6 ms·

After having spent plenty of time in multiple environments, any kind of absolute statements one way or the other are bound to be incorrect. IMO it's highly pers

After having spent plenty of time in multiple environments, any kind of absolute statements one way or the other are bound to be incorrect. IMO it's highly person and situation specific. For me the best order of productivity is: 1. In office but not surrounded by co-workers i.e. can focus for long hours without distractions. 2. At Home and not distracted by family members or other "temptations/errands" at home. 3. Office with co-workers 4. Home with family members/errands to take care of, which there can be plenty of during these Covid days. Some people don't like to be alone and for them Option (1) isn't going to work. They like to be surrounded by other working people to have that sense of group work which helps power them through. For them Option (3) will clearly be the best. Beyond that it also comes down to individual habits. Do you have a system to work at home? Without that one can be pretty ineffective. What's your "sustained focus" mechanism or algorithm? It can be a mix of: - Micro goals system that works intra-day not just inter-day. - Shutting off distractions by keeping the phone in a separate room (if the job allows, since computer can still relay most of the information) - Clever use of headphones with the right kind of music or background noise that works for you. - Some notion and measure of self-accountability. - many others The current environment is a pretty good time (and test) to strengthen any of the productivity habits. It takes practice but I don't see what the alternative is.

sharadov 7y ago
I was extremely productive WFH full time till the stay-at-home started. Now I've the wife WFH and 2 kids to take care of. I can't get any sustained work done.
- satysin 7y ago
  IMHO working from home only really works if you are alone (or the other people are also working from home, i.e. quiet and considerate). Sure you might be able to get an hour or two of quality work time while your partner and kid are watching a movie but the rest of the time is a nightmare. I have worked from home for a while now. I have a home office that is just for work. I work from home to be more flexible, remove my commute and remove physical office interruptions. And because I just generally prefer being on my own when I work. Even with a dedicated home office I find working from home very difficult when others are around such as weekends.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - sharadov 7y ago
    Cannot agree more!
capableweb 7y ago
> IMO it's highly person and situation specific Yeah, I wish this was more normal to aim for, "It depends". Everyone is always trying to come up with a silver bullet that works for everything, and once they find something that works for them, they try to shove it down everyone's throat. Same happened when "open floor offices" gained popularity, the cargo culting began and now you're a bad company unless you have a open floor office. Same is happening with remote work. As someone who mostly does frontend, I need to be able to work tightly with product and design teams, to communicate and ask questions during implementation. But back when I did backend work, I could mostly just receive requirements from product and frontend team, spend time in isolation to fulfill those requirements and my work was done (most of the time at least, not always).
- eshyong 7y ago
  IMO the real reason open floor plans persist is because it's cheaper for the company than the alternatives (cubicles, offices). The more people you can pack into work "pods" the better.
  - opo 7y ago
    The usual cost argument for open floor plans is that by devoting less square feet to each employee, you save money on rent. (The costs to actually put in a door and some sheet rock walls is a one time expense that isn't very high in comparison to the monthly costs for rent.) The reality though is that if employees are less productive, any savings in rent will be small compared to the costs associated with lower worker productivity (assuming you have expensive employees like engineers etc).
chapium 7y ago
TBH you should hard stop on errands and temptations. Just set aside time on the calendar for them and keep it in sync with your flow. These can be very damaging to productivity since they are disruptive.
slx26 7y ago
Agree with the idea that it depends a lot on many factors, many of them unique to each person. I'm sad that we interpret averaged figures as "data proves that [...]" as if we were trying to win a war of opinions instead of trying to make everyone's life better. What kind of work do you do? What type of person are you? What's your work space, both at the office and at home? Who's your boss and which are the work dynamics at your workplace? How many distractions do you have there vs at home? How long do you have to commute if you go to the office? And how annoying is it? I feel we are still pretty new at all this and really suck at it. There are many ideas very unexplored, like making pairs or small groups from time to time to let employees that are geographically close work together in some projects, and have flexibility to organize their work inside their own group. Who knows, maybe in 100 years, for the types of jobs that allow it, we won't have such strict employee - company relationships, and we will focus more on projects, with spaces and teammates being something more flexible, where we have a say in the way we want to organize. That might be interesting.
robotresearcher 7y ago
> any kind of absolute statements one way or the other are bound to be incorrect. The article: "Data proves it: Remote work boosts productivity." "This groundbreaking study, involving 16,000 participants, was conducted by Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom" Of course different people work better in different modes. But since there's no reason to believe that we are uniformly distributed through those modes, one mode could be net more productive by objective absolute measures even if lots of people are in a suboptimal mode.
- compiler-guy 7y ago
  The mistake people and companies will inevitably make is believing that because, on net, having everyone work from home makes people more productive, it will make a specific person more productive. In other words, companies may misinterpret this study as "everyone working from home" is the optimal solution. But the optimal solution is some people working from home and some people not.
  - robotresearcher 7y ago
    Agreed. I just looked at the study itself, and there's an important fact that the article does not mention. There were two test groups WFH and on-site. The WFH groups were volunteers, and their outcomes were better. It's interesting that the net productivity of the on-site workers did not go up despite the removal of the self-selected WFH-curious population. The study: https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/f/wfh.pdf https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/...
    - rv-de 7y ago
      That is a really important detail I must say.
    - James_Henry 7y ago
      This is great in that it shows that people who volunteer to work from home end up being more productive at home. However, knowing that you are part of a study that is measuring how effective people are at home and in the office and being someone who volunteered to work from home, there are clearly incentives for those assigned to work from home to work harder and for those assigned to work in the office to work less hard.
Shorel 7y ago
Yes, but the overwhelming consensus I read on other forums is the report of the failure of the work-from-home policy at Yahoo some years ago. So, this is a counterpoint to the current absolute-statement circulating online.
Reedx 7y ago
Yeah, absolute statements about this (and many things) are rather silly. It depends on so many variables - office setup/environment, home setup/env, type of work, personality, coworkers, commute distance, etc. Everyone will have to figure out what works best for their particular situation. For some that'll be remote, for some office and for others a mix of the two. I think the important thing is for companies to consider the options in a thoughtful, big picture way. Also not assume that current remote productivity is indicative of remote work during non-pandemic times, heh.
snarf21 7y ago
Right, there are always tradeoffs. Some engineers think LOC is a measure of productivity but 2 days of architecture discussion could save 100s of hours. At the same time, constant Slack messages and all day meetings create too much overhead. There is no silver bullet. I've always felt it best to have each team run how it runs best and let the team leads handle the synchronization. It is hard to have teams go off and not build the wrong thing even with documentation. Managers have to understand not just the what but also the how and why. Additionally, some people like me hate working from home. I don't feel part of a team at home. It feels more like a hated chore at the house. I've bought co-working memberships to help separate work life from home life. It helps some people create and maintain healthy balance. Time together in person builds relationships in a way you can't over the phone. This happens today at larger companies that have several "work from office" locations. It creates a very us vs them mentality. People don't get the benefit of the doubt and (bad) assumptions are made.

