I find myself doing the opposite. It's much easier for me to step away at 6pm sharp knowing that if anything happens I can jump back in an instant, vs the worry of being the first to leave the office, and being stuck in a train for a half hour.
When I worked in an office I never worried about being the first to leave, and didn't even realize other people do.
For me, the biggest downside of working from home is how easy it is to get distracted by non-work. I go grab a coffee and end up putting dishes away, cleaning up, etc. and next thing I know an hour's passed by so I'm working late or feeling guilty.
I've been working on my time management, in general, and that's helping.
> For me, the biggest downside of working from home is how easy it is to get distracted by non-work. I go grab a coffee and end up putting dishes away, cleaning up, etc.
Sometimes taking a short break like that is the best way to make progress on a difficult problem though. Realistically we probably get 2 or 3 hours of actual work done in a day. Everything else is a bonus and it comes and goes over time.
I've been running rescuetime on my computer for most of a decade, and "my developer time"(time on terminal, few documentation sites like SO, editor etc...) goal was initially 1hr 30 minutes, but nowadays it is stuck at 3 hours.. and been not filled except for rare days.
> When I worked in an office I never worried about being the first to leave, and didn't even realize other people do.
A lot of it is scarcity vs abundance mindset. Many people are quite scared to lose their jobs. I know people making six figures who would be in deep shit if they had a month of no paychecks while switching jobs.
I've seen both responses from people I know. One person has always been a bit of a workaholic, and used work as sort of a coping mechanism for anxiety. As one might imagine, they started working much much longer hours. Another person I know got in the habit of working from about 10 to 3 or so, to the point where I was worried for their job. I think the lesson is that people's relationship with work is just a highly individual, and people will have very divergent outcomes.
Both of those are rational responses to the modern work culture.
The two extremes are:
1. Working as hard as possible to get a promotion over the next person working as hard as possible.
2. Doing the bare minimum to not get fired.
Anything in between is, logically, irrational, because you're doing more work than necessary.
Luckily, companies have found the levers for most humans and tend to get them working in between the two extremes.
Completely agree. It helped that I have a recurring meeting in Outlook that starts when I leave work, and goes for an hour. I find that this block prevents people from scheduling surprise last minute meetings, and keeps me from working longer than 8 hours a day (I start at 8 AM and go until 4 PM).
I liked the fact that when I left the office it virtually impossible for me to jump back into anything until I got back to the office the next day. Now all my work is just sitting there in the next room just waiting for me to jump back in any time 24/7.
It's just the feeling of not making yourself unavailable during what are still working hours for others, not about being available after say 7pm. And I haven't actually needed to do that more than once or twice.
