13 ms·

Why are some people better at working from home than others?

181 points by BerislavLopac 7y ago

dlkf 7y ago
The discussion so far is largely unproductive, because it is conflating "WFH life" and "we're in the midst of a global pandemic and we can't do our favourite activities." Personally I'm hating my current situation, but if I could go to a concert or plan a vacation, WFH might be awesome. I really have no idea.
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
I’ve found the WFH experiment very unsurprising. Diligent and reliable coworkers are just as diligent and reliable. People who were iffy in person are basically non-existent WFH.
- andybak 7y ago
  So you dispute that "struggles in the office but thrives WFH" is a real category?
  - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
    I actually wonder about such a person. Do they exist? I haven’t had enough time WFH to tell.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - andybak 7y ago
      Yeah. It's me for a start.
wait_a_minute 7y ago
For the same reason some people are better at working from the office than others - they just do the work and are diligent about putting in the time required. Someone who is motivated to do the work will do the work from anywhere. I'm one of those people. If I didn't want to be doing the work, I'd be shirking my duties at the office too. And tech is still good enough for us workers that I'd go down the street for a new job before I ever got to the point where I didn't want to do the work anymore.
radicalbyte 7y ago
If you have a baby and two young children around who you also have to homeschool for 8 hours a day then you're not going to be "productive" working at home. People who slack at work by hide it by having lots of meetings / playing politics are useless whilst working-from home because they don't know how operate when their productivity is more visible.
- forinti 7y ago
  Also, some people are terrible at written communication and just can't do without face-to-face conversations.
  - srl 7y ago
    We have video meetings, though. WFH hasn't really changed the amount of written communication in my work. My closest collaborator falls pretty squarely under "terrible at written communication", but we still have sufficiently frequent face-to-face time to be about as productive as before. I'm in agreement with the general sentiment elsewhere in this thread, though. I've found nothing about people's WFH productivity that's surprising. People with kids are handicapped, but are often determined enough to find a way to make it work. For everybody else, it seems like the inequality in productivity just goes up, and it's harder to mask non-productivity by socializing well.
- thomk 7y ago
  Our solution is that I go to bed at 8pm and get up at 4am and work like mad until breakfast which is around 9am. Thats 5h of uninterrupted coding time, which is about the max my old brain can handle anyway. The hard part is doing 'working hours' business, but hey, I just email everyone from the potty. Sorry, ahem, bathroom.
  - radicalbyte 7y ago
    We did the same and it has been a war of attrition.
- analog31 7y ago
MattGaiser 7y ago
I haven't found the results of WFH to be surprising. The self-motivated people are getting just as much if not more work done. The people who are chatty in the office are more unproductive at home simply because the main reason they stopped chatting was because the boss walked by. I don't think they are more productive as shirking work in the office is equally easy. Just claim to be doing "background research." Work from home just removes the outside influences, causing people to become more like who they would otherwise be. In my case, I ignore meetings and just have them on in the background. I am barely in attendance. I can't do that in the office as my managers/team are watching. That is my one behavioral change.
cameronbrown 7y ago
Kids.
markbaikal 7y ago
While working in an office, I considered myself one of the more productive members of my team, and one colleague called me the most productive team member. Now, working from home, I am often standing up, walking around and dreaming for hours. I am glad I was allowed to return to an office alone this Monday. I am not 100% sure it is all due to WFH because my assigned project changed at about the same time but I can only hope I'll recover when I'm in an office again, even if nobody else is there to watch over me.
- MattGaiser 7y ago
  How much of that walk around time is just time saving from other things? I'm also called productive by my team and I do the same as I save so much time by not having to deal with interruptions, leaving meetings on in the background, and and being able to work through lunch.
  - markbaikal 7y ago
    None of the walkaround time is saved from other things I'd say. I don't work through lunch, my lunch break has gotten longer because I make food instead of eating in the canteen, and lunch is one of the enjoyable times when I do not feel guilty for not working. The 'enjoyable because I do not feel guilty for not working' is somewhat true for the meetings now as well.
Noos 7y ago
Some people need to go to a gym to do their exercise, some people are okay with a home gym. It's little to do with diligence or anything, people have different styles of motivation or drive.
fullito 7y ago
I actually thought i'm the type of person who needs the office. Apparently i'm not. That gives me great hope for my future plan to do home office when buying a farm. Just yesterday i did nothing in the morning and worked highly concentrated and efficient until 10pm (that was a one time thing normally i'm quite punctual as i had an private appointment). When working at the office, i have to hurry to be on time and at the evening i'm stressing on going home because i wanna see my wife and a wanna eat something. Now my wife is here anyway and i'm much more flexible now.
- ndespres 7y ago
  I like the flexibility, but you have to be conscious to still set boundaries. Having to leave the office to catch my train on time is a great motivator to make sure everything is wrapped up and I don't linger at the office. When work is at home, what's another 15 minutes, or 30, or 2 hours.. I'm hearing from my coworkers that they are having a hard time with separating at the end of the day, when "going home" is just going into the other room (or disconnecting from the VPN).
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    > I'm hearing from my coworkers that they are having a hard time with separating at the end of the day Yup, the thing I always try to remember is tomorrow's another day and that whatever I'm working on likely isn't as important as I'm making it out to be.
mns 7y ago
Everyone is different and the whole thing depends on so many things, that there is no one solution fits all. I started my career or a good part of it as a freelancer and then with my own company that was fully remote in a time where home office wasn’t even a thing. I loved it, I was working for myself, I could work whenever I wanted, could take time off, but also had big projects where I was working 7 days a week for a month. I didn’t care because in the end I was young and single and life was simple. Now, working in a company, I miss the office so much. I don’t like this lack of border between work and personal life. I didn’t sign up for this, my home is my own space and I don’t want calls, I don’t want anything related to work in there. I don’t like having my work laptop and equipment in my personal space and office, I don’t like switching laptops just so that I can do something else that I like. The thing is, I like the office where I work, I like my colleagues, I like our lunches, I like the social interactions, it was always a nice change of space where I could fully focus on my work, knowing that when I leave the building, work is done and I’m switching to my other environment.
haram_masala 7y ago
I’m finding myself to be terrible working from home, but (a) I have kids, one of whom needs a lot of supervision, (b) the only real focused workspace I have is in my unfinished basement, and it’s as dank and awful as most such basements are. I’ve ended several workdays wheezing and coughing.
- cma 7y ago
  I'd recommend at least getting a quiet dehumidifier and an air purifier.
moron4hire 7y ago
Because some people are just better at their jobs and don't need to be rode crop to do it.
ergothus 7y ago
