One of my all-time favorite blog posts is about how much I hate commuting—both because of the cost of the gas and the time spent on the road that basically counts as unpaid worktime. I felt this most painfully back in 2011, when I was working an office job and driving 46 miles per day round trip. When I did the math, I found this was costing me $33.50 in gas per week, which came out to 84 cents per hour, or 7% of my total paycheck. Yikes!
There was also the matter of time: because I was going in early to beat rush hour, my 8 hour workday turned into a 9.5 hour day total, adding an extra 7.5 hours per week that I could have spent on other things. Double yikes!
Though I’ve also spent time commuting by train and bike, the experience made me think more about where my time and money were going, and how much more efficient it would be if I didn’t have to spend so much of both on commuting.
Though I wrote this post back in 2016, in the post-pandemic age, I and a lot of other people work from home and don’t have to commute at all. This has given me a lot more time during my workweek while also drastically lowering how much I spend on gas, which should mean that I’m getting more done and overall feel a lot better, right?
Well, as it turns out, maybe not.
Commuting as a Way of Shifting Roles
In this amazing NPR article and peer-reviewed study, Matthew Piszczek and Kristie McAlpine examine what happens to our brains during commuting, a time they describe as Liminal Space, otherwise known as the space between roles. Simply put, this is a time when we’re in neither Home Mode nor Work Mode, when we can transition between these roles and adjust between different states of being.
I won’t attempt to summarize all of McAlpine and Piszcek’s article, but the gist of it stems from something called Boundary Theory, which states that we take on different roles at work than we do in our personal lives. Moving from one role to the other (in this case, from the Work Role to the Home Role) involves a few different stages:
- A Symbolic Way of Separating from one role (such as turning off your work computer)
- A Movement Phase that involves a change in location (like a commute)
- A Rite of Incorporation to join you to the new role (like greeting your family at home, or getting the mail)
When we go home and take on our Home Roles, we don’t want to be in our Work Roles—we want to have what’s called Psychological Detachment from Work, which means we don’t think about Work Stuff because we’re thinking about Home Stuff (or Fun Stuff, or Creative Stuff).
McAlpine and Piszcek point out that it’s more difficult for people with knowledge-based jobs to psychologically detach from work in the 21st century because we might be answering emails, having late meetings, or working overtime. The result of not being psychologically detached is that we can feel more exhausted, have higher stress levels, and ultimately be less effective when it comes time to go to work again.
I’ve definitely felt this in my work life, and I imagine a lot of people reading have too.
The authors put forward that commuting helps us find that psychological detachment from work by moving us through the three stages outlined above. As a result, the act of detaching from the Work Space, existing in Liminal Space (like on a commute), and then transitioning into the Home Space can help us recover better, stay psychologically detached from work, and ultimately lower our stress levels.
What Does This Mean for People Who Work From Home?
As you probably already guessed, people who work from home don’t have a commute, but it’s still important for them to go through these rites of passage and enter this Liminal Space as a way of separating their Work Roles from their Home Roles.
There are a few different ways we can do this, and the authors suggest that small rituals like pouring a cup of coffee in the morning can help us transition into our Work Roles, while taking a walk at the end of the day can help us enter our Home Roles, even though we take on both in the same place.
I found myself nodding in recognition as I read this article and longer peer-reviewed study because I already do a lot of these things in my own routine, especially in the mornings before I start work. My pre-work transition rituals consist of making breakfast, brushing my teeth, making my bed, pouring a cup of tea and a cup of water, and listening to 2-3 songs (in that order) to start my day, especially if I plan on writing. These actions help train my brain that it’s time to enter Work Mode, and help me keep up the habit of entering Work Mode more quickly.
For me, listening to music in the mornings has become especially important: whereas I started doing this on mornings when I was having trouble writing, more generally, lying down, putting my headphones on, and pulling up a few songs to listen to with my eyes closed helps pull me out of my morning get-ready routine and prepare me to leap up and start work. (Usually the last song I listen to is something upbeat—most recently the theme from the anime classic Maison Ikkoku.)
My end of the day routine, though, is much less defined: while I like to end the day by checking the final item off my to-do list, shutting down my laptop, and leaving my office, that transition doesn’t really include a Movement Phase, unless you count walking out of the office. Sometimes I end the workday by lying on my bed and relaxing for a while, but more often I tend to go right to the kitchen and start dinner—or, if I’m working after dinner, I might finish work and go right into the next thing I want to do, like opening a book or putting on a movie.
I’m realizing that I really don’t like this about my evening routine—ideally, I’d like to develop a more consistent way of moving from Work Mode to Home Mode that separated the two a bit more. I really like the idea of taking an end of the day walk, but realistically I probably won’t do this (especially if it’s rainy, or if I’ve already been out that day).
Lying down and relaxing (which I already sometimes do) feels like a much better option, since it provides some separation, takes up time, and is easy to do even in bad weather. So, I think I want to try this more regularly to help me transition into Home Mode, which should hopefully help me leave work behind and recover my energy for the next day.
Find Your Own Routines That Work For You
I’ve been fascinated by the separation between work and home ever since I saw a more pronounced version of it while working in Japan, and it was cool to see these boundaries explored in actual scientific studies, as well as how to apply them in a work-from-home setup.
Learning to manage your own schedule and deadlines as a creative person or a self-employed person can be incredibly hard, but learning to manage a work-from-home setup (which many creative people also have to deal with) is something that doesn’t get talked about as often. While in a lot of ways working from home is easier and cheaper than working somewhere else, the psychological challenges of working from home are real, and managing them effectively to create better work-life balance and psychological detachment can mean the difference between success and mediocrity.