How Workers Really Spend Their Days

Remote-work die-hards like to brag about how they get more work done from home. Truth is, it’s often their downtime that’s so much more productive.

Kory Black began actually accomplishing things on his breaks when he started working remotely for a credit union last year. Back when he commuted to his job every day, he’d get pulled into office gossip or eat takeout in his car with the sun shade down. Now he pauses his work to give his baby son a bottle, throw in a load of laundry or have a bite in his recliner, the dog on his lap. 

“It’s kind of like you can set your mind off and say, I’m not thinking about work right now,” the 45-year-old South Carolina resident said. “Just breathe in.”

What do workers do all day? Work, sure. They also take runs, unload the dishwasher and pop out to the drugstore—if they’re remote. Recent data from Stanford University and other researchers finds that those at home are more likely to exercise, complete chores and personal errands, and care for their kids during the workday. 

Employees in the office, meanwhile, are more likely to kill time scrolling the internet or playing a game on their phones, according to the survey of more than 4,500 people. 

When we’re working remotely, our breaks become more precious, ready to be filled with stuff we actually want and need to do. In the office, it’s more about finding that brief mental distraction before plunging into the next task. 

“You can completely shirk at the office,” said Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford University and one of the authors of the research. 

Workers at home have the option of making more rational choices, Bloom told me. After all, why wait until it’s dark out and places are closed to tackle the rest of your life? Instead, they tap the leisure economy during the day, spreading out the peak load at hair salons and golf courses. 

“It’s, like, serene and blissful,” he said of rituals like hitting the gym at 11 a.m. They’ll make up the work tonight—or tomorrow, when they head into the office.

Make office breaks better 

Back in our workplaces, we’re beholden to the cadence of the train schedule and the sense that our colleagues are judging us if we show up late. We feel we can’t openly chip away at our personal to-do lists, so we turn our laptop screens or click back to our email when the boss strolls over. 

Still, we need breaks. 

“Our expectation as a whole that people are never going to tend their personal lives while they’re at work is absolutely ridiculous,” said Pam Sampson, who leads a staff of 800 as the chief program officer of a Massachusetts nonprofit. 

Nearly all her staff work in-person five days a week. She knows they log on to Amazon for Prime Day, or pause to call their doctor’s office for an appointment. She worries, though, that, left to their own devices, they’ll “work and work and work and they’ll become crabbier and crabbier and crabbier,” she said. 

Hence, a mandated break that Sampson has coined, “Pam’s Stupid Games.” Every six weeks or so, she’ll convene 50 of her managers for a daytime scavenger hunt across central Massachusetts or an afternoon in an escape room.   

“I force people to do something,” she said.

Good distractions

On-site workers clock 12 more minutes of productivity a day on average, according to an analysis of 91,000 employees by ActivTrak, a maker of workforce analytics software. They do take breaks—two more a week than remote workers, according to ActivTrak. Those breaks are shorter than their counterparts’ at home, who often contend with distractions from partners, kids, even leafblowers. Office workers’ focus sessions—time when they’re not multitasking, or away from their computers—are also more frequent. 

Gabriela Mauch, vice president of ActivTrak’s productivity lab, suspects that disruptions at the office, like responding to a colleague’s question, are more likely to prompt workers to dive back into their tasks quicker. Such distractions could even set one down a better path with a project, in a way that mopping your kitchen floors is unlikely to do.

“The presence of other people gets us to be better people,” said Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and the author of a book about harnessing motivation. We absorb others’ schedules via osmosis, she adds, and fall into natural breaks somewhere between work and play, like grabbing coffee with a co-worker.

Alone at home, “you constantly have a fear of like, What are you missing? What is the opportunity cost? What should I have been doing?” she said. 

‘Breaks I choose to take’

Many employers would surely agree that breaks at the office are more productive. But most of the hybrid and remote workers I spoke to are clinging to the freedom of working at home. They say they log on from their kitchen tables early, before their inboxes are swamped with requests, and find they can get tasks done in half the time. They plop their babies in office playpens, pop casseroles in the oven, set timers on their watches and relish control of their time.

“The breaks at home are the breaks I choose to take,” Larry Lock, a 26-year-old hybrid worker in Virginia, told me. “And the breaks in the office are the ones that are taken for me.”

Brenda Schumacher, a marketing and communications professional in the Dallas area, remembers walking into her office complex every day at 9 a.m. to face the long warm-up: colleagues exchanging hellos, putting away their lunches, filling up coffee cups. 

“Nothing really got done that first hour,” she said. “That was our work-life balance, right there.”

Same thing at the end of the day, as people wound down, she said. If she wrapped her work early, she felt unable to leave even though the job was done. 

Starting a remote job last year, she found the idea of working, and breaking, on her own time thrilling.

“You don’t have to go up to everyone and go, ‘How was your weekend?’ ” she said. “You can just get to work.”

Write to Rachel Feintzeig at [email protected]