Let’s address the uncomfortable truth no one wants to discuss: working from home is making you worse at creativity.
Not lazier. Not less productive in terms of output. But genuinely, measurably worse at the actual creative thinking that makes this industry worth being in. And until we admit it, we can’t fix it.
The problem isn’t discipline or technology or Zoom fatigue. The problem is comfort. And comfort is creativity’s silent assassin.
The Friction Factor
Great work emerges from friction. The uncomfortable conversation. The unexpected challenge. The collision of different perspectives that forces new thinking. I met somone who is about to start work at a design studio that only comes together twice a week. How on earth does that work I wondered (aloud)… How do you do anything really interesting?
Your spare room doesn’t provide friction. It provides slippers, a full fridge, and the ability to attend meetings while still in yesterday’s clothes. It’s comfortable. Convenient and I’d suggest completely inadequate for generating breakthrough ideas.
I watch designers present work over video calls with all the energy of someone reading their grocery list. I see strategists phoning in thinking that would never survive a room full of actual humans. Everyone’s comfortable. Everyone’s going through motions.
And the work shows it.
The Accidental Genius Problem
The best ideas don’t happen in scheduled creativity sessions. They happen in corridors. Over lunch. In those messy, unplanned moments when someone overhears something and connects it to something else.
Working remotely, every interaction is scheduled. Calendared. Purpose-driven. There’s no room for serendipity. No space for accidental collision. No opportunity for the random spark that ignites something brilliant.
Your structured 30-minute video calls will never replace the unstructured chaos of people in proximity. And if you think they can, you’ve forgotten what made this work exciting in the first place.
The Isolation Delusion
“I’m more productive at home,” everyone claims. And they’re right — if productivity means cranking out deliverables. But creativity isn’t about production volume. It’s about idea quality. And isolated thinking produces isolated ideas.
You need the challenge. The pushback. The immediate, brutal honesty of showing work to another human being who can see through your bullshit. Video calls let you hide. Literal distance creates metaphorical distance from the work’s weaknesses.
Creative directors who’d eviscerate weak thinking face-to-face become strangely diplomatic over Zoom. Designers who’d defend their decisions passionately in person just shrug and revise on camera. The edges get smoothed. The work gets softer.
Comfortable. And forgettable.
The Client Catastrophe
Clients feel this too, even if they can’t articulate it. Chemistry doesn’t translate over video. Energy dissipates across screens. That intangible confidence that comes from watching a team think together in real-time? Gone.
So they choose agencies based on price instead of potential. On credentials instead of connection. Because everyone sounds equally competent in a video call. Everyone’s work looks equally professional in a PDF.
The advantage you had — your team’s actual dynamic, your studio’s energy, your collective creative voltage — is now invisible. You’ve voluntarily entered a competition judged purely on documented capability rather than demonstrated chemistry.
The Uncomfortable Solution
Get back in the room. Not one or two days a week as some compromise. Properly back. Uncomfortable commutes. Uncomfortable chairs. Uncomfortable proximity to colleagues who challenge you.
Because discomfort makes you sharp. Alert. Present in ways that comfort never will. The inconvenience of office life isn’t a bug. It’s the feature that makes creative excellence possible.
Yes, life balance matters. Yes, flexibility has value. At SomeOne we use Mondays and Fridays to generally crank through piles of deliverables — But if you chose creativity as a career, you chose difficulty. Intensity. The pursuit of work that matters more than it should. You can’t have that from your sofa.
The Zoom-forward future everyone predicted? It’s producing mediocrity at scale. Comfortable, convenient, completely forgettable mediocrity. It’s almost as bad as A.I. (!)
And mediocrity, no matter how efficiently produced, never changed anything.
Get uncomfortable. Get back to the studio. Get back to work that scares you a little.
Because comfortable creativity is an oxymoron.