Digital technology, especially email and smartphones, have greatly improved the ability of workers to be productive outside of a traditional office. Even so, most administrative work is still done in an office. In practice, modern communications technology is used both to link physical workplaces (such as at Slate, which has two offices, one in New York and one in DC) and to disperse them. One reason is that, according to a new survey of office workers conducted by Wakefield Research for IT consulting firm Citrix, most bosses have concerns about telecommuting. Half of workers say their boss disapproves of remote work and only 35 percent say they tolerate it.

Skeptical bosses are likely to have their doubts reinforced by the same survey, which shows that 43% of workers say they have watched TV or a movie while “working” remotely, while 35% have done housework and 28% have cooked. Dinner.

Physical proximity may not be necessary for much work, but it’s still a tough find to replace against The Price Is Right while he’s on the clock.

My experience working primarily from home for an extended period several years ago was that it’s a surprisingly efficient way to go crazy. The need to make petty decisions—where to work, what chair to sit in, whether to even bother getting out of bed, whether I should wear shoes right now—became overwhelming. I was spending a completely unreasonable amount of time wondering what to make for lunch, and while working on a book, I was devoting a surprising amount of energy to meeting my self-imposed daily word quota in time to catch the movie matinees.

But there’s also a compelling case to show that working from home makes people much more efficient, because it allows workers to take care of small and annoying tasks while still doing their jobs. Remote work, at least occasional remote work, can be great precisely because of the opportunity it provides to do a number of non-work things. It’s much faster to buy groceries at a quarter to three than to stand in line during rush hour after work. Too many people work similar hours and want to eat dinner at dinner time. My neighborhood supermarket turns into a nightmare from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Sunday afternoons, another popular time for shopping, are even worse, as the aisles are often short of goods Soviet-style key. If you simply start work a little earlier (you don’t have to commute, after all) and stop by the store during a break when the lines are short, you can get more work done and more shopping done in a fixed period of time. Even better, if more people did that, then shift workers with genuinely inflexible hours might also be able to avoid some line issues.

And telecommuting allows you to tackle time-consuming household tasks that don’t really involve a lot of work. Watching your clothes spin in your washer or dryer is perfectly compatible with productive work. But between the washing step and the drying step comes a time sensitive phase of “putting wet clothes in the dryer”. Taking just a few minutes off work to do the swap allows you to get the task done efficiently and leaves your real free time free for exciting activities like getting out and about. Many recipes, similarly, involve considerable periods of simmering or roasting during which it’s nice to be in the house but you don’t actually have to do anything. In a “work, then shop, then cook, then eat” paradigm, it’s a challenge to eat anything that can’t be made quickly. But if you can simmer while you work, then a lot of housework can be done with minimal reduction in professional output.

The fact that such practices remain officially taboo reflects how far we have not come as a society since the days when we expected every full-time professional to be supported by a full-time stay-at-home mom.

More broadly, the Wakefield survey suggests that employers may be missing out on an inexpensive way to provide workers with something of value. Sixty-four percent of respondents who have not worked remotely “identify at least one extremely popular benefit or pleasure that they would be willing to give up to work from home just one day a week.” The fundamental fact of modern economics is that no matter how much technology advances or society’s wealth improves, we don’t add more hours to the day and we still need sleep. Given the circumstances, tactics that help people save time are not only valuable, they are becoming more so with each passing year. Smart companies must find ways to recognize that and allow their employees enough flexibility to manage their time effectively.