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Agreed. Sometimes I have heads-down days, where I really just want to immerse myself, and being around coworkers is distracting. And sometimes I have less structured days when informal conversations are more necessary. These are roughly analogous to stages of a sprint or project, so they're roughly synchronized across the team. Fully onsite and fully remote are both suboptimal.

In a professional environment, I've always been able to take off for such things whenever I wanted without such things. "Hey, boss, I have to run to the bank. Be right back," was all that was required. I really didn't even have to tell the boss. Often a co-worker or a secretary would do.

Can't you just go on your lunch? Or even just put an 'out-of-office' hour on your calendar?

I work in a rural area, not in a city. No banks within lunch commute at all. All we really have is a Subway.

That's a reasonable reason. I would love more flexibility at my butts-in-seats company too, btw.