As of this writing, a lot of comments are sharing their varied personal experiences in WFH. Which is good, because they are all more interesting and valuable than the article, which skips the "varied" part and basically lumps everything in to "if you have troubles working from home, you need more willpower" (paraphrase). I found it insulting and was a bit surprised to see what I assumed to be American work-fetish from a BBC article. There are LOTS of reasons because people are very different and our environments are very different. I don't have kids, I am easily distracted by visuals or sounds in my periphery, I have a separate room for my home office, I don't have neighbors that share a wall or live above my ceiling, I have good internet service, I'm an introvert...so yeah, I have an easier time working from home. But those that don't, they obviously just lack dedication to work. Garbage.
- opportune 7y ago
  I think willpower is an important factor, but not the only one. The bigger issue is viewing lack of willpower as a personal moral failing rather than something that can be fixed with practice and attention. I really buy into the fact that willpower is like a muscle that you can exercise and that there are real practical ways to improve it. I've seen huge increases in my own focus and working ability in the last five years - part of that due to a maturing prefrontal cortex but in large part also because I've taken concrete steps to improving it (and reducing procrastination). That is not to say that all distractions are easily fixed or that everybody should have great focus and attention.
  - Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
    Can you give any tips on where to start? Any particular books or anything you found helpful in giving you practical ways to exercise your willpower?
    - icer2312 7y ago
      If I've got any sort of work to do, where I could just as easily load up a game, I say to myself "I'm going to work on this for ten minutes until 3:30pm. Then if I'm sick of working on it, I'll just play the game instead." It's exceptionally practical, since 95% of the time I end up working on that thing for longer than that ten minutes. For me, it alleviates the pressure of thinking I'll need to push through a task for hours by giving myself an escape hatch. It's a "motivation follows action" technique/trick/hack.
Ductapemaster 7y ago
One really positive thing I have found for myself in the WFH life is that I am taking MUCH better care of myself. So far I have lost weight, started a bodyweight workout routine, which I do in between meetings/calls/other work, and have gained back 2 hours of my day by not taking transit into the city. That's 2 more hours every day that I get to relax, work on a personal project, hang out with my SO, or even crush out some work-related interest if I am feeling motivated. It has also been a fantastic motivator and resource for cooking — I can start dinner before my workday is over, cook myself lunch, meal plan... I also pay thousands of dollars to live in a cool place, and now I am finally getting to enjoy it, and enjoy it with my SO. At the end of the day, maybe I am less "productive", by normal standards, but maybe I didn't need to be in an office for 8+ hours every day to get the parts of my job done that need getting done. There surely are parts of this that I want to change or can't wait to change, but at the end of the day I am grateful for the forcing function to working from home full-time.
- greggman3 7y ago
  Opposite for me. I gained weight because I no longer walk to work (walk to station, take subway, walk from office). And, I'm only a few feet from my kitchen so can eat. I have no S.O. so much lonelier not having co-workers to talk to, eat lunch with, etc...
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > One really positive thing I have found for myself in the WFH life is that I am taking MUCH better care of myself. I think people are going to come out of this one of two ways - half will come out fitter, mentally and physically, more positive, with new interests and skills and stronger relationships, and the other half are going to come out a mess (understandably.)
  - tayo42 7y ago
    I'm coming out of the this less fit, mostly because my workouts depended on being out of the house. gyms being open. Or freedom to travel to somewhere. Im also not eating as fresh as I normally do. I can usually get fish and vegetables and cook the day of. Now I gotta stock up on groceries for the week to reduce shopping frequency.
gorgoiler 7y ago
I’m an introvert and a teacher. In class I successfully turn myself into a charismatic extrovert. I have 80+ teenage pupils to manage remotely, with me on camera for a significant amount of that time. I find it very easy. All pupils have an iPad. We all have full accounts in Microsoft Outlook and in Google Classroom, Forms, Docs and Meet. Being remote has made me tighten up my document formatting game. I just set up a nice asciidoctor template to make classroom materials have a bit more wow factor for the assignments and ideas I post online. The tools hold pupils to deadlines. It’s a boundary they respect and it gets a lot more out of them. They find remote work a lot harder than I do of course. It makes school feel a lot more tiring. (Periods have about 30% face time and the rest they are left to work under their own steam — with parents no doubt pushing them on my behalf.) We will go back to school eventually and we had all these tools before but I don’t feel we used them to anything like the full extent we do right now. Remote teaching has really changed the game for me, for the better. It’s not something I’d choose to do — for their sake — but I’m enjoying what it’s helped me learn and look forward to carrying a ton of techniques over into the new school year.
myles_mv 7y ago
Discipline?
cmdshiftf4 7y ago
Let me caveat the following by saying that I'm one who believes the future of tech work is fully remote and personally hope to stay fully remote post-COVID. I do not believe now is the time to be drawing comparisons or conclusions between the office norm and the fully remote situation most of us have been thrust into. Sure, some people procrastinate more than others. Some people need more management than others to keep going. Some people are better self-driven and self-organized than others. The effects of the externalities many are now faced with - worry over savings / the state of the market - job security as we watch others get laid off - how the kids are holding up, how will this impact their education and future - sick family members - etc. etc. renders it impossible to draw conclusions meaningfully e.g. "Susan was super productive when we were working in the office, but she seems to have really dropped off now that she's remote. Looks like remote isn't for her!" or "I was so effective in the office but now that I'm at home I can't seem to get anything done, or focus, therefore I must not be cut out for remote work". Whilst in the background you, or Susan, are facing a big drop in your 401k, or you're worried your kids are watching too much tv at home all day, or Mom is headed out to get groceries again when she really shouldn't be and there's nothing I can do about it. I believe the sweet period when some sense of normality resumes but we're still mandated to WFH because it'll be impossible to institute social distancing effectively in cost-optimized open office spaces will be when we can more effectively starting measuring and drawing conclusions over fully remote work and its impact on people and the office.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  Honestly, it's just not for some people. And that's ok.
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    Thats true. The point of the comment is that the set of people who just aren't cut our to work from home happily and productively is a lot smaller than the set of people who can't work happily and productively right now, no matter where they work.
    - 7y ago
hatmatrix 7y ago
I wouldn't say that I'm very productive at home, but I'm also not any more productive at the office either.
fendy3002 7y ago
As a programmer, apparently for me the best will be WFH with coming to office in between, let's say 1 or 2 days a week, based on ongoing tasks. While wfh and online conference brings so much benefits, it cannot replace the value of face to face meeting. There are some problems that can be easily tackled with physical discussion, that can be complicated with online meeting / conference.
onemoresoop 7y ago
