Why you might be missing your commute

“You can’t disentangle home and work anymore, and that’s not always easy,” says Jon Jachimowicz, an assistant professor in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. A new study, co-authored by Jachimowicz, examines the function of the commute as a psychological threshold between home and work.

According to the study, the daily commute offers an opportunity for people to engage in “role-clarifying prospection”, meaning it gives them time and space to think about the upcoming work role. “Through role-clarifying prospection, employees mentally shift their attention from what they are experiencing in the present - thoughts pertaining to their commute, or thoughts unrelated to their past or future role - to what they will be experiencing when they arrive at work, namely, thoughts pertaining to their workday,” the authors write.

Read here (BBC, May 21, 2020)