We are coming up on a year of this now. I sat down to write the upbeat version, the one with the standing desk and the morning routine and the "actually I am more productive than ever", and I could not do it with a straight face. So here is the honest version instead, written from a spare bedroom in late January, with the heating on and the light gone by half four.
The first lockdown back in March felt, if I am brutally honest, a bit like a snow day that would not end. Novel. The commute vanished and I got an hour of my life back twice a day. I genuinely got more done in those first few weeks than I had in months, partly because nobody could schedule a meeting in a room I had to walk to. That phase did not last, and I think a lot of the productivity advice from that era is written by people who only experienced that phase and stopped taking notes.
what the advice gets wrong
Most of the working-from-home guidance assumes the problem is discipline. Set a routine, get dressed, have a dedicated workspace, take breaks. And that is all fine, I do most of it, the dedicated workspace especially is not optional once your partner is also on calls in the next room. But discipline was never my problem. The problem was the opposite. The work had no edges any more.
When the office existed, leaving the building was the full stop at the end of the day. The journey home was a decompression I did not know I relied on until it was gone. Now the laptop is on the same desk where I will sit down again at eight tomorrow, and the temptation to "just finish this one thing" at nine in the evening is constant, and I gave in to it far more often than I would admit in a stand-up.
The thing that actually fixed it, eventually, was a fake commute. I walk a loop around the block before I start and another when I finish. Same route, twenty minutes, in whatever the weather is doing. It is faintly ridiculous and it works better than any app I have tried. The walk is the full stop. It tells my head the day has an edge again. On the days I skip it the work bleeds into the evening every single time, so I have stopped treating it as optional.
the quiet things
The bit nobody puts in the LinkedIn post is how much of work was the incidental human contact, and how little of it survives a video call. The corridor conversation. The "have you got a sec" that solves a problem in ninety seconds instead of a half-hour thread. The simple fact of being in a room with people who are also concentrating, which it turns out I found steadying in a way I never noticed until it was removed.
Video calls are not that. They are a worse thing wearing the costume of a meeting. Everyone is slightly delayed, slightly performing, watching their own face in the corner, and after a day of them I am tired in a way that bears no relation to how much I have actually achieved. There is a name for it now, people are calling it Zoom fatigue, and naming it has helped a little, but naming a thing does not make it go away.
I have tried to be deliberate about the contact instead of waiting for it to happen by accident, because it no longer happens by accident. A standing ten minutes with my closest colleague, cameras optional, no agenda. A team thing on a Friday that is explicitly not about work. It is a poor substitute, but a deliberate poor substitute beats nothing, and nothing is the default if you let it be.
what I would keep
For all of that, I do not want to go back to five days in an office, and I do not think I am alone. The flexibility is real. Being home when a parcel comes, throwing a wash on between meetings, eating lunch in my own kitchen, none of it is dramatic but the accumulation is genuinely better than the old commute-and-canteen rhythm. When this finally ends, and at some point it will, I want the good bits to survive: the trust that the work gets done wherever I am, the absence of a daily two hours on a train, the quiet mornings.
But I want the edges back. The office gave me edges for free and I never thanked it. Until then it is the walk around the block, twice a day, rain or not, drawing a line the building used to draw for me. Stay well, whoever is reading this. It has been a long year and it is not over yet.