The Real Reason You’re Having a Hard Time Getting Things Done at the Office
Working from home altered our brains. We need more office time to fix them.
3 min
If you still don’t have your office groove back, there might be a scientific explanation. Hybrid work arrangements mess with our brains.
Frustrated bosses who survey their half-empty officescapes say it makes no sense that somebody who worked full time in an office before 2020 can’t show up like they used to. But neurologists and behavioural scientists say the collective amnesia for effectively working alongside each other makes perfect sense to them.
Some workers have lost the muscle memory in their minds required to get jobs done in an open-office setting and, like flabby biceps, that muscle has to be exercised to strengthen, says S. Thomas Carmichael, professor and chair of the neurology department at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.
After years of remote work, our brains’ selective attention skills and ability to block out distractions is weakened, Carmichael says. Those who prefer to work from home might not like one of his remedies: Make yourself work from the office more often.
“The brain is really good at understanding contingencies, so if we just say ‘I’ll just get this done when I’m at home,’ we don’t learn it as well,” he says.
Drowning in a sea of ‘what ifs?’
Knowing how effective working from home can be has created a simmering unhappiness, says organisational psychologist Cathleen Swody. Many workers lose their uninterrupted autonomy in social office spaces.
Maryia Babinova, a senior software engineer in New York City, tried going into her office several days a week back in 2021 and found it nearly impossible to be productive.
“The first 30 to 45 minutes of my day were taken up by saying hello to everybody,” she says.
Babinova says even small office time wasters have become a major annoyance. A trip to the office coffee machine, for instance, can take as long as 15 minutes when there’s a line. At home, she says, caffeine is at her fingertips, keeping her on task.
Now, Babinova only shows up in person when her team members visit from another city. At the office, she works on tasks that don’t require a heavy mental lift so she can get them done.
Constantly comparing 2023’s office realities with alternative remote-work setups can add to workers’ readjustment woes, says Laura M. Giurge, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, who teaches a course on the science of time at work.
When people start to ponder what life would be like if their circumstances were different, they can rapidly end up drowning in a sea of “what ifs,” a psychological concept known as counterfactual thinking.
“Now, when we go to the office, we have the counterfactuals of our home offices,” Giurge says. “We know how much better things would be…how much more work we might get done.”
It’s hard to un-remember how nice it was to take the dog for a walk midday, or how helpful it was to log out at 4 p.m. to get dinner started and log back in later. Running through scenarios of how time could be better spent takes up precious brainpower, distracting us from the real work at hand, psychologists say.
Unsettling quiet
Getting used to working with background noise takes time.
Many workplaces are quieter now because they are less crowded, and that means there can be periods of dead silence punctuated by sudden noise that feels magnified, jarring people again and again all day long. Even toggling between work-from-home solitude one day to a noisy office the next can have a similar effect.
“We have to habituate ourselves to all those distractions all over again in order to get any good work done,” says Vanessa Bohns, a professor of organisational behaviour at Cornell University. She points to research that shows it takes 20 minutes to get used to background noise, but five minutes of silence before bringing back the noise forces the brain’s process to start over again.
Many workers and a few bosses now view the office as a place to collaborate, but not the only place to do head-down individual work.
In a large-scale survey published by Microsoft last year, 84% of employees cited connecting with co-workers as their key motivation for working in person. More than 70% said they would go to the office more frequently if they knew their direct team members or work friends would be there.
“The data shows we can’t only see the office as a place to get focused work done,” said Colette Stallbaumer, Microsoft’s general manager of Future of Work.
Lynn Dang, a software developer in the Dallas area, uses her three mandatory office days for face-to-face meetings and work that doesn’t require intense concentration.
When she transitioned back to the office last year, she noticed she couldn’t concentrate on reading code like she could while working from home. Loud team discussions and overhearing one-sided conversations amid the cubicles from people who were on the phone or dialled into video meetings created a constant assault on her senses.
“It was like I’m gonna have to find something to do on my to-do list that would make me productive,” she says. “Otherwise I’m going to have to keep working overtime or working over the weekend just to get stuff done.”
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The voices reshaping how Australians think about money — and why credibility matters more than reach.
6 min
The best financial advice many Australians are receiving right now is not coming from licensed advisers charging by the hour. It is coming through a phone screen, in the ten minutes between work and dinner, from creators who have built credibility the hard way: by being right, being transparent, and being specific in a space where vagueness has always been the easy default.
This is not a ranking by follower count. Follower count is a measure of distribution, not of quality. What follows is a ranking by substance — credentials, accuracy, community depth, and the quality of what an audience actually learns from following these accounts. The distinction matters, because the Australians acting on this content are making real financial decisions with real money.
1- Queenie Tan – Corporate Authorised Representative; Co-Founder & Director, Invest With Queenie & Billroo
There are finance influencers who talk about building wealth, and there are those who document it in real time with receipts. Queenie Tan belongs firmly in the second category. Starting from a $400-per-week income, Tan built her net worth past $1 million while publishing the actual numbers — income, savings rate, investment decisions — for an audience of more than 400,000 across platforms.
