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Random conversations with passing colleagues, switching between meeting rooms and work spaces, quick trips to the indoor café or outdoor snack van and strolls around town on our lunch breaks. You could hardly consider them major events, but these small yet varied moments throughout the day give us some much needed respite from our screens and offer a change in scenery to ease fatigue. It’s hard to break away from the confines of your home office set up, especially when there’s nowhere to go and no one to see, but introducing small elements of variety into your day can help you avoid burnout.

Sure, we have free reign over our kitchens while we’re practically working in them, but the novelty isn’t quite the same as the moment you discover one of your colleagues has kindly topped up the designated snack table or canteen cupboard with boxes of chocolates, cupcakes, biscuits or even something healthy!

Not the Zoom meetings or online quizzes, but the group lunches, the charity bake offs, the sharing of photos of what you did over the weekend, the motivational exercises, the laughs and the support networks. These human interactions improve the way we communicate with and understand each other, while reinforcing the feeling of being part of a team.

While this beggars belief for some, the opportunity to get some morning air, have time to think about the day ahead, listen to your favourite podcast or radio station in the car or read a chapter of your latest book on the train, certainly isn’t a bad way to start your day. Sometimes when we jump out of the shower and land right in front of our desk to start work, we can feel a little foggy headed and unprepared, but the morning commute often gives us that separation and mental preparation needed to start the day.

Aside from the fact that the Friday feeling isn’t quite as profound when it involves leaving your dining room table for your sofa, working from home can also feel like your work and home life blur into one and you can sometimes find yourself working later and more often when your laptop is always within reach. We miss the feeling of being able to walk away from the day and switching work-mode off for a while.

It’s safe to say we’re all pretty confident in our own music tastes, but it can be refreshing, uplifting and nostalgic to hear others from time to time!

Whether it’s the proud excitement of having good news to share, the overflowing urge to re-enact the hilarious highlight of the day or the longing to offload to a loved one, the final thing we miss about the office is going home and telling everyone about our day at the office.