I have been working remotely full time since 2018. Eight years. That is eight years of not sitting in traffic, inhaling the fumes of a thousand other miserable commuters while some breakfast radio hosts laugh at their own jokes. Eight years of being home. Eight years of being present for the moments that actually matter.
I watched my children take their first steps. Not on a grainy video my wife sent me while I pretended to care about Jira tickets in some open plan office. I was there. In the room. I saw it happen live. That is not a humble brag. That is the point. That memory exists because I was home, not because I got lucky with timing.
When my wife is crook, I am here. I handle the school run. I make lunch for the kids. I check on her between meetings. I do not have to grovel to a manager or burn through my sick leave (which apparently only exists for when I am sick, not when my family needs me). I just handle it. Because I am already home.
School pick ups when my wife cannot do them? Sorted. A parcel arriving? I receive it like a normal person instead of playing that infuriating game where Australia Post leaves a card and you have to trek to some depot in an industrial estate during their extremely convenient hours of 9am to 4:30pm, Monday to Friday. (Seriously, who designed that system? People with jobs?)
These things sound small. They are not. They are the difference between a life that flows and a life that feels like you are constantly behind.
The maths actually works out
Remote workers save around $6,000 a year on commuting, lunches, and the kind of clothes you have to wear when other humans judge your appearance. Employers save about $11,000 per employee in overhead.
But forget the money for a second. Someone who used to spend 90 minutes a day commuting saves 375 hours a year. That is more than nine full work weeks. Nine weeks of your life, returned to you, every single year.
Childcare costs in Australia are absolutely cooked. If I had to put my kids in care for the extra hours a commute would demand, we would be bleeding thousands more a year.
Remote work did not just save us money. It let us structure our family in a way that would have been financially impossible otherwise. My wife and I can actually tag team. One of us is always around. That flexibility is worth more than any pay rise.
Then there is the health angle. Nearly half of remote workers say reduced stress is the biggest benefit. Sounds about right. No peak hour motorway crawl. No rushing out the door with toast in my mouth like a character in a bad sitcom. No sitting under fluorescent lights in an air conditioned box pretending to look busy because my boss walks past every twenty minutes.
I can take a walk when my brain turns to mush. I can eat food that is not a sad sandwich from the work fridge. I can step away and come back sharp instead of grinding through exhaustion because leaving early looks bad.
The environmental stuff matters too, if you care about the planet not cooking (and you should). One study found that if 3.9 million people worked from home at least half the time, it would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 54 million tons a year.
Every commuter who stays home is one less car clogging the roads and pumping carbon into the air. My daily commute is now a 15 second walk down the hallway. I am basically an environmental hero.
Regional towns actually benefit
I live in a regional area. Not the outback, but definitely not Sydney or Melbourne either. Remote work has arguably kept my local coffee shop in business given how much I spend there.
That is only half a joke. I am in there most days. I know the owner’s name. She knows my order. That money circulates locally instead of going to some Pret A Manger next to a WeWork in the CBD.
When remote workers stay in or move to regional towns, they bring income that actually sticks around. They spend at cafes, shops, tradies, local services. They create demand that evaporates the moment everyone has to relocate for work.
Remote work stops the brain drain. Young people do not have to pack up and move to a capital city just to find a decent job. They can stay in their towns, raise families, and contribute to places that have spent decades watching their populations hollow out.
Regional areas with good internet see better job growth and higher incomes. The NBN investment (yes, even the botched version we ended up with) pays off when people can actually use it to work. This is economic development that does not require a new mine or a government grant. It just requires letting people work where they live.
Companies are still fighting it anyway
Despite everything I just said, we are watching a wave of return to office mandates crash through 2025 and into 2026. Amazon dragged 350,000 employees back full time in January 2025. JP Morgan killed remote work in April. AT&T, five days a week. Instagram just announced everyone back from February 2026. TikTok and a bunch of banks are following suit.
A survey found that nearly 30% of companies plan to eliminate remote work entirely by 2026. Half want at least four days in the office.
Some are tracking badge swipes like we are all naughty schoolchildren and threatening to sack people who do not comply. Genuinely dystopian stuff.
Here is the funny part. Eight in ten companies admitted they lost talent because of these mandates. Strict return to office policies correlate with 13% higher turnover.
Some analysts reckon the mandates are a quiet way to cut headcount without calling it redundancies. Make the job worse, let people quit, and you do not have to pay severance. Clever in a sociopathic sort of way.
This is spectacularly short sighted. The best people have options. They will walk. The companies demanding bums on seats as a proxy for productivity will be left with whoever could not find something better. Good luck building anything great with that crew.
I actually get more done
I have shipped more working from home than I ever did in an office. It is not even close. No interruptions. No drive by conversations from bored colleagues. No hour long meetings that could have been a three line Slack message. I control my environment. I get to actually think. No lost hours on the commute.
The idea that presence equals productivity is a relic from when work meant operating machinery or hauling things. Knowledge work is different. Output matters. Results matter. Where you physically sit while producing them does not.
Some managers cannot handle that. They need to see people at desks to believe work is happening. That is a them problem, not a remote work problem. If you can only measure attendance and not output, you are not managing. You are running a very expensive daycare for adults.
What I would lose going back
If I had to return to an office, I would lose mornings with my kids. I would lose the flexibility to handle life when life inevitably happens. I would lose hours every week to a commute that produces nothing except stress and a vague sense of wasted time. I would lose the ability to live where I actually want to live.
I would lose the thing that makes this career sustainable. The thing that stops work from eating everything else. The boundary between being a person with a job and being a job that occasionally remembers it has a person attached.
Remote work is not a perk. It is not a nice to have you list on a job ad to seem progressive. For me, it is the difference between a career that supports my life and a career that replaces it.
Companies that get this will attract and keep their best people. Companies that do not will spend 2026 wondering why all their good staff keep leaving.