My job isn’t one you can do from home, so while the rest of the world has spent the last few years abandoning the office, I’ve still been turning up in person like some sort of mug.

The other day I had the opportunity to spend a day working from home, and grabbed it with both hands. I had lots of project work to do and none of it required me to be in the building: I had some training videos that needed voiceovers recording, I had documentation to write and I had some development work to do on some internal web tools I wrote. So on Friday I fired up a work laptop at home and got stuck in.

Not only did I get more sleep and avoid the time and cost of about 3½ hours of commuting, I also got loads done. Here is a summary of how I spent my ten hour shift.

Activity	Duration
Attend morning meeting for WFH staff through my phone because the laptop wasn’t logged in yet	0h 30m
Struggle to get the work laptop to connect to my home wifi and talk to IT support about proxy settings	0h 45m
Check emails	0h 10m
Make coffee, get distracted by arrival of post	0h 10m
Open training slides in Powerpoint, set up USB microphone and headphones, test setup, get distracted and read news articles on the Guardian website	1h
Do Guardian Quick Crossword #16972	0h 15m
Start recording voiceover, discover time limit on Powerpoint recordings, search for alternative screen recording software, install on work laptop	0h 25m
Dog arrives in room, play with dog	0h 30m
See message on phone, reply to message, see notification on Reddit, scroll through Reddit	0h 20m
Break for lunch	1h
Unlock laptop, set Teams status to “available”; toilet break	0h 10m
Start recording voiceover with new software, get lost on complex slide animation twenty minutes in, discover there is no edit feature, resign self to having to start recording again, become despondent about project, make tea, look at phone again for a bit	1h 30m
Let dog out for a wee, throw ball for dog which gets dog excited, dog spends extended period of time on very wet lawn, dog runs back inside and through house with muddy paws. Clean dog’s paws. Clean kitchen, dining room and hallway floors with Dettol wipes	0h 45m
See email from team leader asking how day is going, redraft reply eight times, eventually just say it’s going well thanks	0h 15m
Notice office-hours staff will be leaving work in 15 minutes, write email asking complex question about SQL database backups for web app that I need to work on, send email slightly too late for it to be seen or dealt with before Monday	0h 30m
Rehearse complex slide animation that tripped me up before, change animation after rehearsal, fail to rehearse new animation sequence	0h 30m
Make tea, get distracted by dog, play with dog	0h 30m
Start recording voiceover, get lost on changed animation sequence twenty minutes in, plough on anyway since interest in project is now waning, continue to end of recording	0h 40m
Discover freeware screen recording software has recorded in some random format to some place in the cloud, attempt to download and convert this to something useful	0h 20m
Send email to team leaders shared inbox about something unrelated to today’s work to prove I am still online at the end of my shift	0h 5m
Log off	0h 5m