I find myself being more relaxed and because of that I indulge in breaks and brcause of that I end having to put in some work here and there at night after my kid fell sleep. So it feels like my whole day is work, lighter but permanent work.. At least its on my mind. The moment i was leaving the office work was out of mind. In an ideal world I’d do wfh 2-3 days a week and the rest in the office. I even miss my routine and buss ride to work. Some of it is I suspect simply isolation nonsense, im now saving 1.5 hours of commute which can’t possibly be worse
gamesbrainiac 7y ago
As a rule of thumb, what I've figured out is that people who have kids at home are far less productive than people who don't have kids.
imafish 7y ago
I’m an introvert with two small kids at home. They do not disturb during work hours (b/c wife). WFH has been a blessing these two last months. Minimum interruptions. I am probably 10-20% more productive than in the Office. Schedule: - get up at 8 - eat b/f with kids - work 8:30-12 - lunch + exercise 12-1pm - work 1-5pm It just works. I am much happier, less fatigued due to no commute AND I get exercise.
Avshalom 7y ago
no mention of babies, kids, teens, spouses or parents
2019-nCoV 7y ago
It mostly comes down introversion levels. While natural extroverts have always had the upper hand, contemporary technology is reversing this trend: Dating: moving from bars to apps Social: moving from third places to apps Working: moving from the office to apps
- alexpetralia 7y ago
  Software by the technologists, for the technologists!
angry_octet 7y ago
If I were not prone to procrastination, I wouldn't be reading articles from bbc.com that I found on HN. But procrastination isn't the problem, I can do that at the office too. The office even has many avenues of approved procrastination. No, the problem is I am not working at home by myself, in blissful isolation, but with a number of other people who demand my time and attention. I have read a number of "The self-motivated people are getting just as much if not more work done" posts, and to be frank, that is codwobble. Even self-motivated people experience pandemic anxiety and financial pressure, and have partners and children who they need to spend time with.
enriquto 7y ago
It depends a lot on your family situation. If you live in a small flat, locked down with a couple of young kids, then working from home is impossible.
theonemind 7y ago
I don’t get how some people work different hours at home. Generally, I have to have Slack availability and then the meetings all get scheduled around the standard 9-5 times. So I have to work the same times anyway, or else I will just look like I don’t work. Work from office seems like a lose-lose situation however. I have to commute, and at work, I just waste more time because showing up counts as work. I sort of wish I felt more at ease at home. I mostly work harder. So the one-size-fits-all-butts-in-seats, in some cases, falls into that stupidity where one party (the employer) causes a loss for both parties without benefits, because they’ll make no effort to figure out what works best for who and just have a dumb blanket policy.
- lucb1e 7y ago
  > I have to work the same times anyway, or else I will just look like I don’t work. Especially when working from home, doesn't one have to judge performance by the work output rather than physical presence? I understand that this ideal is not the reality everywhere, especially in the office if people don't know you started at 7am that they they'll look weird if you leave at 15h instead of 17h, but from home you can slack off anyway so you really have to look at the output and not presence. If not done already, you might want to look at tracking work time to make everyone feel confident that the others are doing their part, and bosses should notice when time worked does not match output.
- SyneRyder 7y ago
  > I don’t get how some people work different hours at home.. Not every company will have a stack of meetings or require you to be on Slack. For 10 years I did WFH for a company where everything happened via email, and it was designed to be asynchronous. That meant I could choose any hours to work, and I often worked at night & slept in through the morning. As long as the work got done and milestones were finished on time, it didn't matter. My personal opinion, but if a company is requiring you to work synchronously from home, something has gone a bit wrong and their processes are fragile. It's like multi-threaded code but the threads are always blocked waiting on each other. (In that case, the company is probably just doing WFH to save on rental costs and to get the employees to buy the office equipment instead.) At least in those cases you still get the benefit of designing the work environment you want with the gear you want, but you miss out on the time flexibility.
pier25 7y ago
I've been working from home for the past 10 years and I don't think I could go back to a regular office. - I can work at my own natural pace whenever I want. Some days I work 4 hours. Some days I work 12 hours until 1-2 am. - If I need to buy something I just do it. I can go to the supermarket at the best times. - I can eat home made food and follow any schedule I wish. My SO also works at home and we're doing intermittent fasting 4/20. We start eating at 2pm and stop at 6pm. - I loooove espresso. To give you an idea my espresso setup costs more than my work setup and I roast my own beans. No office could provide me with this. - We have 2 large dogs and we just couldn't abandon them for 8-10 hours every day. I don't know how people do that. - We can live wherever we want and we don't have to pay extra to live in a nice house. Gone are the days of living in apartments without garden.
- bostonpete 7y ago
  The question was asking why some people are better at working at home than others. You seemed to answer the question "how awesome is working at home?". ;-)
- gerdesj 7y ago
  My job title is Managing Director. I am learning quite quickly about working from home. Espresso - I don't roll my own but I love 85% Aribica with 15% Rombusta. I gather that is the Italian default brew and I concur. We do bean to cup rather than tree to cup. We used to look after other people's dogs. Wifey now walks me! We live next to a park and see many of our customers daily from afar. I could not give a shit about the money but we miss our friends. Even now I smile thinking about Cwtch (not a typo) and co. running madly around the meadow down hill from my house. Anyway, I am now seriously thinking about how we properly integrate home working in the future. There is a massive win-win if we all do it.
- lucb1e 7y ago
  > Some days I work 4 hours. Some days I work 12 hours until 1-2 am. Do you track those hours to make sure you don't think you worked enough but in fact consistently work too little or too much? Wondering because I had that problem (working slightly too much every week).
thrower123 7y ago
A lot of people don't really do anything but churn and make sound and fury, signifying nothing. There's much less cause for engaging in that behavior when everyone is working from home, so it becomes more apparent that they don't actually do anything productive.
ydb 7y ago
Some people are more motivated than others. Just like some people are more intelligent than others, or more athletic than others... some are more self-motivated and can work through their own initiative rather than relying on external input (such as managers). That's not a bad thing, either! We should encourage those self-motivated people to work however makes them the most productive members of our economy. That is incredibly crucial for the times that we live in.
- danielscrubs 7y ago
  When I was a manager I'd always just say to the people under me that they where driven, until they actually started to be motivated. It's a great little trick that made everyone happier, works on teaching programming too. I don't think it's that easy as self-motivation as a scale, it's all about the environment and task that makes people the most productive. I always want there to be someone with insane amounts of grit and ask how they do it. Insane amounts of grit would be: - Six pack and can run a marathon when old. - Recognised in their field. - Earned enough through work (not through the insane rise in housing prices) to be able to stay in their home for a decade without working. Checking all these boxes, would be the master of grit.
davidjnelson 7y ago
