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>The distinction between the beginning and end of my work day.

Just log off at 5pm or 4pm or whenever you have done your contracted working hours.

I rarely end up in a meeting which goes over my usual working hours. But otherwise I just log off. I don't understand how someone can work longer hours unwillingly when it's entirely in your control.

I guess it depends on how your remote working is implemented. For me I remote in. For others it's a VPN. But either way, cut off all communication avenues until the next morning.

>When someone of greater rank than me in an inconvenient time zone wants to have a meeting with me involved, I have to attend. I’ve practically lost all my mornings from 6am - 9am, 3-4 days a week.

The mistake was attending this even once. Now you've shown a weakness in that you'll attend a terribly scheduled meeting. You need to bring this up, it's not fair to be in work at 6am if that was not the norm before COVID. If your days started at 9am in the office, your days start at 9am at home.

> I don't understand how someone can work longer hours unwillingly when it's entirely in your control.

I have that situation, but without the 'unwilling' part. In the office, I have often the situation "Gosh, I'd love to finish this, but if I don't catch the next train I have to wait another half hour for the next one", which automatically makes me stop work at fixed times.

Sure, I could also just stop at the same time at home, but ultimately I always end up working longer hours. Same in the morning; having to catch a train is really something that forces me to hit certain timings; when working from home, staying in bed just a little longer doesn't make me miss any trains.

It's a silly problem and could easily be overcome with enough willpower, but it requires the willpower where otherwise there are already external factors in place that soft-force me to start/stop work.

Unfortunately, will power means nothing.

What you need, as I learned, is discipline, which is really hard to train. you basically have Work hard on small things one at a time until you build the habits you want.

On that topic, this is pretty interesting:

https://www.wisdomination.com/screw-motivation-what-you-need...

Relying on something like train timings to enforce your work life balance isn’t a reliable strategy.

What if the trains started running every 5 minutes? Or what if you moved a little closer and you could walk?

If you don’t want to use willpower to stop working you could add some structured activity (after COVID) like a workout class after work. Or you could generally just make more deliberate plans for you after work time.

Or my personal favorite. Start a hobby you like more than work.

If trains are infrequent enough (every 20-30 minutes or more) that it's worth planning around the schedule, it's generally unlikely that the frequency will be changed significantly in any 10-year period.

Maybe not every train, but an individual train route could easily significantly change in frequency for a few hours a day, or more likely the train schedule could get worse to the point where you can’t leave until later.

Or the office could move, you could move, your office could change the time of the last meeting of the day etc...

Relying on the granularity of the train schedule to enforce work life balance is brittle at best, and it’s a terrible argument against WFH.

It doesn't require willpower. Write a script that warns you 10-5 minutes before 5pm that your computer will be shutting down. Then again a minute before shutdown.

Then it shuts down.

Or write one that sends a message to your partner, friends or flatmates that you'll be done in a few and to put on a kettle. Plan to have tea or what have you with your SO or flatmate at 5pm sharp. Set an alarm to take your dog out. I'm sure you can come up with other things.

Add things to your schedule that force you to leave, just like your train. Even if you're in a meeting drop a "Sorry folks, we'll have to pick this up tomorrow, I have personal obligations waiting on me" and you're out.

I also work longer hours on average when working from home, but I don't really mind it.

The main reason is that I save easily 90 minutes of commute per day, so it's not bothersome to be available some of that time extra. And the second reason is that I take personal breaks randomly during the day, I'm not always 100% focused on my work, so I don't feel like being available a bit later is a stretch. Flexibility goes both ways.

This isn't really what i meant, it's not necessarily that I'm working longer hours now (although I am).

I meant I miss the routine I used to have, go to the gym, come back home, make breakfast, shower, put on my "work clothes" then psychically go to my office, have coffee with colleagues and then sit at my desk, open my day planner and get started.

That was the queue to begin focusing. Of course I can try do this in my living room, but it just doesn't have the same effect for me personally.

