The Commute is Just the Stairs

Most mornings, my commute is fourteen steps. Currently, I go up the stairs, right at the top, into the spare room that became an office in 2022 and never quite changed back. I have been working from home full time since 2020.

First of all, don't get me wrong, I love this new way of working. I don't see me going back to the office full time anytime soon. My employer is great, understands that I have a young family, and allows me to be where I need to be, when I need to be there.

Some days I make it to my desk before anyone notices I'm gone. Other days, one of my daughters (Esme (9) and Tilly (7)) in pyjamas appears at my elbow halfway through a Teams call, holding a half-eaten piece of toast and a question that cannot wait. I mute, I smile, I deal with it. Then I unmute and pretend I'm a serious professional who definitely wasn't just having a conversation about the differences between Marmite and Bovril.

This is the bit nobody really wrote the manual for.

When the world tipped into remote working, a lot of us thought we'd won something. No more queuing or paying for trains. No more sitting in traffic wondering what we were doing with our lives. The commute was gone, replaced by a flight of stairs, the decompression that I used to have to and from the office, no longer there. On paper, it was a clean upgrade.

In practice, it turned out to be more complicated than that.

I'm Jon. I work in tech, mostly in the Power Platform world, helping people automate the boring bits of their jobs so they can focus on the things only humans can do. I've been doing this long enough to have strong opinions about Dataverse and a healthy respect for the chaos a badly designed flow can unleash on a Monday morning. I love the work. I find consulting genuinely interesting.

I'm also Dad to two small humans, both excellent, both amazing. They do not care about my sprint review. They do not care that the demo is in twenty minutes. They care that the wrong cup has been used for the squash, and they care about it loudly.

This blog is about the overlap. The bit where the work life and the family life don't sit neatly side by side, but bleed into each other in ways that are sometimes brilliant and sometimes deeply weird. It's about the transition from one state to another, the ultimate context switch.

Because here's the thing. Working from home with a young family is not the productivity dream the LinkedIn posts suggested. It is not "the future of work" in soft focus. It's a real, daily negotiation between two parts of your life that both want all of you, at the same time, in the same room. It is very much a balance.

There's the obvious stuff. The interrupted calls. The school run squeezed in between meetings. The trips to and from clubs, that are just at the end fo work. The juggle between Dad and office.

Then there's the less obvious stuff. The mental load of switching context ten times a day. Closing a laptop and trying to be fully present at dinner and bath time when your brain is still half-stuck on a problem you didn't quite solve. The strange guilt of being physically near (ish, both are in school) your kids all day and somehow still missing things. The other strange guilt of stepping away from your desk for twenty minutes and feeling like you've committed a small crime. Compound this with the fact I have late adult diagnosis of ADHD and everything that comes with that, it can be a heady mix ! (More on ADHD in future posts).

It's not bad. I want to be clear about that. I'm aware of how lucky I am to have work I enjoy, a family I love, and a setup that, on a good day, lets me have both. But "lucky" and "easy" are not the same word, and I think we've been a bit slow to admit that out loud.

So this is what The Commute is Just the Stairs is going to be about. My wife, Katie, came up with the name and it has stuck. This site is not going to be about productivity hacks. Not five things I do before 6am, because the honest answer is "sleep, badly". Not advice, really, because I don't think I'm in a position to hand any out.

It's more of a notebook. Things I'm noticing. Bits I'm getting wrong. The occasional thing I'm getting right, usually by accident. Some of it will be about work, because the work is part of it. Some of it will be about parenting, because that's part of it too. Another part of it will be my journey with ADHD and how I am navigating that. Most of it will be about the bits in the middle, which is where I actually live now. Think of it as my journal, in the hope that it might help someone going through or experiencing something similar.

If you're a working parent trying to make this shape of life fit, you're very welcome here. If you're a manager wondering what's really going on for the people on your team who keep their cameras on but look slightly haunted, you're welcome too. If you class yourself as neurodivergent, then you are also welcome. I mean everyone is.

I don't have it figured out. I'm not sure anyone does. But I think there's something useful in saying that out loud, and then talking about it like grown-ups.

The stairs are behind me. Let's see how today goes.