It’s now been over two months of being back in the office full-time for me, which has certainly provided a large enough sample size of days for me to ineloquently conclude that it sucks. The contrast is made all the more plain after five years of working from home most days, a great example of the endowment effect in action (had I never experienced a hybrid work model, I would not have valued it nearly as much).

President Trump has termed this as a “return to work” for federal employees like myself, and most media has run with that phrasing. I take issue with this, as it implies that people were not working, not getting their jobs done at home, and I have observed the exact opposite across multiple organizations over the past five years. I will therefore never refer to this as anything other than a “return to the office” or “return to in-person work.” There is little point in making counter-arguments about efficiency or morale, neither of which appear to be truly held concerns of those empowered to revoke telework in both the public and private sectors. How many other accurate descriptors exist, I wonder?

How about a “return to distractions”? Simultaneously overhearing multiple conversations about projects I’m not involved with and oddball watercooler chats has decimated my focus and productivity. As has the time lost wondering about the handful of nearby people who shout so loudly into their PC headset that it penetrates not only a set of earplugs with a 26dB noise reduction rating, but also a pair of headphones with music playing and active noise cancellation on. I would be remiss not to mention the insane hindrances from a slew of emails (and avalanche of follow-up clarifications) generated whenever unelected oligarch Elon Musk decides to harass and waste the time of civil servants from his bootleg .gov email account.^[1][2]

Maybe a “return to disgusting workplace bathrooms”? Even a “return to the germ factory,” featuring the usual suspects who have banked weeks worth of sick leave but inexplicably show up to cough on everyone and everything. Just like the good old days. I had previously thought (while working from home) that David Graeber’s 2018 book Bullshit Jobs had lost some of its potency, but for anyone forced to drive to an office every day in order to dial into virtual meetings, Graeber will once again ring as relevant as he did prior to the pandemic.

Sarcasm aside, the most evident impact of returning to the office has been dealt to my free time. The cost of commuting is not only that of the drive itself. On top of a thirty-minute drive each way, I’ve lost the ability to exercise on my lunch break, forcing me to do that in the evenings after getting home. This pushes my total time lost to at least ninety minutes per day, and I’m sure I could find a few more minutes if I wanted to be pedantic about it. I make the best of my commute time by listening to podcasts, but audio entertainment is typically something that I would multitask and combine with a physical chore, so it’s no surprise that productivity in my personal life has declined.

Over the past several years I’ve cut an increasing majority of wasted time from my daily schedule. I no longer sit there and browse the internet without a purpose or intention; there’s not ninety minutes of phone scrolling to cut from my schedule to offset the temporal cost of commuting. The sacrifice must thus be selected from something I actively want to be doing, and throwing the work/life balance I had become accustomed to into disarray. Do I choose to read less? Write less? Exercise less frequently? Slow down even further on home improvement projects? It’s an unpalatable decision, and one that — for the first several weeks of returning to the office — ironically led to further wasted time from analysis paralysis.

I have primarily focused my thoughts on personal impacts, and not work-related efficiency impacts, because it’s abundantly clear to me that if my employer and other employers do not care about the latter, it is only fair that I don’t either. I am paid to be working in the office a set number of hours. It’s simple reasoning that my total maximum daily output will be reduced if it takes me longer to do each individual task due to the mental pollution of simultaneously overhearing a conversation about skiing while cubicle neighbors on either side of me are shouting at a far louder than required volume into their headsets. So simple and apparent to any reasonable person, that I consider it fair to conclude this is not my burden to bear. At least private companies will see any hit from a return to office affect their profitability. The costs of the government’s return to office will be left to the taxpayers. Either in the form of increased labor costs to achieve the same output, reduced service quality, a less capable military, or less progress towards whatever the mission of a particular agency is.

I do believe that certain types of meetings or collaboration are best done face to face. So I was quite happy to go into the office when needed to support those particular tasks, if it meant that my individual work and virtual meetings could be done at home. This is of course driven by my personal preferences, and the arrangement that functions best for how I work, but according to a survey by Gallup of U.S. workers whose jobs were deemed remote-capable, as of January 2025 60% of them preferred hybrid arrangements. Only 7% preferred full-time on-site work. The same survey had previously found in 2023 that “spending three days in the office, or working exclusively remotely, was associated with somewhat higher levels of employee engagement for remote-capable workers.”^[3]

I am certainly free to seek out other roles that offer the working arrangement that I desire and functions best for me. It’s clear that being in the office 100% of the time is not conducive to my well-being. However, I wonder with a lead from the current administration and a softening job market if some employers will use the leverage they regain to enforce further return to office mandates. The hybrid model will be more likely to stick around if employees actually leave when it is revoked, which requires both effort on their part and enough demand for their labor. Maybe I’m just wishing after a world that was too good to be true; the last tangible foothold of the coronavirus pandemic in my life, evaporating with the rest of it and feeling more like a fever dream with time’s passage. I hope not, because I barely have three months of tolerance for commuting into an office on the daily — let alone thirty more years.