The Office Is Killing You

In a follow-up to my dramatic, but well-thoughtout (at least I believe so) critique of ridiculously long commute times into places of work, here is my soapboat rant about what happens when you actually arrive in the office.

I pen this blog post because it is the start of 2026 and my year of 2025 was largely quite productive, but the office had absolutely nothing to do with that and was largely a hindrence to (first buzzword) deepwork.

So before you form a counter-opinion this early into my post, allow me to paint a picture for you:

My commute is 90-minutes each way, that is 3-hours a day spent doing nothing but travelling. This is actually split up into three parts.

• The first part is brisk but enjoyable walk to my tram stop, taking around 10 minutes. Once there, I hop on the tram and to begin the first part of my commute, clocking in at 35 minutes. This is what I’d consider a normal amout of time to be commuting.
• The second part is a change to the UK’s finest failure in public transportation, the train. I quickly dash off the tram and to my train’s platform where we now begin the second leg of my commute. At this point I have been out of the house for close to an hour, and I still have another 45 minutes of traveling to do.
• Finally, after arriving at my train’s stop, I wait for a further 10-15 minutes and board the shuttle bus to take me to my work’s technology park. From there, a final 10 minute walk is needed.

This results in exhaustion from travel fatigue, less sleep because I need to wake up an hour early to run the commute gauntlet, leading to an overall less productive day from this and the elephant in the room that everyone experiences but nobody talks about

…the office.

A true relic of the modern working era, at least in IT. Bright lights, open plan office, lack of space and control, and the constant interruptions.

Ah the interruptions, “Can you just?”. No, no I can’t. Please can you just open a ticket like we ask you to time & time again.

And the office radio, oh jeez. Not one, but two radios. Playing different stations, and my desk is sandwiched in the middle of the open plan office. I’m basically the prime target for interruptions.

The hilarious thing is that when I make requests to Work From Home, or I need to take some time. I am criticised for being “less visible”

Yes! I know! I want to be less visible! I means I can get on and do some fucking work.

It is truly hard to put into words but I can across this old thread on HN which sums up a lot of feeling regarding working in an office.

The Open Plan office

Despite what we like to tell ourselves, nobody likes the open plan office. Perhaps that is too generalised, but so is the open plan office. sigh

The Open Plan office isn’t there to make us feel more comfortable, it is there to facilitate management surveillance. I include this exerpt from an article on signalvnoise.com which makes this point perfectly:

By force, of course! Open offices are more appealing to people in management because they needn’t protect their own time and attention as much. Few managers have a schedule that allows, or even requires, long hours of uninterrupted time dedicated to a single creative pursuit.

Long. Uninterrupted. Time

Working From Home facilitates the above, but according to the opinion of HR since I am not in the office I am not visible and I am therefore unproductive.

My personal distaste for the open office goes back to the turn of the millennium when I worked at several tech companies with open-office layouts. It was a tyranny of interruption, distraction, and stress. The quality of my work suffered immensely, and so did my mental wellbeing. I feel quite comfortable stating that I would never have been able to create Ruby on Rails or any of my other software or creative achievements in such an environment.

Office Lighting

Since we are in the middle of the winter we are all subject to the cataract cannons driving on the UK’s roads and as my commute begins at the crack of dawn I am subjected to the waterboarding of photons in the morning and in the evening.

And this continues when I am in the office.

I am reaching the limit of typing today so I’ll include choice exerpts from a LinkedIn Article I read:

Artificial lighting all day long. Your circadian rhythm depends on light signals to know what time it is. Bright, blue-enriched light in the morning tells your body “it’s time to be alert.” Dimmer, warmer light in the evening signals “time to wind down.” But fluorescent office lighting gives the same flat signal from 9AM until you leave. Your body has no idea what time it actually is and it is mentally exhausting trying to work out what time it is constantly.

Maybe I am just a vampire but I prefer locking myself in my office room, with the lights off, and just getting on with work.

No distractions, no hideous flourescent lighting, no requests from users who cannot send emails, just work.