Here's Why You May Be Missing Your Commute - How You Can Replicate It While Working From Home

The following is an excerpt from my recent E-Book, How To Make Virtual Teams Work (Simple Truths, 2020), an Amazon Bestseller that shares the principles, tools and tactics needed to build world-class remote organizations.

Regardless of how you feel about your experience working from home in 2020, you probably haven't missed your commute.

Commutes all over the world had reached all-time peaks in the year leading up to the pandemic. The average American worker spent 225 hours, or nine days, commuting in 2019. The average commute in the United Kingdom was 59 minutes each way and in India, it was over two hours per day.

But the commute serves a valuable purpose that can be missing from many people's virtual work experience. It’s incredibly helpful to have buffer activities that help delineate work time from personal time. Without these boundaries, remote workers face a natural instinct to hop on their phone or work computer as soon as they wake up, work straight until dinner time and then bring their work into their bedrooms at night.

While no one loves traffic or crowded public transportation systems, there is a psychological value to commuting that can be valuable to replicate in a virtual work environment. That’s why so many renowned performance experts highly recommend following a personal morning routine each day, rather than jumping straight into work.

Whether you want to start the day with coffee and breakfast, a brisk jog or some inspiring reading, doing something for yourself each morning will help you enter the workday more clear-headed and energized. If you roll out of bed and look at your phone and computer right away, it often leads to an immediate dose of stress—work emails with problems that occurred overnight, reminders of deadlines, and more.

This a terrible way to start your day; it’s the equivalent of being swept from your bed into your office in your pajamas at 7am. I don’t know about you but that would not be ideal for me.

The same goes for the end of the day. Many people who’ve spent most of their work life commuting to an office are likely to state that, even though they didn’t love the commute, the time spent driving home or on public transit allowed them to detach and unwind from work before stepping into their house. This is especially true for working parents, who sometimes struggle with a snap-transition from work-mode into parent-mode.

Just as in the morning, we also encourage all of our remote employees to take time to unwind as soon as the workday ends.

This was something I personally had to learn. I would finish hours of meetings and calls at six o'clock in the evening and immediately sit down to dinner with my family and three kids. Those dinners can be a bit loud and chaotic and I would usually feel overwhelmed. I've learned to take at least 20 or 30 minutes at the end of the day to exercise, meditate or take a short walk, and it makes a noticeable difference for my mental transition out of the workday.

Whether you want to walk the dog, listen to music, read or even meditate, doing something simple once you stop working will help you de-stress after a long day in the virtual office. Plus, it will provide a reminder that you need to unplug for the evening.

On that note, it’s also useful to keep any work devices out of your bedroom. Studies have shown that looking at a screen immediately before bed results in a delayed transition to a restful sleep longer and ensures we sleep less deeply.

Bringing your laptop to bed to answer a few emails before you go to sleep is likely to make you more fatigued and less alert for the next day. Ultimately, all you’re doing is sacrificing your well-being and professional effectiveness just to answer messages that could – and often should – wait until morning.

It’s also worth getting into the habit of shutting down and putting away your smartphone for the night (ideally in a location outside your bedroom) at least an hour before bed to maximize your sleep quality. This is especially useful if you have email or work apps on your phone. These technological tools make it all too easy to go from scrolling through Instagram to reflexively checking your work email or Slack messages before bed.

Remember, you control your environment. If you take steps to place buffers in between your work and home life, and avoid letting the former bleed into the latter, you will feel more energized, more balanced, and be able to bring your best self to the virtual office.

Get your copy of How To Make Virtual Teams Work, available now in E-Book in North America. If you are interested in the forthcoming international edition of this book, sign up to be the first to know when it's published.

Robert Glazer is the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners, an award-winning partner marketing agency ranked #4 on Glassdoor’s best places to work. Robert was also named twice to Glassdoor’s list of Top CEO of Small and Medium Companies in the US, ranking #2 and was recently named one of Conscious Company’s top 22 conscious business leaders. He is a member of Marshall Goldsmith's 100 Coaches initiative.