Working from home took your commute. It was doing more than you thought.

Nobody misses the traffic. But when people started working from home, many found they'd lost something else along with it. The commute used to be the time when you stopped being at work and hadn't yet arrived home. Now the trip from work to home is about four steps, or zero if you work from the couch.

The commute was doing a job

A team of researchers led by Jon Jachimowicz studied this in a paper published in Organization Science in 2021. They argue that the commute is a transition between your home role and your work role, a stretch of time that belongs to neither. Across three field studies with 1,736 participants, they looked at how people used that time.

Long morning commutes were harder on people with lower self-control and on people with more conflict between work and family. Those people ended up less satisfied with their jobs and more likely to quit. But people who used the trip to think ahead about their work role were less affected by a long commute. The authors' point: people use the commute to switch roles, and that switch is worth doing on purpose.

Their studies mostly looked at the trip into work. The same logic runs in the other direction, though. The ride home is when a lot of people stop being the employee and start being the partner, the parent, or just a person who's off.

At home, the boundary has to be built

Blake Ashforth and his coauthors described two ways to arrange roles back in 2000. You can keep them apart or blend them together. Keeping them apart makes each switch a bigger jump, which is why people lean on rituals to make it. Blending them makes switching easy, but the roles start to blur, and you have to work to keep any line between them.

Remote work pushes a lot of people toward blending. The office is the kitchen table, and the laptop is the same one you use to watch shows at night. Nothing in the room tells you the workday is over.

Microsoft's data points the same way. Its 2025 report on the "infinite workday" found meetings after 8 p.m. up 16 percent from the year before. The average worker now sends or receives more than 50 messages outside core hours, and by 10 p.m. nearly a third of active workers are back in their inbox.

That matters because the evening is where recovery happens. A 2017 meta-analysis of 38,124 employees linked mentally detaching from work with less exhaustion and better sleep. Detaching is hard when work is always in the next room.

Building a fake commute

You don't need to sit in traffic to get the benefit. You need some marker that says one role is over and the other has started. Some that people use:

• A short walk around the block after the last call, even ten minutes.
• Changing clothes, which is one of the rituals Ashforth and colleagues describe.
• Two minutes of looking back at the day and planning tomorrow, like the five-minute shutdown ritual.
• Putting the laptop away where you can't see it, not just closing it on the table.

Whatever you choose, do it at the end of every workday, the same way each time. Repetition is what makes it a boundary.

The lid as the front door

For most laptop workers, the one thing that already happens at the end of every workday is closing the lid. That makes it a good anchor for the rest of your routine. The catch is that it's silent, so it's easy to close it without noticing and open it again an hour later.

Maclap adds a sound to that moment, like the sound of a door closing behind you. We can't tell you it'll fix your evenings, since nobody has studied that. But if you're rebuilding the commute you lost, a pop when the lid shuts is a pretty good place for it to end.