When the pandemic hit in March 2020, our office closed on a Friday and we were all working from home by Monday, with no transition plan and no playbook. The first two weeks were chaos — nobody had a proper home office setup, video calls were a novelty that everyone treated as optional, and the boundary between work time and personal time dissolved almost overnight. I was answering Slack messages at 9 PM because there was no physical "leaving the office" to signal the end of the workday, and I was starting work at 7 AM because there was no commute to ease into the day. Within a month, I was more tired than I'd ever been in an office, and it took me a while to understand why.

The problem was the absence of transitions. In an office, the commute creates a buffer between home and work in both directions — you decompress on the way home, and you ramp up on the way in. Without that buffer, work bleeds into everything, and the brain never fully shifts into either mode. The fix, which took me months to figure out, was to manufacture transitions: a morning walk before starting work, a strict shutdown routine at the end of the day, and a dedicated workspace that I only used for work. Those sound like trivial changes, but they made the difference between burning out in three months and sustaining remote work indefinitely.

The other lesson from that period was about communication. In an office, you can walk over to someone's desk and ask a question; remotely, every interaction is a written message, and the overhead of writing makes you more selective about what you ask. That selectiveness is mostly good — it reduces interruptions and forces you to think before asking — but it also means that the casual, serendipitous conversations that spark ideas don't happen. Replicating those conversations remotely requires deliberate effort: scheduled video calls with no agenda, virtual coffee breaks, and a culture that values social conversation as work rather than as a distraction from it.