Written communication skills are crucial to successful remote work. Both writing and reading.
Madmallard 7y ago
Same reason some toddlers pass the marshmallow test and others don't.
- tibbydudeza 7y ago
  Thanks you made me google it ... wow interesting.
JesseMReeves 7y ago
I've always been a night owl and WFH seems to fix my mental health after years of trying to force myself to work during "normal office hours" (let's just agree to call them bricklaying and farming hours) in noisy office environments (I'm doing a mixture between natural science and AI which requires plenty of focus). I'm slowly regaining trust in my ability to focus, getting into flow, and feel "normal" again. I'm starting my day with food-related stuff, sports and work communication, then going for an open-end session only towards late afternoon when communication slows down, working into the night.
saeranv 7y ago
>> “All of this said, chronic procrastinators will procrastinate just about anywhere,” Pychyl adds. “That’s just something that’s inherent. It’s just your disposition, and it’s not going to change overnight.” Well that's depressing.
iambateman 7y ago
The article has some official-sounding theories about WFH, which may be a little more high-minded than necessary? Success working from home boils down to two things: 1. Desire to work from home and 2. Space free from distraction. I am the only long-term WFH guy working with an office of 40 “In office” folks who have found themselves at home. Some of them complain, others don’t. Some of them have toddlers (!!), others don’t.
f0rfun 7y ago
Because they have no young kids
PeterStuer 7y ago
I started WFH when the company I worked for had moved to a place where commuting meant 3 hours stuck in traffic each day. I never 'missed the office'. I found most people that do are confusing work with having an actual social life, which they lack because they spend the time it would take to build one listening to podcasts while stuck in traffic.
aszantu 7y ago
I've had so man bad experiences with ppl that I just came to hate them in general. I feel bothered by noises from outside, I hate my neighbour who just wants the house clean and asks me to clean outside of my room. She just wants a friend, but she akss for a thing back to just talk about how bad her back is and blabla... I liked the first few weeks of quietness when social distancing started,no I'm bothered by every noise that comes into my space.
gargs 7y ago
I am of the opinion that autonomy plays a major role in whether you enjoy working from home or not. If you have the autonomy to execute on a clear purpose that you have planned for yourself, there is seemingly no difference in whether that work is carried out in an office or at home. In my experience, all the need for constant feedback and 'catching up' is mostly a side effect of poor project management caused by kicking off work on unbaked requirements or where the estimations haven't been done well or where the dependencies were assumed to be in some state while they're not really there. That said, you could still catch up from home, if not more, simply because you don't have to scurry around looking for a quiet place or finding the colleague.
jokoon 7y ago
You need a home office, a separate room in your home. It's too easy to get distracted otherwise. Simple as that.
- l_davis 7y ago
  Some of us don't have the space for a separate home office. That being said, I WFHed part time before the pandemic, so the new part for me is being home 100 percent of the time. My workspace is a table in my (multipurpose) living room. I've made a small tweak or two since the pandemic but it is basically the same as before. My work and personal habits are better since the pandemic started. Several reasons. Part is that it is springtime, and I am much less of a couch potato naturally then. And the other part is that I have been taking the risks of getting sick and the associated issues like the economic problems seriously and making conscious efforts to take care of my health, reorganize my home, take steps towards bolstering my economic security, etc. I think that small distractions are OK (it's actually unhealthy to stay in your chair for too long) as long as they are kept under control.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    CGP Grey did a video about the importance of having different spaces for different activities¹, and in one of the comments for the video², one Vallejo B. said that they have handled the lack of physical space by using tricks to fool the mind into thinking it is a different space, using different lighting, sounds, tastes for different modes. Like stage set design, a simple difference goes a long way, and as long your own brain is fooled, it works. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck&lc=Ugzl3DOl0s0oSv6osRp4AaABAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck&lc=Ugzl3DOl0s0oS...
- lawn 7y ago
  While I agree that a home office is very good, saying that it's as simple as just having a home office isn't always enough. It's downplaying the issue. For instance having a set schedule, regular breaks, getting fresh air and filling the social need is not something that comes naturally to everyone or that a home office magically solve.
echelon 7y ago
I'm finding WFH incredibly distracting for an odd reason: my home office is where I work on my side hustle. Having to share my innovation space with work work is jarring, and I'm having a lot of difficulty disentangling the two. I now spent a lot of my work day thinking about my startup since I'm in the place where I used to do that in isolation. Ultimately I'm now a lot less productive at both. It's driving my focus and energy down.
Eridrus 7y ago
I feel.lioe so much of this discussion misses that all of these things about people are both situational and mutable. I've done some WFH on every job I've had, with wildly different results, depending on how motivated I was to do the work. Just because WFH did not work for you once doesn't mean you're not suited to it.
higeorge13 7y ago
It's a little bit too early to judge whether WFH works for everyone and i think that some companies are doing a wrong move deciding to go fully remote forever at these circumstances. The main point is that we were forced to work from home due to a global emergency, but it is way different to do it by choice and in companies formed with a remote work culture. Also i think there is some excuse for employees' current lack of productivity (due to the health concerns or summer break approaching) which will probably change in the next few months. People are probably seeing WFH as a chance to do their work from a beach house, an island, next to a pool and it's perfect because it's summer but most of them will hate it in the winter. Hence i foresee a lot of people currently loving it will change views after a few months or so and also a lot of companies getting frustrated with their employees and will request the majority of them to return to their premises.
olnluis 7y ago
I've been a remote worker since before the lockdowns started. My life is more of a mess now because work has become more intense since everyone started working remotely. It would be easy to ignore a single person asking for favor at 8PM but sometimes it's a whole team discussing stuff at night.
unsignedint 7y ago
I'm definitely in the group that works better in the office: 1) My productivity seems to be polarizing. In some day I feel I have accomplished a lot more, but in other days not great. Generally, many things seem to take longer to attain. 2) My working environment simply sucks. I only have cluttered desk with my personal equipment. I improvised the TV to use as my secondary monitor, but is definitely not optimal from ergonomic standpoint, so mostly ended up working on the tiny laptop screen. I upgrade to better chair, and that at least helped me a lot. 3) I don't have air conditioning, and if the WFH prolongs, this will be problematic. 4) My workout level certainly has dropped for a while after the lockdown WFH started. I have gradually improved this, by establishing daily walking, and remote work out sessions.
richardjennings 7y ago
Some people have ideal conditions to work in at home. Some people will struggle with increased costs and induced domestic stresses. Some people can communicate and socialise remotely. Some people will struggle to find reason to leave the house. Some people will repurpose commute times and flexibility to their advantage. Some people will stop looking after themselves.

