Nowadays, working from home is becoming a lot more common. While recent global events may have made telecommuting mandatory for countless individuals, working from home has actually been growing in popularity for years and is continuing to be a well-loved option even as society moves forward past government-mandated safety measures.
A lot of people work from home every day of the week. For example, independents artists and full-time freelancers have been using their place of residence as their business headquarters for quite a while. Particularly busy professionals also have at-home offices so they can work outside of the office, too. Even for those who might have typical nine-to-five careers with designated desks in brick-and-mortar office spaces, working from home might be a beneficial option for them at least one to two days a week.
With the impressive growth of telecommunications and media technology, working from home is easier now than it has ever been. Even if your job requires you to be in the office all week, readjusting your schedule to work from home even one day a week can have a lot of benefits. But, how do you know if working from home is right for you? Most importantly, what day of the week is the best one to work from home?
Choosing a Day to Work From Home
So, you’ve made the decision to work from home at least once a week. You’ve created your second office space tucked away in a cozy corner of your home, whether it’s at an actual desk or simply a corner of your couch. You’ve made all the necessary announcements to your coworkers that you will still be working, but doing it from the comfort of your home.
But, how do you pick a day of the week to work from home?
Intuitively, a lot of people might assume that the best day to work from home would be either Monday or Friday. This is because it might help us feel like we’re extending our weekend a little bit by putting off the frustrating commute or obligatory in-person interactions for one more day.
Easing yourself in or out of the work week by working from home on Monday or Friday could have significant benefits for your stress levels and overall mental health. It’s also a commonly known fact that traffic tends to be worse on those days, so avoiding that would be an undeniable benefit. However, survey research has shown that the best day to work from home isn’t actually Monday or Friday… it’s Wednesday!
Work From Home on Wednesday
It might seem strange to work from home on a day that’s right in the middle of the week. But, telecommuting on hump day can have some suprising upsides that outweigh the benefits of working from home on other days. Why is that?
Well, think about it! Even though you’re technically still working when you telecommute for a day, it’s kind of like a small break. You get a break from both your usual commute and from high levels of social interaction. Taking that break in the middle of the week can allow you to segment the otherwise long work week into much more digestable chunks. In that regard, you can avoid that familiar midweek slump!
Furthermore, working from home on Wednesday allows you to increase your own level of accountability. After all, a lot of us are guilty of decreased productivity as the work week goes on and we become more excited for and focused on the weekend. When you telecommute on a Wednesday, however, that means you’ll be reporting back to the office on a Thursday and will need to be accountable for your workload later in the week, as well.
Lastly, working from home on Wednesday is a better option than Monday or Friday because it discourages the aforementioned idea that you would be getting a three-day weekend. This is actually a really good thing because it will encourage productivity and help your boost your success and, as a result, your company’s upward trajectory, too.
Benefits of Working From Home
A lot of studies have shown that working from home even just once a week allows employees to maintain a healthy work-life balance. This means that the amount of stress one might have about balancing their personal and professional life can be decreased, or even eliminated entirely.
Working from home means that you might be able to spend more time with your spouse, children, pets, or roommates, depending on your lifestyle. We all know how important having healthy interpersonal relationships is to maintaining mental health, even for those of us who might consider ourselves introverts.
Furthermore, telecommuting once a week also provides a sense of flexibility that you might not otherwise be afforded when you work a typical day in the office with a commute and other committments. Having one day a week where the work hours can be a little more flexible than the rigid and traditional nine-to-five means you might have more opportunities to schedule doctor appointments, bring your vehicle in for an oil change, go to the bank, or anything else that always seems to only be possible during the hours you’re stuck in the office.
How to Initiate a Wednesday Telecommute
In our modern era, telecommuting isn’t unheard of. As mentioned above, it’s actually quite common, even if it occurs only once or twice a week. But, what if you work for a company that hasn’t quite dived into the possibility of it yet? How do you initiate that conversation?
If you work for yourself or you’re the boss of the company, you can skip this section. You can pretty much do whatever you want! However, if you have a supervisor that you have to answer to, breaching the conversation about working from home on Wednesdays might feel a little daunting.
We recommend bringing up the topic casually. Try mentioning to your boss or supervisor how you’ve noticed that so many people are working from home nowadays. If they seem interested, present them with a few of the countless facts that we mentioned above, boasting the positives of telecommuting (especially on Wednesdays). In a rapidly changing world that brings us new and exciting things every single day, we don’t see why your boss or supervisor wouldn’t be open to a change that is as simple as working from home on Wednesdays.
What’s next?
To sum it all up, working from home is not a new concept. However, it is a concept that’s become much easier and much more common over the past couple of years. With sophisticated technology at our fingertips, there are practically no compromises to be made when making the switch from going into the office to working from home, even if it’s just for one day of the week. In fact, there are countless benefits!
So, what are you waiting for? Forget Monday and Friday, and don’t even bother with Tuesday or Thursday… start your once-a-week telecommute lifestyle by setting up a personal workspace in your home, putting on your coziest outfit, and being productive from the comfort of your own home on a Wednesday!