The 9 to 5 Is Dying - Where Are the Tools for Flexible Work?

Since Garfield hated Mondays and Dolly Parton's day job inspired a hit single, the unforgiving crawl of time through the working day has been the subject of many a successful Hollywood movie about discovering what's important in life. That was until the global COVID pandemic, when Big Corp™ discovered that a remote or hybrid work pattern could both cut costs and improve employee morale. In many industries, these new work patterns are becoming standard - but are we actually ready to handle this?

What We Lost

I am a massive supporter of modern, flexible working patterns: they convey more respect for employees' time, and more support for when life throws its unscheduled challenges. Whether it's picking up children, visiting the doctor, or going to a property viewing, the rest of the world simply doesn't owe anyone a timetable.

However, in-person work enforced a certain separation of concerns in life: for some, work was completed only while physically in the workplace, leaving home as a sanctuary of rest; it forced mandated socialisation with colleagues; and it imposed a strict, regular routine of leaving your own home (even if only to catch the tube).

Without this structure, many people find themselves struggling in one way or another - with feelings of isolation and loneliness, difficulty motivating themselves to complete work or the tasks necessary to keep themselves going: a collapse of work-life balance into a work-life primordial soup.

The gruelling structure of our education and work systems has left the general population entirely unequipped to deal with the revolution our workplaces are going through. We're told to be organised or develop time management skills, without any specific, actionable, or proven advice on how to do this in a way our stubborn brains might actually find sustainable.

What Can We Do?

Enforcing a Schedule

Developing a schedule that works for you can be highly beneficial. This means allocating a separation in time or space in which certain activities are done - for example, only completing work tasks during certain hours, going to work at a café every day from 13:00 to 15:00, or trying to see the sun for half an hour every day when you wake up. The key to sticking to it is to build a schedule around activities you actually enjoy, and to allow flexibility when necessary.

Done right, a schedule can reduce stress by decreasing cognitive load and decision fatigue, and it can help build the habits you need to achieve your goals. Being in the same place every day is also one of the best ways to meet new people, develop relationships, or keep up with your friends.

Tools such as Increment support enforcing a schedule with custom hours. These let users set specific hours of the week during which only certain tasks may be scheduled. This can help protect work-life balance by ensuring work stays within the working day, that busy tasks stay out of the way of the school run, or that Saturday mornings stay free for exercise. Hours are fully customisable to your unique life.

Staying Motivated

When you have a massive problem and no idea how to approach it, staying motivated is a key challenge.

The trick isn't necessarily discipline - that's just a habitual routine of focus. For your brain to commit to the journey, it needs to be rewarded at every step along the way. In practice, that means breaking the work you have into smaller, achievable blocks, and giving yourself a reason to actually want to get each block done.

Increment helps its users achieve this by encouraging them to define their work as a set of tasks. Each task can be split into multiple work blocks, which are flexibly scheduled around fixed events. When a block is done, evidence of the time spent appears on the calendar. When a task is done, you get to tick it off your list.

All of that logged time doesn't just disappear once a block is ticked off - it's collated into stats that show where your hours are actually going, week over week. Proof that the unglamorous, invisible work you've been putting in is real and adding up, even on days that didn't feel especially productive.

The Admin of Just Staying Alive

Not every task on your list is a project with a deadline. A huge chunk of life is made up of small, recurring chores that never really finish - the food shop, the laundry, watering the plants, batch-cooking for the week. They don't feel urgent on any single day, which is exactly why they're so easy to let slide until they become one.

Increment treats these as recurring tasks: flexible jobs that need to happen regularly, but not at any fixed time. Rather than making you decide each week when the laundry is going to get done, it auto-schedules the block into the free time you have. That removes a small but constant source of decision fatigue - one less thing to plan and one less thing to forget.

It's a small feature, but it reflects a bigger point: personal-care tasks aren't optional extras to be squeezed in if there's time left over. They're part of the baseline maintenance that keeps everything else running, and they deserve a real place on the calendar - not just a mental note you're quietly stressed about.

Building the Structure Nobody Gave Us

Flexible work was sold to us as a trade: give up the office, and get your time back. What gets forgetten is the invisible organisational work the office was doing on our behalf - that structure doesn't just appear on its own. It has to be built, deliberately, by each of us.

None of this means flexible work is a mistake. It means the tools we use to manage our time need to catch up with how we actually work now, instead of assuming a 9-to-5 that most of us no longer keep. That's the gap Increment is trying to close - not by forcing rigidity back onto your week, but by handling the planning around your fixed commitments so the rest of your time can flex around real life, not the other way around.