Introducing "Winter Hours"

Like most people, I have spent most of my working life commuting to an office. The routine of getting up in the morning and navigating car, train & bus timetables so as to get to work ahead of 9am, and then reverse it all at 530pm every night to get home was almost auto-pilot. But now I am working from home 5 days a week I have found myself questioning how many habits still make sense if I’m at home.

But, I have been working from home for a while and it’s only been a few weeks since I really started to question this so what’s changed? The clocks. British Summertime was officially over and as the clocks changed so did the weather, and with it that natural light started to fade into shorter windows. A lot of my habits started to change too. A morning walk didn’t seem so inviting in the rain. A post-work 5k in the dark didn’t feel a sensible option either. The hot summer months where I took my laptop outdoors (buying that garden table is hands down my best investment of 2020) seemed so far away as I worked away waiting for the light to fade a full 90 minutes before the end of the working day.

An old colleague had Seasonal Affective Disorder, so I was aware that for some the change of seasons can have a big impact on their wellbeing, but it wasn’t something I had ever felt in the past. Sure, the wait on the platform for the rush hour train was even less fun when the wind was bitterly cold, but it didn’t affect me like it did when I switched to working from home. In fact, I usually embraced the change of seasons. Ever an eye out for a good photo the change in weather brought with it opportunities to shoot fungus, snow, spring flowers… So what had really changed?

And it kept coming back to 2 things: being outside and daylight. When you need to head into an office the weather is almost irrelevant. You have to make it in regardless of ice or heat. When at home a walk before work becomes a ‘nice to have’ that is scrapped as soon as the weather gets miserable. So I tried to bring back a commuting routine. “Whatever the weather I will walk before and after work!” I was committed to my plan!

It lasted 8 days.

I tried again, but the habit just didn’t stick. Surely, a big positive of working from home is not having to go out early in the day when the weather is so un-inviting? So I tried a new plan. I introduced “winter hours” and I want to trademark them for the difference they make

For me winter hours takes advantage of the best time for daylight in the bleakest months: lunchtime. I shuffled my hours to allow a 2 hour lunch break and made up the time in the evening instead. 2 hours in the middle of the day is actually quite a long time. I could make a decent lunch, go for a run and still make it back to shower with time to spare before logging back on. And without really trying, I found myself heading outside every day for at least 30 minutes – even when it was freezing cold. It didn’t feel like willpower, it felt totally natural. During my walks or runs, I’d gather my thoughts, reflecting on the morning and thinking ahead to the afternoon. With no interruptions and no real feeling of time pressure I enjoyed this time and found it impacting me in many ways

Sunlight can help boost production of serotonin, and this is a powerful hormone that can stabilise our mood helping us feel happier. When we’re exposed to enough sunlight our serotonin levels increase, making us feel calmer and more able to deal with what life throws at us. It also focuses the mind. As I ran, I found solutions to problems become clearer and my plan of action for when I returned to the laptop already planned out - even though I still felt like I had taken a break away from work.

I had implemented winter hours with the view to improving my wellbeing, but the biggest surprise was the improvement to my work productivity. My ability to tackle the afternoon’s work was most definitely improved by the 2-hour break. And there was the added bonus of the hour at the end of the day being largely un-interrupted as people assume you’ve ‘clocked off’ allowing time to really get stuck into some of the tasks I had procrastinated on before.

So I am sticking to my winter hours! Most roles have the flexibility to adapt and why should we continue to work by rules set up for an entirely different way of working? Embracing winter daylight has seen me improve my work and home life with no overall reduction to my hours and I feel so much better for adapting to the season.