The Question That Stings: "So What Did You Actually Do?"
You've just finished a marathon day. Your back aches from the chair, your eyes are strained from the screen, and your brain feels like it's been through a blender. The clock finally hits 6 PM. You hear the front door open—your partner, home from their office job. They see you at your desk, still in your work clothes, looking exhausted. And then it comes: "So what did you do today?"
Not "How was your day?" Not "Rough one?" The phrasing matters. It carries an unspoken assumption: that because you were home, your work must have been less real, less demanding, less valid than theirs. This scenario, shared by a remote worker on Reddit in late 2024, sparked a firestorm of recognition. Hundreds of comments poured in from people who'd felt that same sting. It's not about the question itself, but about what it implies. In 2025, as remote and hybrid work models have solidified, this communication gap between home-based and office-based workers remains one of the most persistent, frustrating aspects of modern work life.
This article isn't just about venting—though God knows we all need to sometimes. It's about understanding why this disconnect happens, what's really going on during those invisible work hours, and most importantly, how to bridge this gap with the people who matter most. Because when your partner doesn't understand your work, it doesn't just hurt your feelings. It can erode respect, create resentment, and make you question your own worth. Let's fix that.
The Invisible Architecture of Remote Work
Here's the thing most office-goers don't get: remote work has its own architecture. It's just not made of cubicle walls and break rooms. Your office might be a corner of the living room, but the structures are there—they're digital, psychological, and temporal.
Take that Reddit poster's day: "calls from 9am to 6pm, barely had time to eat lunch." To someone walking through a physical office, that might sound like... well, just talking. But anyone who's done remote work knows the truth. Those back-to-back Zoom calls aren't passive. They're performance. You're managing your video frame, your background, your audio quality. You're reading micro-expressions through pixelated video. You're taking notes while trying to look engaged. You're troubleshooting tech issues silently so you don't disrupt the flow. And between calls? You're answering Slacks, checking emails, updating project management tools, and preparing for the next meeting. There's no water cooler chat buffer—just one task bleeding into the next.
The physical markers of work are missing. No commute bookends your day. No colleagues see you arrive early or leave late. No boss walks by your desk to see you deep in concentration. The evidence of labor exists in digital artifacts: sent emails, completed tickets, updated documents, meeting recordings. But these aren't visible to someone who shares your living space. They just see you sitting at a computer. And in 2025, despite years of remote work normalization, that visual disconnect still fuels misunderstanding.
Why Office Workers Struggle to "Get It"
It's tempting to frame this as a character flaw—your partner just doesn't respect your work. But usually, it's more about cognitive bias than malice. Office work comes with built-in validation systems that remote work lacks.
Think about a traditional office day. Your partner leaves the house at a set time, battles traffic or public transport, enters a building dedicated to work, interacts with colleagues face-to-face, attends meetings in conference rooms, and returns home at a predictable hour. The boundaries are physical and social. Their work has witnesses. The struggle is communal. When they complain about a difficult client, their colleagues nod in shared understanding because they've met that client too, or they've seen the stress on your partner's face all afternoon.
Your remote work day? The boundaries are self-imposed and invisible. You might start earlier because you didn't have to commute. You might work later because your laptop is right there. Your difficult client exists only as a voice on a call or text in a thread. Your stressful deadline is a date in a digital calendar, not a visible pile of paperwork on your desk. Your partner doesn't see the mental context switching, the frustration of waiting for an email reply, the anxiety of a silent Slack channel after you've asked an important question.
And here's another layer: for many office workers, home represents rest. It's where you recharge after work. So seeing you "at work" in that space can create cognitive dissonance. Their brain categorizes home as non-work, making your labor there seem less legitimate. It's not fair, but it's a deeply ingrained association we're still unraveling in 2025.
The Emotional Tax of Constant Justification
When you're asked to account for your time, it puts you in a defensive position before you've even started describing your day. You're not sharing—you're justifying. And that takes a psychological toll that office workers rarely experience.
Every remote worker I've spoken to has a version of this story. You finish a complex task, feel a surge of accomplishment, and then immediately have to translate that accomplishment into terms your partner will understand. But how do you explain the two hours you spent untangling a database error that nobody will ever notice was fixed? How do you describe the emotional labor of calming an angry client when all your partner heard was your calm, measured voice from the other room? How do you convey the mental exhaustion of making 47 small decisions before lunch?
