On October 12, 2022, I sat in my spare bedroom in South London for six hours and produced absolutely nothing. I’m not talking about ‘low productivity’ or ‘having a slow day.’ I mean I staring at a blinking cursor on a Google Doc for a client—a logistics firm called Redwood—trying to come up with a campaign hook, and my brain felt like a sponge that had been left in the sun for three days. It was bone dry. I had the $900 Herman Miller chair, the $45 IKEA sympathetic lighting, and a noise-canceling headset that cost more than my first car. I had every ‘optimization’ known to man. And I was functionally braindead.
We’ve been sold this idea that remote work is the ultimate unlock for deep work. We talk about ‘flow states’ and ‘cutting the commute’ like they’re the holy grail. But after three years of doing this, I’ve realized something uncomfortable. My home office is where my career goes to stay stable, but it’s also where my best ideas go to die. It’s a creative graveyard.
The commute was actually a ritual (and I hate that I’m saying this)
I used to think the Northern Line was a circle of hell. I spent years complaining about the smell of damp coats and the guy eating a tuna sandwich at 8:15 AM. I was completely wrong. What I didn’t realize was that the 22-minute journey from my flat to the office was a psychological decompression chamber. It was the space between ‘Person Who Worries About Laundry’ and ‘Person Who Solves Problems.’
When you work from home, that space is gone. You transition from breakfast to a high-stakes strategy meeting in the time it takes to walk four feet. There is no mental ‘loading screen.’ Your brain stays in domestic mode. You’re trying to solve a complex architectural problem while subconsciously noticing that the skirting board needs painting. It’s impossible to be truly visionary when you’re surrounded by the physical evidence of your chores. Anyway, that’s just my experience, but I suspect I’m not the only one staring at a pile of dirty socks while trying to disrupt an industry.
The lack of physical transition creates a permanent state of ‘mild focus’ that never quite reaches ‘brilliance.’
Slack is a slot machine for anxiety
I’m going to say something that might get me kicked out of every ‘future of work’ Slack channel: Slack is the single worst thing to happen to creative thinking since the open-plan office. Actually, let me put it differently—it’s worse because you can’t escape it by putting on headphones. It’s in the headphones.
In a real office, if I see someone staring out a window, I know they’re thinking. I don’t poke them. In the remote world, silence is interpreted as absence. So we stay ‘active.’ We post emojis. We reply to threads that don’t matter just to show we’re still alive. It’s performative presence. I refuse to use the new Slack ‘Huddles’ feature because it feels like a digital home invasion. Every time that little ‘knock’ sound happens, whatever fragile idea I was building just shatters. Total disaster.
“Creativity requires long periods of boredom and uninterrupted staring. Remote work replaces that with a thousand tiny digital taps on the shoulder.”
The data I didn’t want to see
I’m a bit of a nerd, so I actually tracked this. For 18 months, I kept a log of every ‘breakthrough’ idea I had—the ones that actually moved the needle for my projects. I tracked 42 significant ideas in that period. Only 4 of them happened while I was sitting at my desk at home. Four.
- 12 happened while walking to a coffee shop.
- 9 happened during unplanned ‘watercooler’ chats when I actually went into a co-working space.
- 15 happened in the shower or just before bed (the classic ‘default mode’ brain).
- 2 happened on a train.
The desk? The place I spent 40 hours a week? It was the least productive place for actual thinking. It’s great for data entry. It’s great for clearing emails. But for anything that requires a leap of imagination? It’s useless. The environment is too controlled. There’s no friction. And creativity, for some reason, needs friction. It needs the annoying guy with the tuna sandwich. It needs the weird poster on the tube. It needs the world to be a bit messy.
I know people will disagree, but remote work makes you boring
This is the part where people get angry. I know the arguments: ‘I have more time for my kids,’ ‘I saved $3,000 on train fares,’ ‘I can work in my pajamas.’ Those are all true. They are also all reasons why your work is becoming derivative. When you only interact with people through a 13-inch MacBook screen, you lose the subtext. You lose the ‘vibe’ of a room. You lose the accidental inspiration that comes from seeing what a colleague is reading over their shoulder.
I genuinely believe most people who claim they are ‘more productive’ at home are just getting better at answering emails while watching Netflix. They are more efficient at the boring stuff. But are they coming up with better ideas? I doubt it. I think we’re all just becoming slightly more efficient versions of our most mediocre selves. I’ve started to actively tell my friends to stop working from their bedrooms. It’s depressing. It turns your place of rest into a place of low-grade stress. I’ve bought the same $120 pair of noise-canceling earbuds three times now because I keep losing them at the library—and I don’t care. I’d rather spend the money and lose the buds than spend another Tuesday staring at my bedroom wall.
I might be wrong about this. Maybe some of you are thriving in your garden sheds. But I look at the work being produced lately—the ‘safe’ designs, the ’templated’ writing, the lack of soul—and I can’t help but think we’re all just suffering from a collective lack of fresh air and human friction.
Leave your house. Go to a library. Sit in a loud pub with a notebook. Just stop pretending that the room where you sleep is the best place to change the world. It isn’t.
I still haven’t figured out how to balance it all, to be honest. I still work from home three days a week because the convenience is a hard drug to quit. But I’ve stopped expecting to be brilliant here. I do my admin at home. I do my thinking somewhere else.
Go outside. Seriously.
