Working from home obviously saves you a commute. But that’s only the beginning.
There are dozens of tiny moments wrapped around an office workday that we rarely count as “work”: getting ready to leave, packing lunch, finding your keys, parking, grabbing coffee, walking into the building.
Five minutes here. Ten minutes there.
Take them away, and suddenly working from home can give you back a surprising amount of your day.
TL;DR
Working from home doesn’t necessarily mean working fewer hours. It means spending less of your day around work.
You may save time by:
- Eliminating your commute
- Getting ready for home instead of the office
- Making coffee or lunch where you already are
- Skipping parking, elevators, and walks into the building
- Going directly from work back to your life
For some people, that’s 30 minutes. For others, it’s two hours.
The interesting part is figuring out where your time goes.
The Commute Is Only the Obvious Part
Ask someone how much time they’d save working from home, and they’ll probably calculate their commute.
Thirty minutes there. Thirty minutes back. Great. There’s an hour.
But your workday doesn’t really begin when you arrive at the office. Think about everything that happened before you got there.
You got ready. Maybe you prepared lunch. Filled a travel mug. Checked the weather. Found your keys. Walked to the car. Drove. Parked. Walked from the parking lot.
None of those things feels particularly significant. That’s precisely why we forget to count them.
How Many Minutes Does It Take You Just to Leave the House?
This is where the math gets interesting.
Maybe working from home means you spend 10 fewer minutes getting ready because there’s no commute or office to dress for.
Maybe making coffee at home takes three minutes instead of adding a stop along your route.
Maybe you don’t spend ten minutes preparing something to take for lunch because your kitchen is a few steps away.
And yes, maybe you save four minutes because you’re no longer walking around asking: “WHERE ARE MY KEYS?”
We’re counting that too. The point isn’t whether each of these takes exactly 3, 7, or 15 minutes. The point is that they happen over and over again.
Then There Are the Minutes Between Home and Work
The commute itself can be significant, but even that isn’t always just driving time.
Finding parking. Walking from the parking lot. Stopping for gas.
Finding out somebody decided 8 a.m. Monday was the perfect time to close two lanes of your commute.
Working from home compresses that entire transition into something considerably less dramatic:
And remember: everything you counted getting to work has a return trip. Parking lots, traffic, walking back to the car. It all happens again before you’re actually home.
So, How Much Time Do You Actually Save?
There’s no universal answer. And there shouldn’t be.
Someone with a ten-minute commute will have a very different answer from someone who spends an hour in traffic each way.
But imagine a hypothetical day where someone saves:
- 15 minutes getting out of the house
- 30 minutes commuting each way
- 10 minutes preparing things to take to work
- 5 minutes parking and getting into the building
- 5 minutes getting back to the car afterward
That’s 95 minutes in one day.
Even if your number is half of that, repeat it across five days, and suddenly you’re talking about hours.
Repeat that across a year, and the number becomes surprisingly large.
Working From Home Doesn’t Create More Time
That’s probably the most important distinction. There are still 24 hours in your day.
And working from home doesn’t mean your working hours magically disappear. What changes is everything wrapped around them.
Maybe the extra time becomes another half-hour of sleep.
Maybe it’s breakfast with your kids.
Maybe it’s exercise.
Maybe it’s cooking instead of picking something up on the way home.
Or maybe it’s just sitting down with your coffee instead of drinking it in traffic. There doesn’t need to be a productive use for every minute you get back. Sometimes having the minute back is enough.
It's Not Just the Commute. It's All the Little Moments Around It.
Working from home doesn't create more hours. It can simply return some of the minutes that used to disappear between life and work.
What could your time be worth? Estimate your earnings →
