Wednesday is the best day to work from home

It's about productivity, not long weekends

Once upon a time, working from home was a rare and highly desired perk. After working for an organization for several years, someone might be able to negotiate the ability to work from home on Fridays.

Why Friday? That was because the assumption was that anyone working from home wasn’t really working. In many offices, Fridays are slower than other days. When I collected 1001 days of time diary data for one of my books, I Know How She Does It, I found that even people in very demanding jobs tended to work fewer hours on Fridays than other days of the week. On Wednesdays people worked 9 hours on average, and on Friday they worked 7.1 hours. Friday was an easier ask because, even if you weren’t productive at home, your manager wasn’t losing a peak productivity day.

Of course, post-Covid, all this has changed. We’ve now realized that many information-based jobs can be done almost entirely from home. Offices are pulling all sorts of tricks to get people to come in even three days a week. The highly desired perk of 2015 — working from home on Fridays — is not even table stakes now.

Just add Mondays

That said, in places where schedules are more formalized, many people are reverting to Monday and Friday as work-from-home days (for the same reasons Friday was chosen before). Perhaps it makes sense, but if you have a choice, I maintain that Wednesday might be the best day to work from home (with Friday, if you get a second day).

Partly, this is just psychological. In studies of moment-by-moment measured happiness, commuting tends to be the low point of people’s days. Especially if you have a long commute, if you work from home on Wednesday, you only have to do this commute twice in a row.

Getting to nix the commute makes for a shorter day, and getting that shorter day in the middle of the week provides a nice breather. You can tank up for a longer day on Thursday while still making the schedule feel sustainable. I’d note that a number of people find it easier to fit in a workout on a work-from-home day. If you’d otherwise be a weekend warrior, a Monday-Friday WFH schedule means all your exercise happens over the course of four consecutive days. Changing that to a mid-week WFH schedule allows for a bit more space.

It’s about productivity, not days off

I also think that choosing Wednesday reinforces the idea that remote work is more about productivity than it is about getting a long weekend (which is likely the assumption some folks are making about Monday and Friday). Many offices are distracting places. It’s hard to think in a cubicle when someone is yelling in a phone four feet from your face. There are definitely things that are best done, together, in person. But many people also have a lot of individual deliverables that are best done by putting their heads down and focusing — perhaps more possible in a home office where the temperature is exactly how you like it, you’re not smelling the fish someone else cooked in the microwave, and you’re not distracted by uncomfortable shoes.

I can envision a scenario where a team agrees on goals for the week on Monday, and does any collaborative brainstorming and planning on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday, everyone retreats to their own remote work spaces to execute on what needs to get done. Thursday things get refined and improved together. Then Friday is for mopping up the details — which can also be done remotely.

In any case, I don’t like the idea of an office dictating which days people work from home. What makes this strategy magical is getting to choose to work remotely when it makes the most sense. People don’t have to take sick days when they aren’t actually sick (but something else is going on in their life which requires a person at home). They don’t have to waste time and fossil fuels commuting if all that’s on the agenda for the day is meeting and calling people in other places.

But if a team is setting norms, or if you do get to choose, there’s no reason to automatically choose Monday and Friday. Considering other days of the week (particularly Wednesday!) opens up all sorts of possibilities.