I have meetings at awkward hours which kind of makes me feel like I'm kind of permanently attached to my work. Before hand, there was work time, and home time, work stayed at work, often including my work laptop.

Also this statement kind of bugged me: "I don't understand how someone can work longer hours unwillingly when it's entirely in your control.", if you have a job that allows you to 100% dictate your hours, never having to deal with unexpected problems, outages, personnel issues, then congratulations. It's not a reality for everyone.

> When someone of greater rank than me in an inconvenient time zone wants to have a meeting with me involved, I have to attend. I’ve practically lost all my mornings from 6am - 9am, 3-4 days a week.

I don’t understand this situation. If this happens I reject the meeting invite, and later see it rescheduled (if my attendance was mandatory).

Is there a different way this happens?

Early morning and late night meetings sometimes happen because of timezones. And you deal with it. But you can be sure that, if I were regularly having to attend meetings from 6am-9am for good reasons, I'm also generally knocking off at 3pm.

Exactly, this is farcical. How did you handle the 6am meetings before COVID?

The difference is that now everyone is distributed, if someone "important" is in a different timezone, you can be singled out to attend a meeting because you're no longer "out of the office at 6am", you have no excuse not to be able to attend early meetings.

Also I just feel that it's becoming culturally more acceptable to attend/schedule meetings at weird times because everyone else accepts it.

If you're the nail that sticks out (by rejecting meetings), you get hammered.

I'm guessing the superior may not have been in a different time zone before COVID.

It's not that simple, my section managers answer to this (I tried it was), "I go to meetings at awkward hours, so what's you excuse?".

To be fair, this particular meeting I'm supposed to be at is once a fortnight, so I feel that I can't complain too much. Some people I know still commute an hour a day.

It does really inconvenience me in a way that I can't describe, I basically lose an hour of sleep on that day and it really screws me over for the rest of the day, compounding my stress.

I don't understand this either. This existed at our company before remote work because we have global offices. People who had early or late meetings may take them from home AND then still had to commute to the office. Otherwise they'd had to get up even earlier to commute first.

It seems like a pretty common scenario, at least to me. There’s a 1 hour meeting to present Project X Status to Executive Y. You are presenting for 20 minutes so are required. Exec Y’s schedule for the next month rules everything out besides next Tuesday at 6am. You can’t just decline and not show up. You just have to suck it up and wake up earlier that day.

This scenario is actually much easier in COVID-WFH because I can just roll out of the bed at 5:45am, run a comb through my hair and fire up the videoconference. When I worked from office it meant waking up at 3:30am, leaving my house at 4am, and getting into the office by 5:30am.

> Exec Y’s schedule for the next month rules everything out besides next Tuesday at 6am.

Eh? My schedule for the month rules out anything before 9am.

I guess we’re not going to have that meeting then unless Mr exec thinks it’s more important than something else on his schedule (which is healthy anyway, he shouldn’t have to wake up at 6 any more than you do.)

You're obviously, like most people on here, talking from a position of privilege. I don't blame you because I've been there.

You also might not be working for a properly distributed global team. Execs I work for are on the other side of the world.

I've said this before by the exec's at my company tell me they have to attend meetings at weird times, so I should have to as well.

Not everyone at the moment has the luxury to just put their job on the line by telling their manager to go stick it. I for example am not in my native country an I rely on my job to support my visa. If I lose my job right now, my visa is potentially lost at a time where finding another job might not be very straight forwards and where my home country isn't allowing citizens to return home yet.

It isn't all bad, I think distributed work culture is evolving and adapting, it's just right now there are certainly inconveniences for those pioneering it.

Yup, it doesn’t get rescheduled and you slowly lose influence and find yourself working on things you hate, getting bad reviews and eventually getting fired/leaving because you hate your job

I would rather that outcome than having to wake up at 6am multiple times a week for a meeting.

