Remote workers work longer, not more efficiently

At my company this is for-sure true, broadly across teams.

Management has explicitly taken advantage of this by booking a lot of recurring meetings that start 8/8:15/8:30am in the morning when in the "before times" it was generally a 9am start. Management also feels comfortable sending Slack DMs at 6-7pm as well, knowing people aren't commuting so they can get an answer.

Regardless of setting boundaries, the noise just starts earlier and ends later.

That said it's a tough trade off for me because I do greatly prefer WFH and find I am handling a much higher workload stress only because I am at home.

I've told my manager multiple times over the last year that the level of meetings/work we are taking on is only sustainable because we are at home and everyones social lives evaporated for a year, to which he largely agrees.

What they expect when people return to office shall be interesting. Unless they are ready to accept the 20% reduction in task completion as we revert to in-office norms, I'll be moving on to a new firm after bonus time.

I find the discussion around "remote work" mostly uninformative. What kind of work? The idea that remote work either is, or is not, productive has a hidden assumption that this is independent of the kind of work. I don't mean just that some kinds of work are impossible to do remotely (at present, anyway); I'm talking about differences among those jobs that can be done remotely.

It's also so clearly dependent on things like the person's situation at home. Are they part of a two-adult, three-kid young family living in a 1,000 sq. ft home during the summer vacation when everyone is at home all day? Or is it a bachelor(ette) living alone? Is it a veteran who has been doing this kind of work for a decade or three, or someone just starting their career? All of these things matter, a lot.

Which would suggest that the best person to be able to predict whether or not working remotely is a good idea, would be that person, and also that the boss should be measuring productivity for that person, and judging accordingly. Some will choose to come in to an office, and others will not, and when layoffs come (and they always come eventually) the person who was working from home had better have been one of the more productive, or they will discover that laying off someone who works remotely is just easier for the boss to do than laying off someone who is in the office every day. That's not nice, but it's the way the real world is, and these studies of productivity of remote work (taken as a large mostly undifferentiated mass) are not very informative about that.

And being able to do usual home stuff (laundry, putting stuff in dishwasher) during the time I would spend at a coffee machine.

I work remotely (before kovid) for 2 years. I work less, learn more and deliver more results with more efficiency.