Even in the 19th century, workers were beginning to resent the grind of office life.
"You don’t know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief, day after day,” British essayist Charles Lamb wrote in a letter to poet William Wordsworth back in 1822, railing against his toil in the East India Company’s office in Leadenhall Street, London.
For the last 17 months, however, Lamb’s modern successors have mostly worked from home, liberated from what he termed "official confinement.” Today’s white-collar staff are living through a radical transformation of professional life, one that economists say is already beginning to jump-start economic productivity and accelerate innovation.