The Real Reason You’re Having a Hard Time Getting Things Done at the Office

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.”

Former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu delivered a warning to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a recent visit to Washington: Already-high airfares will surge if the war in Iran doesn’t end soon.

Sununu, a Republican who represents some of the biggest airlines as president of the industry group Airlines for America, has for weeks sounded the alarm to Trump administration officials about the economic fallout from high jet fuel prices. The war, Sununu has argued, must come to a close soon, or things will get worse.

Administration officials have gotten the message.

Privately, President Trump’s advisers are increasingly worried that Republicans will pay a political price for the rising fuel costs, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of those advisers are eager to end the war, hoping prices will begin to moderate before November’s midterm elections.

The fallout from the U.S.-Israeli attack in late February has slowed traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane, triggering a sharp increase in oil, gasoline and jet-fuel prices.

That means consumers are grappling with high costs ahead of the summer travel season, as they consider vacation plans.

Sixty-three per cent of Americans said they put a great deal or a good amount of blame on Trump for the increase in gas prices, according to a new poll conducted by NPR, PBS and Marist.

More than 8 in 10 Americans said struggles at the gas pump are putting strain on their finances.

Jet-fuel prices roughly doubled in a matter of weeks after the war began, and they have remained high. Airlines have said that will add billions of dollars of additional expenses this year, squeezing profit margins.

U.S. airlines spent more than $5 billion on fuel in March—up 30% from a year earlier, according to government data.

Carriers have been raising ticket prices, hoping to pass the cost along to consumers, and they are culling flights that will no longer make money at higher price levels.

In March, the price of a U.S. domestic round-trip economy ticket rose 21% from a year earlier to $570, according to Airlines Reporting Corp., which tracks travel-agency sales.

So far, airlines have said the higher fares haven’t deterred bookings and they are hoping to recoup more of the fuel-cost increases as the year goes on.

Earlier this week, Trump said the current price of oil is “a very small price to pay for getting rid of a nuclear weapon from people that are really mentally deranged.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that if Iran got a nuclear weapon, the country would have more leverage to keep the strait closed and “make our gas prices like $9 a gallon or $8 a gallon.”

Trump has taken steps in recent days to bring the war to an end. Late Tuesday, the president paused a plan to help guide trapped commercial ships out of the Strait of Hormuz, expressing optimism that a deal could be reached with Iran to end the conflict.

Crude oil prices fell below $100 a barrel on Wednesday, after reports that Iran and the U.S. are working with mediators on a one-page framework to restart negotiations aimed at ending the conflict and opening the strait.

Sununu said Trump administration officials are conscious of the economic fallout from the war: “They get it…and I think that’s why they’re trying to get through the war as fast as they can.”

But he cautioned that it could take months for prices to return to prewar levels.

“Ticket prices won’t go down immediately” after the strait is fully reopened, Sununu said. “You’re looking at elevated ticket prices through the summer and fall because it takes a while for the prices to go down.”

Since the initial U.S.-Israeli attack in late February, Sununu has met in Washington with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, representatives from the Transportation Department and senior White House officials.

A White House official confirmed that Hassett and Sununu have discussed the effect of increased fuel prices on the airline industry. The official said the conversation touched on how the industry can mitigate the impact of high jet fuel prices on consumers.

“The president and his entire energy team anticipated these short-term disruptions to the global energy markets from Operation Epic Fury and had a plan prepared to mitigate these disruptions,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said, pointing to the administration’s decision to waive a century-old shipping law in a bid to lower the cost of moving oil.

Rogers said the administration is working with industry representatives to “address their concerns, explore potential actions, and inform the president’s policy decisions.”

A Treasury Department spokesman pointed to Bessent’s recent comments on Fox News that the U.S. economy remains strong despite price increases. The spokesman said Treasury officials have met with airline executives, who have reaffirmed strong ticket bookings.

“We’re cognizant that this short-term move up in prices is affecting the American people, but I am also confident, on the other side of this, prices will come down very quickly,” Bessent told Fox News on Monday.

The war has already contributed to one casualty in the industry: Spirit Airlines. Company representatives have said they were forced to close the airline because the sustained surge in jet-fuel prices derailed the company’s plan to emerge from chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Trump administration and Spirit failed to come to an agreement for the company to receive a financial lifeline of as much as $500 million from the federal government.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has argued that the Iran war wasn’t the cause of Spirit’s demise, pointing to the company’s past financial struggles, as well as the Biden administration’s decision to challenge a merger with JetBlue.

Other budget airlines have also turned to the federal government for help since the U.S.-Israeli attack. A group of budget airlines last month sought $2.5 billion in financial assistance to offset higher fuel costs, and they separately wrote to lawmakers asking for relief from certain ticket taxes.

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.

Drowning in a sea of ‘what ifs?’

Unsettling quiet

Administration officials have spoken to the airline industry, which has voiced concerns about the rising costs.