Just because I go into the office five days a week doesn't mean anybody else has to

This is my office at Materion. I spend a lot of time here (and I like it).

Back in December I had a post here about how much I enjoyed my company's hybrid arrangement of working three days in the office and two days at home each week.

Let's pretend I never wrote that.

Actually, I still stand behind every word I said, particularly how smart it is for companies to give their employees flexible working options that make life a little more manageable, at least when compared with the old non-negotiable approach of five days in the office for those of us in the white collar world.

For the last five months, however, I have been coming into the office every day, Monday through Friday, of my own volition.

There have been a couple of exceptions, but the most part, I commute to work five days a week like it's still 2019.

This is completely my choice. I do it for me and not as an attempt to suggest to others that they, too, should be back in the office full time.

They shouldn't be. They should be doing whatever works best for them and their employers.

It's just that, for me, the office is the one place where I am most focused on the task at hand. It's not that I can't be productive from my home office, but that, on balance, I get more done at Materion corporate headquarters than I do working upstairs at 30025 Miller Avenue.

The one person I supervise, Courtney, knows I do this, and more importantly, she knows I don't expect her in any way to follow my lead. She has a little boy at home to take care of. It's just easier and better for everyone involved when she can work from home at least a few days a week.

(It doesn't hurt that she's very smart and talented and would be just as productive if we gave her a laptop, a rechargeable battery and a tent and sent her out in the middle of the woods to work.)

The point is, my Materion office is my favorite place to work. I love it on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays when my co-workers are in the office with me and I can collaborate and converse with them, and I love it just as much on Mondays and Fridays when the parking lot is nearly empty and only a few of us are onsite.

My work schedule, my choice. Your results may (and really should) vary.

Three days in the office, two days working from home = perfect (for me anyway)

Back when I was in high school, the only reason you were ever home at 10 in the morning was if you were sick or if it was a holiday.

Then I had kids of my own, and as time went on I watched as they enjoyed the benefits of increasingly flexible school scheduling. It culminated with our youngest, Jack, spending far more of his senior year in his room than he did in a school building.

COVID was largely responsible for the shift in scheduling philosophies, of course. But I was still amazed at how late Jack would wake up some days and still be at school in plenty of time. He would drive to school, attend one class, and be back home less than an hour later.

When I was a lad many moons ago, I left for high school at 7:10 in the morning and it would be at least eight hours before my parents saw me again. Even longer if I had football or track practice.

Being at home in the middle of the day felt weird.

The same has been true for most of my working life. I came into the professional world in the early 90s, when we still worked in an office five days a week for 9 or 10 hours at a time and only came home sometime after 5pm.

AND WE LIKED IT THAT WAY.

Actually, I don't know that we "liked" it that way, but it was the only way we knew. Our parents had worked the same sort of schedule, so we figured it was just how things were.

Then along came the pandemic, and suddenly those of us in the white-collar world had options. For a period of time we only worked at home. Then, when the restrictions lifted, our employers started bringing us back to the office a day or two each week.

Now remote work is the norm. Or I should say "hybrid" work is the norm, with many (most?) professionals working some combination of days each week in the office and other days from home.

For those of us at Materion Corporation, our in-office days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Which of course leaves Monday and Friday as work-from-home days.

Again, maybe it's just the world in which I grew up, but I find this to be an almost unbelievable setup. On Mondays and Fridays, I can be productive working from my upstairs home office while having the flexibility of doing laundry, emptying the dishwasher, running a quick errand, etc.

Then I can see, interact, and generally bond with my co-workers in person during those mid-week in-office days.

Two days a week I'm home when "The Price Is Right" comes on and I don't even have the flu. That's mind-boggling for a card-carrying Gen X-er.

Having experienced so many five-days-in-the-office years, this balance of two days home and three in the office feels ideal to me. Some of my younger co-workers think the ratio should be flipped, or that we should be four days (or even fully) remote.

And maybe they're right. All I know is that Jack's wacky school schedule seems less and less bizarre to me as we get deeper into the Age of Remote Work.

I had no idea how great a short work commute would be

Until the outbreak of COVID in March 2020, I maintained a daily schedule much like that of millions of other Americans. Five mornings a week, I would get in the car and drive to my workplace. For a full decade of my professional life, that drive was a considerable one – at least by Northeast Ohio standards – of 30+ miles each way.

For more than a year, I drove a few days a week down to Akron, a distance of more than 40 miles.

There are some advantages to a longer commute, as I enumerated in a blog post  in 2015, but for the most part, it was a big hassle. It gets tedious, you're constantly having to fill your car with gas, oil changes become more frequent, there's always construction, accidents and other traffic snarls, and on and on.