sharadov 7y ago

I was extremely productive WFH full time till the stay-at-home started. Now I've the wife WFH and 2 kids to take care of. I can't get any sustained work done.

satysin 7y ago
IMHO working from home only really works if you are alone (or the other people are also working from home, i.e. quiet and considerate). Sure you might be able to get an hour or two of quality work time while your partner and kid are watching a movie but the rest of the time is a nightmare. I have worked from home for a while now. I have a home office that is just for work. I work from home to be more flexible, remove my commute and remove physical office interruptions. And because I just generally prefer being on my own when I work. Even with a dedicated home office I find working from home very difficult when others are around such as weekends.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sharadov 7y ago
  Cannot agree more!

capableweb 7y ago

> IMO it's highly person and situation specific Yeah, I wish this was more normal to aim for, "It depends". Everyone is always trying to come up with a silver bullet that works for everything, and once they find something that works for them, they try to shove it down everyone's throat. Same happened when "open floor offices" gained popularity, the cargo culting began and now you're a bad company unless you have a open floor office. Same is happening with remote work. As someone who mostly does frontend, I need to be able to work tightly with product and design teams, to communicate and ask questions during implementation. But back when I did backend work, I could mostly just receive requirements from product and frontend team, spend time in isolation to fulfill those requirements and my work was done (most of the time at least, not always).

