The Border

I don’t know, if I’m lucky to go to work. I mean, to get to work, I travel 8 or 800 kilometers every other week. So there are days when I’m at my desk in ten minutes, and days when I spend at least six hours between car, train, taxi, and walking. In either case, I thought, I don’t meet the ideal commute time. Because they say there’s an ideal commute time: 16 minutes from home to work. And I’m either a little under or way over that.

Those 16 minutes—or a few minutes less, or a lot more—are for unwinding, for spending time alone with yourself, for thinking, for changing your lifestyle, for switching off from home or work, for changing your personality. And then they’re for listening to podcasts or the radio, or reading on the train, or calling your mom. 16 minutes that, if you work from home, you don’t have to get to work. Because if your home is a normal home, like mine, working from home doesn’t involve a 16-minute commute. But then again, maybe you have a big house.

So, here’s the thing—I was wondering, does remote work actually work well? If you have a normal home—I mean, working, eating, sleeping, playing with your daughter (if you have one), changing the cat’s litter (if you have a cat), and making love (if you do)—in short, you know what I mean, and doing all these things together and doing other things too in the same place where you don’t have 16 minutes to get to your desk—if you have a normal home, is remote work worth it? In my opinion, no.

Also because, in my opinion, you don’t just go to work to work. And you don’t even go there just to get to the office. You go there to grab coffee with your coworkers—even the ones who get on your nerves—you go there to get a sense of accomplishment, you go there to let off some steam if that’s your style, you go there to meet your goals, and you go there to unwind from family life.

So you go there, basically, because it might be in your best interest to put up a barrier between your work life and your real life—the one where you take off your shoes and eat and sleep and play with your little girl, if you do, and change the cat’s litter, if you do, and make love, if you do, but where you don’t work.

Gail Sheehy wrote about the “double life of the commuter” for New York Magazine in 1968, profiling the specific personalities aboard the 5:25, 6:02, and 9:57 trains departing from Grand Central Station: “There is a very strong sense of two lives that find a sort of bridge in the train.” The distance between these two lives has been studied in a body of research generally known as “boundary theory.” It is perhaps here that we appreciate the most important function of commuting.

So it’s not that I’m against working from home, but I don’t think it’s all that smart if, between playtime, sand, and love, you end up working late into the night and then, after dinner, it’s already nine in the morning again. And you sit back down at your desk without doing those 16 minutes. And without the podcasts, the radio, the book, or Mom.