One of my favourite thee-letter acronyms – TLAs – is WFH. As in working from home.

I work from home quite a bit. It’s best for thinking, creating, writing, solving. Zero disruptions.

Zero commute too.

Theoretically I could get out of bed, walk downstairs to my office and start working immediately, especially if I’m not meeting anyone or having any video calls. Zero commute, zero dead time, zero waste.

Contrast this with when I’m working from my customers’ offices. Then I have to meet people so I can’t really turn up in my home civvies. It’s approximately 2 hours between getting up and getting in. That’s the normal prep time plus commuting time of an hour plus to get into central London. 2 hours where I can’t be productive, can’t get anything done. I can’t even read or do emails if it’s a jam-packed carriage.

So my customer, or your customer and your employer, gets much more out of us when we’re working from home. Of course you need office time to catch up on projects, touch base with your team and make sure you’re aligned on complicated jobs. That’s when I schedule my meetings and don’t try to do much of the thinking, creating, solving and writing stuff. There are too many disruptions so it’s a different kind of working day.

And that, for me, is the right work-life balance. I’ve always tried to live close to where I work to avoid the long commutes. Anything under 20minutes door to door is great. Living and working space under the same roof – as long as you’re good and switching off between them, well that’s awesome. And the zero commute means you can maximise your personal productivity and minimise your dead time.