute with a short commute.
I’ve been working almost exclusively from home since the early days of the pandemic. Yes, it’s isolating… but I can’t imagine doing any sort of commute anymore. There’s no reason for me to go into an office ever again.
I want to clarify my answer above of preferring to go into the office. I have an awesome work office. If I was out in open seating/cubicles, my answer would change. I would probably work from home (I have an awesome work space at home with cute dog) most days and only go in 1-2 days per week.
I’ve experienced both ways, as up til March this year I had a 15 minute commute. Now it’s more like 1.5 hours on a bad day, so the appeal of working from home is now greater than it was. Having said that, I like a balance of 2/3 days in or out of the office per week. Working from home can be productive when I have a task that requires deep work time, but I work in a creative field, so face to face collaboration is invaluable. The work suffers when we all work in isolation, and the odd video call doesn’t make up for thrashing out ideas in front of a corkboard for half a day.
I live two miles from work. Unless there was a safety reason not to, I’d always go to work.
I work from home, and have since the start of the pandemic. I do, however, frequently have to go to customer sites (2-4 days a week, 2-6 hours at a time, rarely before 10am) so I get some social time with clients but not my own coworkers and it’s never peak traffic time.
I don’t actually have an office I can go to; I’m 100% remote from my actual employer. The 25+ hour drive each way would be killer!
I’m very happy with this arrangement. I can work in cozy clothes under a warm blanket with a cup of tea and a cat on my lap, and I’m able to be very productive. I have a dedicated office in my house, whose only other purpose is to house the drying rack for laundry that doesn’t go in the dryer, so I don’t feel like work is staring me in the face. If anything, I work too hard as I don’t take a lot of breaks (I’m not one to do housework instead!). It can be a bit difficult to not work directly with my coworkers but I manage.
I never want a job with performative in-office days again. If I go on-site now, it’s for a purpose.
Work is about a 7 minute drive followed by a 15 minute walk because the parking situation sucks. A straight walk would be about 45 minutes. I like the forced exercise it gives me, but I feel kind of trapped having to commit 30 minutes a day before I can get to home or any external work. So if I could just head in real quick I’d be more inclined to go in or stop in for stuff I need to to in-person, and being closer would make me show up.
With my new client, I couldn’t ask for an easier commute.
I was there the other day for a meeting and it’s fine once and awhile. Or every now and then I go to my firm’s office in Midtown (which is a bit further and requires a cross town bus).
In purely logistics terms, going to an office every day is challenging because either my wife or I need to drop off and pick up the kids at school.
The thing is, even if I go to the office, 90% of the people I will be working with are in other locations anyway. So it’s not like we are going to do any real face to face collaboration.
My “commute” is roughly a seven-minute walk, so I’m in and out of the office all the time. There are a few specific things that I have a hard time focusing on if I’m at home, and some other things that work better if I do them at the office for practical reasons, but also some other things I prefer to do at home, or in a “third space” like a coffeeshop. I expect I would probably do more of the don’t-have-to-be-in-the-office parts of my job from home if I had a longer commute, but it’s hard to say for sure.
Wake up. Put pants and a a top on. Walk up the stairs from our bedroom to a loft. Login. I’m at work.
You forgot to put on your fingerless gloves before you clack the keyboard and say “I’m in!”
Poll needs an “equally likely” option. Working from home would still be preferable if the office was just down the street because of fewer pointless interruptions from cow orkers (people tend to use official electronic channels only for stuff that actually pertains to work, which is probably one of the reasons for the productivity increases associated with WFH transitions).