‘Work from home, or get back to the office’ is all over the news right now. In fact, the Welsh Government have committed to enabling 30% of the Welsh workforce to work remotely.

As businesses, governments and community leaders clash on the most productive way for the country to safely return to work, arguments appear to be split into either working from home or getting back to a city-centre-office.

But it isn’t an either-or, there is another way…

A way that gets people back into our town centres and high streets, so that they live, work and spend in their local economies, but also provides them with the positive lifestyle of being able to cut their commute or cycle or walk to work.

Most people feel a sense of dread when they think of the commute – and for good reason.

Thanks to the time we gained back in February, we’ve mostly enjoyed being able to wake up later, be home from work earlier and be present for family meals or bedtime stories, time that we normally would have spent sitting in a car. Armed only with a computer and a stable internet connection, we can now communicate and operate from anywhere. It seems daft to go back to travelling 60 minutes a day to do the same thing from a cubicle that we can do from home, just to appear more productive.

Yet, for many, working from home is not ideal. Many of us have had to turn our bedrooms into makeshift offices and kitchen tables into workspaces. It’s also easy to feel that you constantly have a foot in both camps, not fully at work, but not fully at home. Or quite simply, some people may just want their spare rooms back.

So that’s why we are launching our Boot The Commute campaign, starting with our research project – What if everyone could walk to work?

We’ve also been working with the brilliant team at Blue Stag over the summer to consider this challenge, and how we might understand it better.

We want to know what your daily commute experience is was like, and how it has changed during the COVID-19 Pandemic. We’ve created a quiz that will help us understand how you used to travel to work and how you feel about it. We also want it to help highlight just how much money, distance and most importantly, time, folks are spending on their commute.

The quiz will tell you how your trip compares to other people in the UK, and give you some examples of the alternative ways you could better use your time and money. We want to highlight how far people typically travel, and whether or not they want to change that. We will then use the findings to talk to local councils and decision-makers and talk about how they can make a change.

Or maybe people are happy to go back to spending 250 hours a year commuting –  the equivalent of a month of work every year – but we don’t think that will be the case.

The quiz is over at bootthecommute.co.uk. We’d be really grateful if you could take 2 minutes to click through it (it’s quite fun) and share your results with friends.

The way we work is changing, and now is the time to stake a claim for a better way. A way which gives us more time with our family and friends, a way which sees us spend less time on four wheels and more time actually working, relaxing at home or perhaps just getting an extra hour in bed!

Now is the time to boot the commute; so join us and help us take our first steps to a lasting change.

It’s time to #bootthecommute. Head over to bootthecommute.co.uk or read more