eshyong 7y ago
IMO the real reason open floor plans persist is because it's cheaper for the company than the alternatives (cubicles, offices). The more people you can pack into work "pods" the better.
- opo 7y ago
  The usual cost argument for open floor plans is that by devoting less square feet to each employee, you save money on rent. (The costs to actually put in a door and some sheet rock walls is a one time expense that isn't very high in comparison to the monthly costs for rent.) The reality though is that if employees are less productive, any savings in rent will be small compared to the costs associated with lower worker productivity (assuming you have expensive employees like engineers etc).

chapium 7y ago

TBH you should hard stop on errands and temptations. Just set aside time on the calendar for them and keep it in sync with your flow. These can be very damaging to productivity since they are disruptive.

slx26 7y ago

Agree with the idea that it depends a lot on many factors, many of them unique to each person. I'm sad that we interpret averaged figures as "data proves that [...]" as if we were trying to win a war of opinions instead of trying to make everyone's life better. What kind of work do you do? What type of person are you? What's your work space, both at the office and at home? Who's your boss and which are the work dynamics at your workplace? How many distractions do you have there vs at home? How long do you have to commute if you go to the office? And how annoying is it? I feel we are still pretty new at all this and really suck at it. There are many ideas very unexplored, like making pairs or small groups from time to time to let employees that are geographically close work together in some projects, and have flexibility to organize their work inside their own group. Who knows, maybe in 100 years, for the types of jobs that allow it, we won't have such strict employee - company relationships, and we will focus more on projects, with spaces and teammates being something more flexible, where we have a say in the way we want to organize. That might be interesting.

robotresearcher 7y ago

> any kind of absolute statements one way or the other are bound to be incorrect. The article: "Data proves it: Remote work boosts productivity." "This groundbreaking study, involving 16,000 participants, was conducted by Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom" Of course different people work better in different modes. But since there's no reason to believe that we are uniformly distributed through those modes, one mode could be net more productive by objective absolute measures even if lots of people are in a suboptimal mode.

compiler-guy 7y ago
The mistake people and companies will inevitably make is believing that because, on net, having everyone work from home makes people more productive, it will make a specific person more productive. In other words, companies may misinterpret this study as "everyone working from home" is the optimal solution. But the optimal solution is some people working from home and some people not.
- robotresearcher 7y ago
  Agreed. I just looked at the study itself, and there's an important fact that the article does not mention. There were two test groups WFH and on-site. The WFH groups were volunteers, and their outcomes were better. It's interesting that the net productivity of the on-site workers did not go up despite the removal of the self-selected WFH-curious population. The study: https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/f/wfh.pdf https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/...
  - rv-de 7y ago
    That is a really important detail I must say.
  - James_Henry 7y ago
    This is great in that it shows that people who volunteer to work from home end up being more productive at home. However, knowing that you are part of a study that is measuring how effective people are at home and in the office and being someone who volunteered to work from home, there are clearly incentives for those assigned to work from home to work harder and for those assigned to work in the office to work less hard.

Shorel 7y ago

Yes, but the overwhelming consensus I read on other forums is the report of the failure of the work-from-home policy at Yahoo some years ago. So, this is a counterpoint to the current absolute-statement circulating online.

Reedx 7y ago

Yeah, absolute statements about this (and many things) are rather silly. It depends on so many variables - office setup/environment, home setup/env, type of work, personality, coworkers, commute distance, etc. Everyone will have to figure out what works best for their particular situation. For some that'll be remote, for some office and for others a mix of the two. I think the important thing is for companies to consider the options in a thoughtful, big picture way. Also not assume that current remote productivity is indicative of remote work during non-pandemic times, heh.

snarf21 7y ago

Right, there are always tradeoffs. Some engineers think LOC is a measure of productivity but 2 days of architecture discussion could save 100s of hours. At the same time, constant Slack messages and all day meetings create too much overhead. There is no silver bullet. I've always felt it best to have each team run how it runs best and let the team leads handle the synchronization. It is hard to have teams go off and not build the wrong thing even with documentation. Managers have to understand not just the what but also the how and why. Additionally, some people like me hate working from home. I don't feel part of a team at home. It feels more like a hated chore at the house. I've bought co-working memberships to help separate work life from home life. It helps some people create and maintain healthy balance. Time together in person builds relationships in a way you can't over the phone. This happens today at larger companies that have several "work from office" locations. It creates a very us vs them mentality. People don't get the benefit of the doubt and (bad) assumptions are made.