Reply to post: Re: Who got the extra time?

Does the boss want those 2 hours of your free time back? A study says fighting through crowds to office each day hurts productivity

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Re: Who got the extra time?

I was with you, until you started talking about dual / treble 28" monitors. When I'm at work, I have to make do with the laptop monitor, which, whilst having a decent resolution, is pretty tiny, plus two 24" standard HD monitors. I would guess that if you're getting 28" monitors at work, they're going to be QHD or 4K, and you must be fairly high-up in the IT food chain to justify them. This means, you're likely to have more than enough space to have a decent set-up at home.

Personally, my monitors at home are better than the ones at work (2 x 24" QHD), and are shared with my own PC. I couldn't fit anything bigger onto my desk anyway, although I suppose I could stick another two on top if I could justify a need for them. I couldn't, and I doubt my work laptop could drive 4 external monitors, and even the somewhat overpowered graphics card in my own PC might struggle to feed 4 high-res displays.

As for "loss of productivity" from working from home, the studies I have read about have shown an increase in productivity. I've certainly been more productive without the distractions of an office environment (there's always that one guy who likes to make calls at a volume suited to calling sheep home from the next valley, right?). My wife's work (which is not in IT) has seen an increase in efficiency, despite the difficulties imposed by remote working. I guess it depends on what sort of business you are in as to whether being in the office is more productive or not. The cynic in me thinks that maybe those higher-ups who think offices are more productive are the ones who like to arrange a lot of meetings that could have been emails.

And this doesn't even take the commute into account; both my wife and I work about 15 minutes walking distance from our respective offices, and even that small commute has made a big difference to how we can plan our days, and given us back the time and energy to have a bit of our own lives back in the evenings.

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