The Commute Rule: If you are too sick to commute to the office, don’t work from home

This year I have fallen into a bad habit: being moderately sick, but pushing through the sickness and working from home. Since the beginning of COVID I have been working from home. Something I have become aware of is that the barrier to get to work when working from home is extremely low. All I need to do is slink over to my desk, sit upright and clink away on my keyboard. I usually can do that even when I am moderately unwell.

In the past I have written about why I think it is important that we rest when we are sick: Take a real sick day and I still stand by that.

Taking time to recover well seems to lead to shorter illnesses

Working while moderately sick is pretty miserable for everybody and fosters a culture where people feel pressured to work while unwell

Taking a real sick day challenges us to find our self worth outside of our outputs

Sometimes we can be "sick" and it is mild, and has no real impact on our days (eg a small cough). What I needed was some good general rule that I could use for myself that would help me decide whether I was too sick to work from home. A rule I came up with was the commute rule: If I don’t think I am well enough to have a shower, get changed, walk to the train station, catch a train for 45m to the city and walk to the office; then I should not work from home. If I was working in the office, I would not be going to work if I was unable to do the commute. I can apply the same test for working from home.

This rule isn't perfect:

• People have different commutes
• You might be not wanting to commute due to infectiousness, and not ability
• Probably a few other reasons

Even though this rule isn’t perfect, I have personally found it useful I thought I would share it.

I hope you are doing well,

Cheers