181 points by BerislavLopac 7y ago

dlkf 7y ago

The discussion so far is largely unproductive, because it is conflating "WFH life" and "we're in the midst of a global pandemic and we can't do our favourite activities." Personally I'm hating my current situation, but if I could go to a concert or plan a vacation, WFH might be awesome. I really have no idea.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

I’ve found the WFH experiment very unsurprising. Diligent and reliable coworkers are just as diligent and reliable. People who were iffy in person are basically non-existent WFH.

andybak 7y ago
So you dispute that "struggles in the office but thrives WFH" is a real category?
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  I actually wonder about such a person. Do they exist? I haven’t had enough time WFH to tell.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - andybak 7y ago
    Yeah. It's me for a start.

wait_a_minute 7y ago

For the same reason some people are better at working from the office than others - they just do the work and are diligent about putting in the time required. Someone who is motivated to do the work will do the work from anywhere. I'm one of those people. If I didn't want to be doing the work, I'd be shirking my duties at the office too. And tech is still good enough for us workers that I'd go down the street for a new job before I ever got to the point where I didn't want to do the work anymore.

radicalbyte 7y ago

If you have a baby and two young children around who you also have to homeschool for 8 hours a day then you're not going to be "productive" working at home. People who slack at work by hide it by having lots of meetings / playing politics are useless whilst working-from home because they don't know how operate when their productivity is more visible.

forinti 7y ago
Also, some people are terrible at written communication and just can't do without face-to-face conversations.
- srl 7y ago
  We have video meetings, though. WFH hasn't really changed the amount of written communication in my work. My closest collaborator falls pretty squarely under "terrible at written communication", but we still have sufficiently frequent face-to-face time to be about as productive as before. I'm in agreement with the general sentiment elsewhere in this thread, though. I've found nothing about people's WFH productivity that's surprising. People with kids are handicapped, but are often determined enough to find a way to make it work. For everybody else, it seems like the inequality in productivity just goes up, and it's harder to mask non-productivity by socializing well.
thomk 7y ago
Our solution is that I go to bed at 8pm and get up at 4am and work like mad until breakfast which is around 9am. Thats 5h of uninterrupted coding time, which is about the max my old brain can handle anyway. The hard part is doing 'working hours' business, but hey, I just email everyone from the potty. Sorry, ahem, bathroom.
- radicalbyte 7y ago
  We did the same and it has been a war of attrition.
analog31 7y ago