She is a Corporate Authorised Representative, co-founder of the personal finance app Billroo, and the author of a book that has become a practical reference for young Australians navigating ETFs, superannuation and property. What separates her from the crowded field of money educators is precision: she does not talk in principles when she can talk in percentages.
2- Alan Kohler – Editor-in-Chief, Eureka Report; Editor-in-Chief, InvestSMART Group; ABC News finance presenter, host of Inside Business.
If Queenie Tan represents the new wave of personal finance creators, Alan Kohler represents something the new wave will spend decades trying to build: institutional credibility that has survived multiple economic cycles. As Editor-in-Chief of the Eureka Report and InvestSMART Group, and a decades-long presence on ABC News, Kohler has spent more than thirty years making financial analysis accessible without dumbing it down.
His coverage of RBA decisions, market movements and economic policy is cited by podcasters, journalists and fund managers alike. He is not chasing virality. He does not need to.
3- Aleks Nikolic – Corporate lawyer; host, Big Swinging Stocks podcast
Most finance creators address the mechanics of money. Aleks Nikolic addresses the psychology — and that distinction explains why her following is as loyal as it is. Operating as Broke Girl Wealth across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, Nikolic covers ETFs, crypto and investment strategy, but her real differentiator is a willingness to discuss the emotional architecture of financial decision-making.
Shame around debt. Fear around market volatility. The limiting beliefs that stop people acting on what they already know. In a space where confidence is routinely performed, her candour is a genuine competitive advantage.
4- Bryce Leske & Alec Renehan – Equity Mates Media
Equity Mates did not build a following. They built a media company. What began as a podcast by two friends learning to invest has grown into Australia’s most established investing media brand, covering ASX stocks, ETFs, global markets and fund manager interviews across podcast, social and YouTube.
The longevity is the credential. Equity Mates has operated through multiple market cycles, a global pandemic, and a generational shift in how Australians engage with investing — and its audience has grown through all of it. When the hosts speak, their listeners know they have been paying attention for years.
5- The Lazy CEO – CEO & Founder, Showpo; Shark Tank Australia investor
The metric that matters most on social media is not followers — it is engagement, because engagement signals trust. Jane Lu, known as The Lazy CEO, maintains an engagement rate of approximately 1.15 per cent on Instagram, which is exceptional for a finance account of his size. Her 242,000-plus followers are not passive consumers: they ask questions, share experiences and apply what they read.
Her content focuses on business finance and wealth building, and the active comment sections are the clearest possible evidence that her audience does not merely scroll past.
6- Tash Invests – Founder, Tash Lends; Forbes Australia 30 Under 30
Tash Invests built her following on a premise that sounds simple but is rarer in practice than it should be: she publishes the actual numbers. Not approximations or ranges or anonymised case studies — her salary, her savings rate, her portfolio value, her net worth, updated and on the record.
Having bought her first property at twenty-two and grown her documented net worth past $1 million, she has become the primary reference point for young Australians trying to understand what building wealth on a moderate income genuinely looks like. The specificity is the product.
7- David Scutt – APAC Market Analyst at StoneX Group
The authority of most finance social media content rests on research and reading. David Scutt‘s authority rests on having done the job. A former Treasury Dealer at Arab Bank and the Commonwealth Bank, former ASX Business Supervisor, and former Global Markets Editor at Business Insider Australia and anchor at ausbiz TV, Scutt now brings that direct market experience to his role as APAC Market Analyst at StoneX Group, rather than relying on secondary commentary.
When he discusses foreign exchange movements or ASX dynamics, it is not because he has read about them. It is because he has traded them.
8- Meddy Demars – Investing & crypto content creator
The gap Meddy Demars fills is specific and underserviced: connecting global macroeconomic events to the practical reality of Australian investors. When the US Federal Reserve adjusts interest rates, when inflation data moves, when commodity prices shift — most Australian finance content either ignores the local implications or translates them poorly.
Demars, operating across TikTok and Instagram from Sydney, does the translation well: explaining what global conditions mean for Australian stocks, savings rates and investment portfolios in terms that are accessible without being condescending.
9- Simran Kaur – Founder, Friends That Invest
Friends That Invest is arguably the most successful community-building exercise in Australian personal finance, and Simran Kaur is the reason why. The New Zealand-based creator — whose audience is predominantly Australian — built a podcast, a book and a social media presence around a single insight: that the personal finance world was not speaking to young women, and that the consequences of that gap were significant.
The measurable cultural shift that followed — women engaging with investing concepts in communities that had not previously existed — is the kind of impact that most financial literacy programmes aim for and rarely achieve.
10- Effie Zahos – Money Editor at 9News
Effie Zahos is one of Australia’s most recognised financial commentators, appearing regularly across 9News, A Current Affair, Today and Today Extra as 9News Money Editor. Her role puts everyday money questions, from mortgage rates to cost-of-living pressures, in front of a national broadcast audience.
Before television, she spent years as editor of Money magazine, building the editorial foundation for her current commentary. She is also Director and Money Commentator at InvestSMART, an ambassador for Canstar, and a published author, with her financial advice available in print as well as on screen.
That combination, decades of editorial experience, an active broadcast presence, and a body of published work, is what makes her commentary carry weight beyond any single platform or post.
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