Working From Home Doesn't Give You More Energy. That's Not the Point.

For five years the work-from-home debate has been stuck on one question: do you get more done at home or in the office? A new study from the University of Iowa says we've been measuring the wrong thing. It isn't how much energy you have. It's how steady that energy stays — and the flattest days are the most productive ones.

The study: same people, same week, two very different days

Researchers at Iowa's Tippie College of Business followed 219 hybrid workers at a single employer across one business week, comparing each person's output on their home days versus their office days. They also asked everyone to log their energy level every hour. Published in Organization Science under the perfectly dry title "Steady as She Goes," the results were unambiguous: on work-from-home days, people made more progress on their goals and worked faster than on office days. The more often they worked from home, the bigger the effect.

The mechanism is what makes this worth your attention. Workers experienced about 33% less energy variability on home days than in the office. And the payoff curve is wild: each single percentage point of reduced variability produced 26% higher goal progress. Not more energy — steadier energy. Co-author Emily Campion put it plainly: it's not that working from home gives you more energy. It gives you fewer of the spikes and dips that office life inflicts on you.

Why steadiness beats a good morning

Think about a typical office day. You arrive with a full tank, then someone stops by your desk, then a Slack thread detonates, then a meeting fragments your afternoon into twenty-minute chunks. Each transition costs real energy — not just the minutes lost, but the mental reboot of parking one task and loading another. Over eight hours, your energy line looks like a mountain range: high peaks, deep valleys.

The study found the quality of interruptions matters as much as the quantity. Workplace disruptions — a coworker appearing at your desk, noise from the next cubicle, the commute itself — drain more energy than home distractions do. A laundry load between meetings is a blip; a "quick sync" that becomes forty minutes is a crater. At home you have veto power over what interrupts you. In the office, you mostly don't.

This is also why the usual productivity advice misfires. Coffee, power naps, and the "find your peak hours" crowd all chase higher energy. The Iowa data suggests you should chase flatter energy instead. A day that never dips below a 6 out of 10 beats a day that swings between 9 and 3, because the deep dips are where hours quietly evaporate.

The catch: you sit 44 more minutes for it

Here is the honest counter-argument, from a study published the same month. Researchers at the University of Turku strapped accelerometers to the thighs of roughly a hundred hybrid workers for seven days and measured everything: sleep, sitting, standing, movement. The finding is the productivity story's shadow: on remote days, people spent about 14 extra minutes in bed but 44 more minutes sedentary — sitting or lying down. They lost 37 minutes of light activity and 21 minutes of more vigorous movement.

The biggest casualty was standing. Standing desks exist in offices; they mostly don't in kitchens. Some of the lost movement was just the commute's walking and cycling, replaced by the twelve-step journey from bedroom to desk. The researchers' advice is mechanical, not motivational: vary your working position, take longer active breaks on home days, treat movement as a scheduled part of the day rather than something that happens to you.

So the full picture is a trade, not a victory: steadier energy and more output on one side, a growing sedentary debt on the other. Both things are true. Any honest account of remote work has to hold both at once.

The compromise the data keeps pointing to

Neither study says everyone should stay home forever. In fact, a third piece of research published this October — by two researchers at McMaster University — found that the sweet spot is hybrid. Hybrid workers put in about 2.8 more hours per week and produced 5% more per hour than their on-site counterparts. Hybrid also dodged the pathologies of full remote work: moonlighting, subcontracting, ghost employees — problems, the authors note, that only exist when nobody ever sees you in person.

And hybrid doesn't need to mean three or four office days. A randomized nine-month trial of 248 customer-service workers at a large Turkish outsourcer found that just one office day per month — with everything else remote — produced 7.8% more calls per hour in the five months after the visits ended, cut attrition from 21% to 13.7%, and delivered estimated gains about five times the program's cost. One day of hallway conversations bought months of trust and context.

The pattern is remarkably consistent across all three studies: the office is where relationships get built; home is where the work gets done. The optimal schedule isn't a side in the culture war. It's both, each doing what it's good at.

How to engineer steadiness (even in an office)

You don't need a remote job to use the Iowa finding. If variability is the enemy, flatten the curve wherever you are:

• Defend two 90-minute blocks a day. Calendar them, mark yourself busy, silence notifications. These are your office-day armor and your home-day default.
• Batch the transitions. Check email and Slack at set times instead of as they arrive. Every unplanned context switch is a dip in the curve.
• Kill the worst interruption, not all interruptions. Campion's finding about transition costs cuts both ways: a weekly standing meeting is predictable and cheap; the "got a minute?" drive-by is neither. Eliminate the drive-bys first.
• Schedule movement on home days. The Turku study is specific: on remote days, stand up between meetings, take a walk at lunch, change positions. Sedentary time is the tax on your extra output — pay it intentionally.
• Track dips, not peaks. For one week, note when your energy craters rather than when you feel great. You'll find the same one or two culprits every day. Fix those instead of buying another productivity app.

The Iowa researchers didn't discover that home is magic. They discovered something more useful and less comfortable: your energy is not a resource to maximize, it's a signal to stabilize. The people who got the most done weren't the most energized. They were the least interrupted. That's a design problem, not a motivation problem — and design problems can be solved on a Tuesday.

References

• Are remote workers more or less productive? — phys.org (publication details: Bennett et al., "Steady as She Goes: Remote Work Benefits Daily Goal Progress Through Reduced Energy Variability," Organization Science 2026, DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2025.20962)
• Are Remote Workers More or Less Productive? — Newswise (University of Iowa release)
• Finnish study finds working from home increases sedentary behavior — News-Medical (WORKDAY study, Suorsa et al., International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity 2026, DOI: 10.1186/s12966-026-01959-0)
• Hybrid work boosts productivity, research finds — McMaster News (October 2026)
• How This Remote Team Improved Performance Without a 3-Day Office Mandate — Inc.com (NBER working paper, nine-month randomized trial)