Why splitting my week between home and the office works for me

On home days I have lunch with my family. It’s an ordinary weekday, my laptop is still open in the other room, and for a little while nobody needs anything from me except to pass the bread and hear how their morning went.

The rest of the week looks different. I leave the house, sit with my team, talk more than I type, and come home tired in a way I’ve learned to appreciate. I’ve worked fully remote, and I’ve worked the mix I have now. The mix is the one that keeps me steady, and I wanted to write down why.

What home days give me

The obvious part is the commute, or the lack of one. Whatever time I’d spend getting to the office and back, I get to spend at home instead.

The bigger part is harder to measure. It’s being around. I’m there for the small, unplanned pieces of a day: a conversation in the kitchen while the kettle boils, or a question that takes ten seconds to answer because I’m in the next room and not at the office. None of these are big moments. Most of them I couldn’t recall a week later. Over months, though, they’re most of what I’d miss if I were out of the house every day.

There’s also the question of which version of me my family gets. On office days I come home with less in me. That’s fine, a full day with people does that. But if every day were like that, they’d mostly get the tired version, the one who answers everything with “mm” by evening, and I’d rather they got the other one more often.

When every day was a home day

For a while I worked fully remote.

At first it was easy to like. No commute, and lunch whenever I wanted it. Then the days started to blur. Monday looked like Thursday. Same chair, same view out of the same window from morning to night. Some evenings I’d realize I hadn’t been outside in a couple of days, and I couldn’t say when that had started.

My mood went flat, slowly, like a bike tire with a small leak. Each week I had a little less energy, and small tasks began to feel heavier than they had any right to. By the end of some weeks the walls really did feel like they were closing in. I don’t know if I’d call it depression, and I’m not the right person to put a name on it. I only know it was heading somewhere I didn’t want to follow.

Having my family close helped. It didn’t fix it. I love them, but they aren’t my colleagues, and it isn’t fair to make them the only people I talk to all day. I needed other faces, and a reason to put on proper shoes in the morning.

Different distractions

At home my distractions are gentle and constant. Someone needs me for a minute. The dishes are right there, and washing them feels productive, so a problem I’ve been stuck on for ten minutes turns into fifteen minutes at the sink. The couch is a few steps away, and on a flat day it wins more often than I’d like. Then there’s Anabios, my small Framer template business, which lives one browser tab away from my actual job and is very good at feeling urgent.

At the office the distractions are louder. A quick question becomes a long chat, and a coffee break runs well past its time. Those pull me toward people, though, and in a week when I’m in a slump that’s usually what I need. Switching between the two places means neither kind of distraction gets to settle in and wear me down. By the time the home ones start to pile up, I’m back at the office, and by the time I’ve had enough noise, I’m home again.

I want to be honest about the less comfortable reason too. When my mood dips, my focus goes with it, and the work follows. It’s never dramatic. Replies get a little slower, and I start picking the easy tasks first because the hard ones feel like too much. Nobody notices a slow week. People do notice a slow few months, and that’s how good designers lose jobs, quietly, without one big mistake anyone could point to. I’ve been doing this for almost eight years, and I don’t want my mood to be the thing that decides how my work goes.

How my week usually goes

I spend part of the week in the office and the rest at home. The exact split matters less to me than keeping it regular, so I’m not deciding each morning where to be.

I try to match the work to the place. Anything that goes better face to face lands on office days: design reviews, or sitting next to an engineer while we figure out why an interaction feels off. Leading design means more of my job happens in conversation now, and those conversations are easier in the same room. The long, quiet work I save for home, like a new flow that needs thinking through, or a component I’m building in code that needs a few uninterrupted hours.

Over time I’ve picked up a few habits that protect home days. I start them the way I’d start an office day, dressed and at my desk at a regular time, and never on the couch, which has other plans for me. I let my family know roughly when I’m heads down and when I’m free. That makes things easier for everyone, and it means lunch can be a real lunch instead of me eating with one eye on my phone. Anabios stays out of work hours, and I’m calmer about both when they don’t overlap.

Office days need protecting too, just in the other direction. If I put my headphones on the moment I sit down and only take them off when I leave, I’ve made the trip for nothing. So I keep them off for at least part of the day. I eat with people, and I walk over to someone’s desk instead of messaging them from across the room. Those small conversations are the part fully remote work couldn’t give me, and they carry me through the quieter days.

The split isn’t fixed, and I don’t expect it to be. If home days start to feel too quiet and the walls start creeping in again, I find reasons to get out more, to the office or anywhere with people in it. If I’m getting home with nothing left for my family, I guard my home days more carefully. What I’d like to get better at is noticing early, so the next time my mood starts to drift I catch it in the first week and not the third month.