MattGaiser 7y ago

I haven't found the results of WFH to be surprising. The self-motivated people are getting just as much if not more work done. The people who are chatty in the office are more unproductive at home simply because the main reason they stopped chatting was because the boss walked by. I don't think they are more productive as shirking work in the office is equally easy. Just claim to be doing "background research." Work from home just removes the outside influences, causing people to become more like who they would otherwise be. In my case, I ignore meetings and just have them on in the background. I am barely in attendance. I can't do that in the office as my managers/team are watching. That is my one behavioral change.

cameronbrown 7y ago

Kids.

markbaikal 7y ago

While working in an office, I considered myself one of the more productive members of my team, and one colleague called me the most productive team member. Now, working from home, I am often standing up, walking around and dreaming for hours. I am glad I was allowed to return to an office alone this Monday. I am not 100% sure it is all due to WFH because my assigned project changed at about the same time but I can only hope I'll recover when I'm in an office again, even if nobody else is there to watch over me.

MattGaiser 7y ago
How much of that walk around time is just time saving from other things? I'm also called productive by my team and I do the same as I save so much time by not having to deal with interruptions, leaving meetings on in the background, and and being able to work through lunch.
- markbaikal 7y ago
  None of the walkaround time is saved from other things I'd say. I don't work through lunch, my lunch break has gotten longer because I make food instead of eating in the canteen, and lunch is one of the enjoyable times when I do not feel guilty for not working. The 'enjoyable because I do not feel guilty for not working' is somewhat true for the meetings now as well.

Noos 7y ago

Some people need to go to a gym to do their exercise, some people are okay with a home gym. It's little to do with diligence or anything, people have different styles of motivation or drive.

fullito 7y ago

I actually thought i'm the type of person who needs the office. Apparently i'm not. That gives me great hope for my future plan to do home office when buying a farm. Just yesterday i did nothing in the morning and worked highly concentrated and efficient until 10pm (that was a one time thing normally i'm quite punctual as i had an private appointment). When working at the office, i have to hurry to be on time and at the evening i'm stressing on going home because i wanna see my wife and a wanna eat something. Now my wife is here anyway and i'm much more flexible now.

ndespres 7y ago
I like the flexibility, but you have to be conscious to still set boundaries. Having to leave the office to catch my train on time is a great motivator to make sure everything is wrapped up and I don't linger at the office. When work is at home, what's another 15 minutes, or 30, or 2 hours.. I'm hearing from my coworkers that they are having a hard time with separating at the end of the day, when "going home" is just going into the other room (or disconnecting from the VPN).
- hanniabu 7y ago
  > I'm hearing from my coworkers that they are having a hard time with separating at the end of the day Yup, the thing I always try to remember is tomorrow's another day and that whatever I'm working on likely isn't as important as I'm making it out to be.

mns 7y ago

Everyone is different and the whole thing depends on so many things, that there is no one solution fits all. I started my career or a good part of it as a freelancer and then with my own company that was fully remote in a time where home office wasn’t even a thing. I loved it, I was working for myself, I could work whenever I wanted, could take time off, but also had big projects where I was working 7 days a week for a month. I didn’t care because in the end I was young and single and life was simple. Now, working in a company, I miss the office so much. I don’t like this lack of border between work and personal life. I didn’t sign up for this, my home is my own space and I don’t want calls, I don’t want anything related to work in there. I don’t like having my work laptop and equipment in my personal space and office, I don’t like switching laptops just so that I can do something else that I like. The thing is, I like the office where I work, I like my colleagues, I like our lunches, I like the social interactions, it was always a nice change of space where I could fully focus on my work, knowing that when I leave the building, work is done and I’m switching to my other environment.

haram_masala 7y ago

I’m finding myself to be terrible working from home, but (a) I have kids, one of whom needs a lot of supervision, (b) the only real focused workspace I have is in my unfinished basement, and it’s as dank and awful as most such basements are. I’ve ended several workdays wheezing and coughing.

cma 7y ago
I'd recommend at least getting a quiet dehumidifier and an air purifier.

moron4hire 7y ago

Because some people are just better at their jobs and don't need to be rode crop to do it.

ergothus 7y ago

As of this writing, a lot of comments are sharing their varied personal experiences in WFH. Which is good, because they are all more interesting and valuable than the article, which skips the "varied" part and basically lumps everything in to "if you have troubles working from home, you need more willpower" (paraphrase). I found it insulting and was a bit surprised to see what I assumed to be American work-fetish from a BBC article. There are LOTS of reasons because people are very different and our environments are very different. I don't have kids, I am easily distracted by visuals or sounds in my periphery, I have a separate room for my home office, I don't have neighbors that share a wall or live above my ceiling, I have good internet service, I'm an introvert...so yeah, I have an easier time working from home. But those that don't, they obviously just lack dedication to work. Garbage.

opportune 7y ago
I think willpower is an important factor, but not the only one. The bigger issue is viewing lack of willpower as a personal moral failing rather than something that can be fixed with practice and attention. I really buy into the fact that willpower is like a muscle that you can exercise and that there are real practical ways to improve it. I've seen huge increases in my own focus and working ability in the last five years - part of that due to a maturing prefrontal cortex but in large part also because I've taken concrete steps to improving it (and reducing procrastination). That is not to say that all distractions are easily fixed or that everybody should have great focus and attention.
- Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
  Can you give any tips on where to start? Any particular books or anything you found helpful in giving you practical ways to exercise your willpower?
  - icer2312 7y ago
    If I've got any sort of work to do, where I could just as easily load up a game, I say to myself "I'm going to work on this for ten minutes until 3:30pm. Then if I'm sick of working on it, I'll just play the game instead." It's exceptionally practical, since 95% of the time I end up working on that thing for longer than that ten minutes. For me, it alleviates the pressure of thinking I'll need to push through a task for hours by giving myself an escape hatch. It's a "motivation follows action" technique/trick/hack.