This constant translation is emotional labor. It's extra work on top of your work. And when your efforts at explanation are met with a blank stare or a dismissive "Oh, okay," it feels like your expertise is being dismissed. Over time, this dynamic can make you start to question your own contributions. "If I can't make it sound impressive in two sentences, was it actually valuable?" That's a dangerous path.
The Reddit comment section was filled with people describing this exact erosion. One user wrote, "I started over-explaining every tiny task, which made me sound insecure, which made him take me less seriously. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy." Another said, "I'd find myself doing 'performative work'—making sure I was visibly typing when he walked by, just to prove I was doing something." That's no way to work. And it's certainly no way to live.
What's Really Happening During Those 9 Hours?
Let's break down a typical demanding remote day, like the one described in the original post. Because when someone asks "What did you do?" they're often imagining discrete, completed tasks. But modern knowledge work—especially remote—rarely looks like that.
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM: You join the first video call. It's a project sync with five people across three time zones. Two people have connection issues. Someone's dog barks. The agenda is vague. You spend 30 minutes getting everyone aligned on what you're even discussing. You take notes, volunteer for an action item, and spend 15 minutes after the call clarifying expectations over Slack.
11:00 AM - 1:00 PM: You dive into deep work on that action item. This requires concentration—reading documentation, testing approaches, writing code or copy or calculations. You're in flow state. Then, ping! An urgent message from your manager about the client being "difficult." You context-switch. You review the client's latest complaints, draft a diplomatic response, run it by your manager, revise it, send it. The deep work momentum is gone. It takes 15 minutes to get back into it.
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: You grab lunch at your desk while scanning emails. You eat with one hand and type with the other. This isn't a break—it's asynchronous meeting time.
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM: Back-to-back client calls. Each requires a different tone, different knowledge set, different objectives. You're presenting, listening, troubleshooting, promising, reassuring. Your "performance energy" is draining fast, but you have to keep it up. Between calls, you jot down follow-up items. Your to-do list grows.
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM: The deadline-driven push. You're finalizing deliverables, proofreading, testing last-minute changes. You're messaging with teammates who are also in crunch mode. The pressure is palpable even though you're alone. You finally hit send on the deliverable at 5:58 PM. The relief is physical.
Now, describe that day in answer to "What did you do?" "Uh, had some meetings and finished a project." See the disconnect? The complexity, the emotional regulation, the constant pivoting—it gets lost in translation.
Communication Strategies That Actually Work
Okay, so we understand the problem. How do we fix it? Having the same frustrated conversation repeatedly won't help. You need new approaches. Here are strategies that remote workers in 2025 are using to bridge this understanding gap.
First, reframe the conversation timing. Don't try to explain your day when you're both tired and hungry right after work. That's setting up for failure. Instead, create a weekly "work debrief" over weekend coffee. When you're both relaxed, share highlights and lowlights from the week. Talk about your projects in narrative form—the challenge, what you tried, how it turned out. This feels more like sharing than justifying.
Second, make the invisible visible. Office work has natural visibility. Create some for yourself. Use a shared digital calendar? Block your deep work time with labels. Use a project management tool like Trello or Asana? Share your board with your partner (if work-appropriate). Let them see your tasks moving from "To Do" to "Done." At the end of the week, share one concrete output: "Here's the report I wrote," or "Look at this dashboard I built." Tangible evidence helps.
Third, educate through analogy. Compare your remote work challenges to things your partner experiences. "That back-to-back meeting day was like if you had to give presentations in different conference rooms all day, but also had to rebuild the projector between each one." "Debugging that issue was like searching for a specific paper in a filing cabinet that someone reorganized without telling anyone." Analogies build bridges.
Fourth, involve them in your routine occasionally. Let them hear one end of a difficult call (with permission). Show them the complicated spreadsheet you built. Explain why a particular email took 45 minutes to craft. Demystify your expertise. When they understand the skill involved, they're more likely to respect the effort.
Setting Boundaries Without Building Walls
Part of the "what did you do" question stems from blurred boundaries. If you're always at your desk, when are you working versus just being on your computer? Creating clearer separation helps both of you.
