Watch the first half of a football match plus the half-time chat. Go for a run. Watch MasterChef. Have a manicure or haircut. See your children at a good time of day, when they're not asleep, hungry or in the throes of homework.
Instead, Britons spend an hour each day commuting. A recent survey by workspace provider Regus shows that the average one-way commute in the UK is 29 minutes. A quarter of workers commute for over 45 minutes each way.
Occasionally, commuting is great. Thirty uninterrupted minutes to read, or email or text friends, armed with a large latte and some noise-cancelling headphones.
But most days aren't like that. Instead, commuters are subjected to bad and indeed dangerous drivers; delays and service interruptions; road rage; lack of information from service providers; people talking too loudly on their mobile phones; pollution and overheating; and rude behaviour from other passengers.
As a result, the UK's workers are arriving at work exhausted and stressed out, unable to give their best to their job or their colleagues.
So why do we do it? Do we really need to write off five hours a week, in order to commute at peak times to faraway offices?
Sure, some people do have to. If you work as a teacher, nurse, shopworker, and so on, you can't say, "I think I could more productively work at home a couple of days a week." But many office workers do have a choice. It's just that they or their employers are stuck in a time warp where pens, ledgers and paper-based filing systems necessitated centralised working.
Technology - laptops, wireless, cloud computing - means that's no longer the case. Most people could do large parts of their job at home, on the move, or at smaller offices nearer to where they live. So what's standing in their way?
Two things. First, some people don't want to work at home, or on the move. There are too many distractions, too much noise. They like working in an office; they just want to spend less time getting there.
There are easy solutions to this. Letting staff avoid peak commuting hours, or work at third spaces close to home, such as business centres, enables them to retain the aspects of office life that they like, but with lower levels of commuting stress.
The second issue is trust. Over 80% of UK companies offer flexible working, but 38% restrict it to senior staff. Extending flexible working to all employees may require businesses to re-examine their management practices - for example, how they motivate, incentivise, and supervise staff when they're working at different times and places.
But the benefits of introducing flexible working practices are potentially huge: they include greater productivity, motivation and work-life balance, and lower costs. Surely these potential benefits justify a review of your management practices?
Celia Donne, regional director, Regus