Ductapemaster 7y ago

One really positive thing I have found for myself in the WFH life is that I am taking MUCH better care of myself. So far I have lost weight, started a bodyweight workout routine, which I do in between meetings/calls/other work, and have gained back 2 hours of my day by not taking transit into the city. That's 2 more hours every day that I get to relax, work on a personal project, hang out with my SO, or even crush out some work-related interest if I am feeling motivated. It has also been a fantastic motivator and resource for cooking — I can start dinner before my workday is over, cook myself lunch, meal plan... I also pay thousands of dollars to live in a cool place, and now I am finally getting to enjoy it, and enjoy it with my SO. At the end of the day, maybe I am less "productive", by normal standards, but maybe I didn't need to be in an office for 8+ hours every day to get the parts of my job done that need getting done. There surely are parts of this that I want to change or can't wait to change, but at the end of the day I am grateful for the forcing function to working from home full-time.

greggman3 7y ago
Opposite for me. I gained weight because I no longer walk to work (walk to station, take subway, walk from office). And, I'm only a few feet from my kitchen so can eat. I have no S.O. so much lonelier not having co-workers to talk to, eat lunch with, etc...
chrisseaton 7y ago
> One really positive thing I have found for myself in the WFH life is that I am taking MUCH better care of myself. I think people are going to come out of this one of two ways - half will come out fitter, mentally and physically, more positive, with new interests and skills and stronger relationships, and the other half are going to come out a mess (understandably.)
- tayo42 7y ago
  I'm coming out of the this less fit, mostly because my workouts depended on being out of the house. gyms being open. Or freedom to travel to somewhere. Im also not eating as fresh as I normally do. I can usually get fish and vegetables and cook the day of. Now I gotta stock up on groceries for the week to reduce shopping frequency.

gorgoiler 7y ago

I’m an introvert and a teacher. In class I successfully turn myself into a charismatic extrovert. I have 80+ teenage pupils to manage remotely, with me on camera for a significant amount of that time. I find it very easy. All pupils have an iPad. We all have full accounts in Microsoft Outlook and in Google Classroom, Forms, Docs and Meet. Being remote has made me tighten up my document formatting game. I just set up a nice asciidoctor template to make classroom materials have a bit more wow factor for the assignments and ideas I post online. The tools hold pupils to deadlines. It’s a boundary they respect and it gets a lot more out of them. They find remote work a lot harder than I do of course. It makes school feel a lot more tiring. (Periods have about 30% face time and the rest they are left to work under their own steam — with parents no doubt pushing them on my behalf.) We will go back to school eventually and we had all these tools before but I don’t feel we used them to anything like the full extent we do right now. Remote teaching has really changed the game for me, for the better. It’s not something I’d choose to do — for their sake — but I’m enjoying what it’s helped me learn and look forward to carrying a ton of techniques over into the new school year.

myles_mv 7y ago

Discipline?

cmdshiftf4 7y ago

Let me caveat the following by saying that I'm one who believes the future of tech work is fully remote and personally hope to stay fully remote post-COVID. I do not believe now is the time to be drawing comparisons or conclusions between the office norm and the fully remote situation most of us have been thrust into. Sure, some people procrastinate more than others. Some people need more management than others to keep going. Some people are better self-driven and self-organized than others. The effects of the externalities many are now faced with - worry over savings / the state of the market - job security as we watch others get laid off - how the kids are holding up, how will this impact their education and future - sick family members - etc. etc. renders it impossible to draw conclusions meaningfully e.g. "Susan was super productive when we were working in the office, but she seems to have really dropped off now that she's remote. Looks like remote isn't for her!" or "I was so effective in the office but now that I'm at home I can't seem to get anything done, or focus, therefore I must not be cut out for remote work". Whilst in the background you, or Susan, are facing a big drop in your 401k, or you're worried your kids are watching too much tv at home all day, or Mom is headed out to get groceries again when she really shouldn't be and there's nothing I can do about it. I believe the sweet period when some sense of normality resumes but we're still mandated to WFH because it'll be impossible to institute social distancing effectively in cost-optimized open office spaces will be when we can more effectively starting measuring and drawing conclusions over fully remote work and its impact on people and the office.

james_s_tayler 7y ago
Honestly, it's just not for some people. And that's ok.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  Thats true. The point of the comment is that the set of people who just aren't cut our to work from home happily and productively is a lot smaller than the set of people who can't work happily and productively right now, no matter where they work.
  - 7y ago

hatmatrix 7y ago

I wouldn't say that I'm very productive at home, but I'm also not any more productive at the office either.

fendy3002 7y ago

As a programmer, apparently for me the best will be WFH with coming to office in between, let's say 1 or 2 days a week, based on ongoing tasks. While wfh and online conference brings so much benefits, it cannot replace the value of face to face meeting. There are some problems that can be easily tackled with physical discussion, that can be complicated with online meeting / conference.

onemoresoop 7y ago

I find myself being more relaxed and because of that I indulge in breaks and brcause of that I end having to put in some work here and there at night after my kid fell sleep. So it feels like my whole day is work, lighter but permanent work.. At least its on my mind. The moment i was leaving the office work was out of mind. In an ideal world I’d do wfh 2-3 days a week and the rest in the office. I even miss my routine and buss ride to work. Some of it is I suspect simply isolation nonsense, im now saving 1.5 hours of commute which can’t possibly be worse

gamesbrainiac 7y ago

As a rule of thumb, what I've figured out is that people who have kids at home are far less productive than people who don't have kids.

imafish 7y ago

I’m an introvert with two small kids at home. They do not disturb during work hours (b/c wife). WFH has been a blessing these two last months. Minimum interruptions. I am probably 10-20% more productive than in the Office. Schedule: - get up at 8 - eat b/f with kids - work 8:30-12 - lunch + exercise 12-1pm - work 1-5pm It just works. I am much happier, less fatigued due to no commute AND I get exercise.

