30 Years of Leaving Work at Work
There is no doubt that during my 30 years in the police I worked long and hard. Whilst the demand fluctuated, I was privileged to be in such a fascinating, important and varied job even if the cost of this was being “at work” a lot.
During most of my service being “at work” meant just that. It was only in my twilight years that even the most rudimentary forms of remote working came in. Whilst the IT was clunky and connections unstable, I remember more times than healthy being on the laptop late into the evening to finish off just those few things that some operational commitment prevented me from completing in the office.
I didn’t see all the signs so, when I retired and decided to work for myself at home I was truly looking forward to the freedom and flexibility that would provide. Don’t get me wrong, it certainly does give me those things as well as an autonomy and independence that I now jealously guard. However, there are hidden costs for working for yourself from home. None of these are anything like the pressure and burden more traditionally employed people endure but they are real.
When Your Dining Table Becomes Your Office (And You Can’t Escape It)
During the COVID-19 pandemic many got the taste of what it was like to work from home. In those dark and uncertain years when the world was a scary place, the safety of remaining in one’s own bubble was hugely comforting. But it also surfaced some of the challenges those who always work from home face. At that time, I was working predominantly with Brighton Hove City Council and East Sussex County Council on safeguarding. Inevitably many of my colleagues were working from home, some with busy families around them others in isolation. Speaking to some social workers during that period, whilst welcoming of the opportunity to avoid the virus, they soon found given the nature of the work, particularly the more harrowing and upsetting aspects, the ability to switch off at the end of the day was far from easy. Imagine sitting at your dining room table for eight or ten hours a day, working a caseload that involves abused and neglected children or vulnerable adults then sitting at that same table later on trying to enjoy a family meal. Worse, if there was no one else at home to talk to, trying to switch off in the very same room where you have been dealing with such horrific cases.
Although my involvement around that time was not so close to the operational cold face, I did, and still do, recognise that convenient as it should be, work/ life boundaries can become incredibly blurred if you never get away from the “office”. Ironically. flexible work often leads to longer hours as there are no clear start and finish times and, where success depends upon your own input and you are notionally still in the workplace, it can be a struggle to switch off and all too easy to make or reply to emails, calls and messages late into the night even at weekends or during holidays. Structural boundaries are few which means self-discipline to keep work and personal life separate is entirely self-imposed. I am lucky that I do have a separate office in my garden but where the actual home space doubles up as an office the physical and therefore psychological separation between work and rest vanish. When kitchens double as conference rooms or bedrooms are just paces away from unfinished projects the ability to mentally leave work is harder than you’d imagine and that blurring can contribute to burnout and even impact on mental health.
About “Flexible” Hours…
Other than at the very end of my police career, however hard and long I worked it was always “at work”. I was structurally prevented from working much from home and therefore my home life was my home life and my work life, my work life.
I will re-emphasise that the benefits of working for myself from home far far outweigh the disadvantages and I could never see myself working for someone at a corporate office again, but when going into this attractive model of working, it’s crucial to understand there are downsides and to employ strategies to minimise them. Otherwise, what’s the point?
I originally wrote this for my weekly column in The Argus, published on Tuesday, 17 March 2026.
