Overnight fridge retard or same day bake when I leave the house at 6am Technique

One practical caveat: your fridge temperature matters. At 4C a shaped loaf is happy for 18 hours. At 7C, which a lot of full domestic fridges actually run at, it can over-ferment overnight. Put a thermometer in there for a day before you commit to the schedule.

Retard, and it is not close for a working week. The fridge is what turns bread from an event into a background task: you do 15 minutes of active work in the evening, the dough sits cold for 12 to 20 hours, and you bake straight from the fridge with no warm up when you get home the next day. You also get better flavour and a much easier dough to score. The shelf space problem is real but a shaped boule in a banneton inside a bag is about the footprint of a large mixing bowl, and you can retard in the same tub you bulked in if space is truly tight.

Same day bakes are worth keeping for the day off, though. They are a different loaf, milder and softer, and doing both teaches you a lot about what the cold time is actually contributing.

If the fridge is genuinely full, an unheated garage or a cool porch in winter does the same job. I retard at 8 to 10C outdoors from November to March and it is fine, just faster.