Botachay’s arrangement is based on trust. She is contracted to work eight hours and simply fills in a spreadsheet to say how long she has worked on the train each day. And the environment means it’s easy for her to get a solid amount of work done; it’s rare that anyone has to stand, there are dedicated quiet compartments and plenty of other commuters spend their journey working too.

For Thomas Geiser, a professor of labour law at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, there’s no question whether these commuters should be able to log this time. “Working time is the time which the employee makes available to the employer,” he says. “If the employee is willing to work on the way to work, especially on the railways, this is also working time for which payment is due.”

Creeping commitments

But there are reasons to be wary of rolling commuting time into our office hours, says Carys Chan, who studies work-life balance at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. In our always-on society the boundaries between our professional and private lives are already being blurred, she says, and by including commuting time as work hours that line gets even harder to draw.

More insidiously, by counting commuting as work we’re assigning economic value to this time, she says. This could have unintended consequences such as employees feeling compelled to work on their commute so as not to be seen as less committed to their jobs.

Martin Rennison, 37, who works in recruitment in London, is a big advocate for using the commute as a buffer between work and home. Every day he takes a 35-minute train from the town of Leighton Buzzard to Euston station in London before a short hop on the underground to his office near Old Street station.

“I will listen to podcasts, read a book, watch a TV programme or listen to music and just sort of wake up,” he says. “And I really don’t want to work on the train on the way back, because I want to decompress before I get home.”