There is no way I wouldn't hate my job anyway if it was forcing me into ridiculous schedules like that...

Many people have to adapt to working across different timezones in their jobs. Obviously to the degree that something like that becomes a continuous pattern you need to decide if it's worth it to you to adapt to that schedule or not. There's nothing inherently "ridiculous" about it. For example I have a friend in Hawaii who has an agency with West Coast clients and she just adapts her waking schedule accordingly.

I had friends in Hawaii who were stock traders, they really had to wake up early

Kind of want to leave anyway if the only way to retain influence is to go to 6am meetings.

>> * The distinction between the beginning and end of my work day.

>> * When someone of greater rank than me in an inconvenient time zone wants to have a meeting with me involved, I have to attend. I’ve practically lost all my mornings from 6am - 9am, 3-4 days a week.

You know your situation best obviously but to a random outsider this sounds like the (reeeeeeally) common issue of not being well practiced at saying no.

> No lag meetings and whiteboard sessions.

I really miss whiteboard sessions. I've gotten used to zoom meetings, I'm not overloaded with them, and with a proper structured agenda I've found they can be tolerable.

But nothing beats scribbling on a whiteboard with colleagues. We've tried Miro and other tools, but nothing quite has the same feel as those scribbled boxes and arrows on a whiteboard.

The whiteboard experience can be replicated with realtime visualization/collaboration tools. Just saying..

What setup do you use that replicates it? The ones that I’ve tried are a far cry from markers on a board.

Likewise zoom meetings aren’t the same thing but replicate the original experience. Im not using any? but am using a wacom tablet for similar handwriting purposes but have to admit that it’s not realtime. If you can’t find something that you like at least you found a business idea

* random stuffs happening in my life that I can enjoy on my own and tell my wife when I am back from work VS spend 24 hours a day with my wife

I’m confused about your dishes claim. You mention you go home for lunch anyway so dishes don’t seem terrible, otherwise it’s a plate and a knife to pop in the dishwasher.

When you were in an office and someone scheduled a 6am meeting what would you do?

For me in the office I have a cup that I put in the dishwasher at the end of the day. At home I have a better cup that I put in the office at the end of the day.

If you’re only 5 minutes from your colleagues why can’t you go for spontaneous pub etc (assuming it’s open in your locality) Or pop out for lunch?

OP mentioned kids, which is a big complicating factor. We gave two and oof, the dishes thing is real. We are cooking more, and for more people every meal.

As to popping out to the pub with colleagues, again it's tough with the kids home. If I go out anywhere between 4-8 I'm basically sticking my wife with the toughest time of day. Also patio season is done here and you wouldn't catch me drinking indoors during the pandemic.

All of those are 100% true, but they are very specific to the pandemic (for most people for most of the year), not something relevant in the more generalized discussion of WFH.

This is very true! Either you take turns, who can go out and meet and have fun, or you spend the whole day with your family. I think a mix is most sustainable. Try to do ONE thing on your own per week and then cover your partners day out.

I don't have a dishwasher. No space for it.

Some dishwashers are tiny. For camping or singles. E.g. https://daan.tech/

Not sure about the OP, but people are now scheduling meetings earlier and later in the day in my company. Previously, I would never have 8am meetings as I would only get to the office by 930. People just knew not to schedule before then. But now, the big boss starts working and slacking at 730 and often schedules stuff for 8am. And we do video calls all the time, so have to be presentable for those meeting.

On the other hand, research schedules are all over the place and people invariably end up scheduling syncups at 6 or 6:30. Pre-pandemic, I would be at a local pub with coworkers at that time!

In your specific case the problem was exacerbated by WFH. But if your boss doesn’t have a problem with making people work from 7am to 6pm, the problem is the boss.

They could have at any time decided to do the same thing in the office, and many offices do work that way.

If you wouldn’t stay at your company if they required you to be in office 12 hours a day, why would you stay around if they require 12 hour WFH?