Then, in June 2022, I accepted an offer to join Materion Corporation, a global company based in the nearby city of Mayfield Heights. Let's set aside the fact that, professionally speaking, it couldn't have worked out better. I love the team members with whom I get to collaborate, and the work itself is interesting and challenging.

From a purely logistical point of view, this change has been a godsend. My commute to work, which I make three days a week, is rarely longer than about 15 minutes and involves no highway driving at all. On light traffic days when the stoplights cooperate, I can get there in 13 minutes.

The days I broke 45 minutes to Akron always felt like a win. And 40 minutes was pretty much the norm for the 1,000 or so times I drove to the Vitamix corporate headquarters on Cleveland's southwest side over my eight-year tenure there.

Being so close to home makes it much, much easier for me to get to my various sports PA announcing engagements. It means far fewer times when I need to bring a change of clothes to work and run out of the office at 5:30 to drive straight to a field or gym.

On the other end of the day, not having to leave the house until 7:30am is...well, I know it's an overused word, but I can confidently say it's amazing. Life-changing, even.

An extra half-hour may not sound like much, but it allows me to do everything I've wanted to do in the mornings for many years but couldn't squeeze in without having to wake up every day at 4:30am.

Again, I'm not saying long commutes are all bad. I don't get to listen to the same number of podcasts that I used to, and it's harder for me to feed my classical music habit unless I'm very deliberate about carving out dedicated time for it.

But on balance, for me, short commutes win hands down. I had no clue what I was missing.

Five knickknacks that have followed me from job to job and office to office for the last 20 years

I'm always interested to see how people who work in offices (at their place of business or remotely at home) decorate their desks, cabinets and bookshelves.

Photos are most common, it seems, and for good reason. I have a photo of Terry and me on my desk that I look at often and that serves to remind me why I do what I do 40-50 hours a week for the Materion Corporation.

But beyond the pics of kids, spouses and significant others, there are other little bits of office decor I always find fascinating. They provide some insight into what people value, what they do with their free time, and in general what their personalities are like.

I have worked in an office setting since 1988, if you want to call newspaper newsrooms "office settings." They are unlike traditional business offices in that they're generally loud, sometimes frenetic, and usually filled with what could most politely be described as irreverent conversation. I worked in newsrooms from '88 to '96 before moving into more genteel offices.

Since 2002 I've had something like 10 different offices at six companies. Each time I've switched jobs or undergone an office move, there is a core set of items I've smothered in bubble wrap and carried from place to place. They have stayed with me for most or all of these past two decades, and I can't imagine an office without them.

Draw whatever conclusions you will about me from these longtime office knickknacks:

The Laughing Buddha

In December 2005, I spent two full weeks in China meeting with journalists to pitch story ideas on behalf of the clients I represented as a vice president at Cleveland public relations firm Dix & Eaton. I picked this up at a Shanghai market for what I'm sure was a criminally low price, as the dollar was particularly strong against the Chinese yuan at the time. There's something about him that makes me happy, and I've always made a point of putting him in parts of my office where I'm sure to see him.

The Mexican Porcupine

Speaking of Dix & Eaton, about a year and a half after I joined the firm, we moved from Downtown Cleveland's Erieview Tower maybe a half-mile away to the 200 Public Square building. As people were cleaning out their Erieview offices, there was a table where you could discard stuff you didn't want to take with you, just in case others might be interested in it. This little guy was placed on that table (by whom I don't know) and I snatched him up for no other reason than I thought he was cool. A few of the toothpick quills have broken over the years, but he's still going strong and watches me all day long as I work.

The Globe

I always wanted a globe, and one Christmas Terry gave me this little beauty. It serves no practical purpose, but then again, what true knickknack does? Actually I take that back. In 2019, a day before we were scheduled to fly to Australia for a cruise, I spun the globe to North America then spun it to Australia, and it was the first time I realized how truly distant the two continents are from one another. It made the 15-hour flight from Los Angeles to Sydney a little more understandable, so I guess the globe provided some benefit in that one instance.

The Puck

I am an ardent fan of the National Hockey League's Ottawa Senators. Have been since they came back into the league (following a 70-year absence) in the early 90s. I think I bought this puck and cheap plastic display case in Niagara Falls when I took one of our kids there way back when. It's a good conversation piece when someone asks the valid question, "How does a lifelong Clevelander become a fan of the Ottawa Senators?"

The Appalachian Trail Rock

Some years ago, my neighbor Tim did some hiking on portions of the Appalachian Trail. Knowing that a through-hike of the trail is a likely-never-to-happen bucket list item of mine, he very graciously brought back a rock for me, just so I could have a little piece of the 2,150-mile pathway I would love to traverse at some point before I get too old. I always thought that was really nice of him, and it serves as a reminder that we all need to have dreams.