Re-anchored lives: Working from home, gender, and everyday well-being in Sweden

• WFH reshapes time use and well-being through home-bound recoupling. • Women report less stress, time scarcity, and better health when WFH. • WFH shows negative, non-significant effects on men’s well-being. • Social participation remains stable regardless of work location. • WFH may ease time pressures and promote well-being among women. The normalization of frequent, full-day working from home (WFH) marks a structural shift in the spatial organization of everyday life, with profound implications for time use and well-being. This article contributes to the growing literature on the social consequences of WFH by theorizing the home as a renewed site of socio-temporal anchoring. We propose the concept of home-bound recoupling to capture how WFH practices re-anchor everyday life to place, reshaping temporal experience and individual welfare. Focusing on four key dimensions of well-being – perceived time scarcity, stress, self-reported health, and social participation – we draw on representative data from the 2021 Swedish Survey of Time Use (subsample N = 625), collected shortly after the lifting of Sweden’s Covid-19-related WFH recommendations. We compare individuals engaged in WFH and working from the office (WFO) on a typical weekday, controlling for bounded time spent on paid work. The results reveal gender divergences: WFH is associated with improved well-being among women, who report lower time pressure, reduced stress, and better health relative to their WFO counterparts. For men, the associations are not statistically significant and, in most cases, trend in a negative direction. Social participation remains stable across work settings for both genders. We conclude that WFH can function as a gender-sensitive strategy for mitigating intensifying time pressures in daily life and enhancing everyday well-being. By conceptualizing WFH within broader processes of spatial recoupling, this study advances theoretical debates on digital labor geographies and the restructuring of home-space under post-pandemic conditions.