Establish a definitive end to your workday. Shut down your computer—literally turn it off if you can. Put your work phone in a drawer. Change your clothes. Perform a ritual that signals "work is done." This visual cue helps your partner, but it also helps you psychologically detach.
Designate a workspace, even if it's just a specific chair. When you're there, you're working. When you're not, you're not. This physical boundary helps your partner read your status without asking. In 2025, affordable home office solutions make this easier than ever. A simple room divider, a dedicated desk, even a particular lamp that's on during work hours can create that signal.
And here's a pro tip: schedule your "visible chores" strategically. If you throw in a load of laundry during a break, do it discreetly. I know that sounds counterintuitive—shouldn't you show you're multitasking? Actually, no. When your partner later sees you folding laundry, they might unconsciously attribute that time to your workday, thinking "She had time to do laundry, so her work couldn't have been that intense." Protect your work time's perceived integrity. Household tasks are separate. Keep them separate.
When It's More Than Just Misunderstanding
Sometimes, the "what did you do" question isn't about confusion—it's about control, resentment, or deeper relationship issues. It's important to recognize when you're dealing with more than a communication gap.
Red flags include: consistent dismissal of your work's importance, refusal to engage with your explanations, comparing your job unfavorably to "real jobs," or using your home presence to assign you more household responsibilities by default. These patterns suggest a fundamental lack of respect for your profession or your autonomy.
If you suspect this is the case, the conversation needs to shift from "helping you understand my day" to "why you don't respect my career." That's harder. It might require couples counseling. It definitely requires you to assert your professional value clearly: "My job contributes X to our household income and provides Y benefits. It requires Z skills. Your comments suggest you don't value that. We need to talk about why."
Remember, your work is valid even if someone else doesn't understand it. Your expertise is real even if you can't demonstrate it physically. In 2025, companies aren't keeping remote workers because they're charitable—they're doing it because remote work produces results. You are part of that proof.
Tools That Can Help (and One That Might Not)
Technology got us into this remote work reality, and it can offer some solutions too. But choose wisely.
Time-tracking apps like Toggl or Clockify can provide data about where your hours go. This isn't about justifying yourself to your partner daily, but if there's genuine curiosity about your work composition, a weekly report can show: "See, 35% of my time was in meetings, 40% was deep work, 15% was communication, 10% was planning." Data depersonalizes the issue.
Project management tools make progress visible. A simple Kanban board showing your tasks moving from "To Do" to "Doing" to "Done" offers a visual narrative of productivity. Tools like Trello, Asana, or Notion can be shared in read-only mode if you want to provide a window into your workflow without collaboration.
But here's the tool I caution against: constant availability. Don't leave your work chat open on the family tablet. Don't have email notifications popping up on your personal phone during dinner. These tools blur boundaries and make it look like your work is always interruptible, which subtly undermines its seriousness. Defend your offline time as fiercely as your focus time.
And for automating some of the more tedious data-gathering or reporting aspects of making your work visible? Some teams use platforms like Apify to pull together automated reports from various work tools. It's a way to create visibility without manual labor. But honestly? Your partner shouldn't need a dashboard to believe you worked hard. The goal is mutual understanding, not surveillance.
Your Worth Isn't Measured By Someone Else's Understanding
At the end of all this, here's the most important thing to remember: your value as a professional doesn't decrease because someone fails to recognize it. That Reddit poster worked a solid 9-hour day under pressure. That's an objective fact, regardless of her husband's question.
The shift to remote work in the 2020s changed where we work, but it didn't change the fundamentals of knowledge work. It still requires expertise, judgment, creativity, and perseverance. It still produces value. The container changed; the content didn't.
If you're facing this "what did you do" dynamic, start with empathy—for yourself and your partner. It's a new world, and we're all learning. Use the strategies here to build understanding. But also, build your own confidence. Keep a work journal for yourself. Note your accomplishments, big and small. At the end of the week, read it. See the pattern of your contribution.
And maybe, next time you're asked that question, you can try a different response. Instead of launching into a defensive list, you might say: "I used my expertise to solve problems and create value, same as you. How was your day?" Then listen. Because sometimes, the question isn't really about your productivity. Sometimes, it's just a clumsy request for connection after a long day apart. And that's something you can both understand.