Avshalom 7y ago

no mention of babies, kids, teens, spouses or parents

2019-nCoV 7y ago

It mostly comes down introversion levels. While natural extroverts have always had the upper hand, contemporary technology is reversing this trend: Dating: moving from bars to apps Social: moving from third places to apps Working: moving from the office to apps

alexpetralia 7y ago
Software by the technologists, for the technologists!

angry_octet 7y ago

If I were not prone to procrastination, I wouldn't be reading articles from bbc.com that I found on HN. But procrastination isn't the problem, I can do that at the office too. The office even has many avenues of approved procrastination. No, the problem is I am not working at home by myself, in blissful isolation, but with a number of other people who demand my time and attention. I have read a number of "The self-motivated people are getting just as much if not more work done" posts, and to be frank, that is codwobble. Even self-motivated people experience pandemic anxiety and financial pressure, and have partners and children who they need to spend time with.

enriquto 7y ago

It depends a lot on your family situation. If you live in a small flat, locked down with a couple of young kids, then working from home is impossible.

theonemind 7y ago

I don’t get how some people work different hours at home. Generally, I have to have Slack availability and then the meetings all get scheduled around the standard 9-5 times. So I have to work the same times anyway, or else I will just look like I don’t work. Work from office seems like a lose-lose situation however. I have to commute, and at work, I just waste more time because showing up counts as work. I sort of wish I felt more at ease at home. I mostly work harder. So the one-size-fits-all-butts-in-seats, in some cases, falls into that stupidity where one party (the employer) causes a loss for both parties without benefits, because they’ll make no effort to figure out what works best for who and just have a dumb blanket policy.

lucb1e 7y ago
> I have to work the same times anyway, or else I will just look like I don’t work. Especially when working from home, doesn't one have to judge performance by the work output rather than physical presence? I understand that this ideal is not the reality everywhere, especially in the office if people don't know you started at 7am that they they'll look weird if you leave at 15h instead of 17h, but from home you can slack off anyway so you really have to look at the output and not presence. If not done already, you might want to look at tracking work time to make everyone feel confident that the others are doing their part, and bosses should notice when time worked does not match output.
SyneRyder 7y ago
> I don’t get how some people work different hours at home.. Not every company will have a stack of meetings or require you to be on Slack. For 10 years I did WFH for a company where everything happened via email, and it was designed to be asynchronous. That meant I could choose any hours to work, and I often worked at night & slept in through the morning. As long as the work got done and milestones were finished on time, it didn't matter. My personal opinion, but if a company is requiring you to work synchronously from home, something has gone a bit wrong and their processes are fragile. It's like multi-threaded code but the threads are always blocked waiting on each other. (In that case, the company is probably just doing WFH to save on rental costs and to get the employees to buy the office equipment instead.) At least in those cases you still get the benefit of designing the work environment you want with the gear you want, but you miss out on the time flexibility.

pier25 7y ago

I've been working from home for the past 10 years and I don't think I could go back to a regular office. - I can work at my own natural pace whenever I want. Some days I work 4 hours. Some days I work 12 hours until 1-2 am. - If I need to buy something I just do it. I can go to the supermarket at the best times. - I can eat home made food and follow any schedule I wish. My SO also works at home and we're doing intermittent fasting 4/20. We start eating at 2pm and stop at 6pm. - I loooove espresso. To give you an idea my espresso setup costs more than my work setup and I roast my own beans. No office could provide me with this. - We have 2 large dogs and we just couldn't abandon them for 8-10 hours every day. I don't know how people do that. - We can live wherever we want and we don't have to pay extra to live in a nice house. Gone are the days of living in apartments without garden.

bostonpete 7y ago
The question was asking why some people are better at working at home than others. You seemed to answer the question "how awesome is working at home?". ;-)
gerdesj 7y ago
My job title is Managing Director. I am learning quite quickly about working from home. Espresso - I don't roll my own but I love 85% Aribica with 15% Rombusta. I gather that is the Italian default brew and I concur. We do bean to cup rather than tree to cup. We used to look after other people's dogs. Wifey now walks me! We live next to a park and see many of our customers daily from afar. I could not give a shit about the money but we miss our friends. Even now I smile thinking about Cwtch (not a typo) and co. running madly around the meadow down hill from my house. Anyway, I am now seriously thinking about how we properly integrate home working in the future. There is a massive win-win if we all do it.
lucb1e 7y ago
> Some days I work 4 hours. Some days I work 12 hours until 1-2 am. Do you track those hours to make sure you don't think you worked enough but in fact consistently work too little or too much? Wondering because I had that problem (working slightly too much every week).

thrower123 7y ago

A lot of people don't really do anything but churn and make sound and fury, signifying nothing. There's much less cause for engaging in that behavior when everyone is working from home, so it becomes more apparent that they don't actually do anything productive.

ydb 7y ago

Some people are more motivated than others. Just like some people are more intelligent than others, or more athletic than others... some are more self-motivated and can work through their own initiative rather than relying on external input (such as managers). That's not a bad thing, either! We should encourage those self-motivated people to work however makes them the most productive members of our economy. That is incredibly crucial for the times that we live in.

danielscrubs 7y ago
When I was a manager I'd always just say to the people under me that they where driven, until they actually started to be motivated. It's a great little trick that made everyone happier, works on teaching programming too. I don't think it's that easy as self-motivation as a scale, it's all about the environment and task that makes people the most productive. I always want there to be someone with insane amounts of grit and ask how they do it. Insane amounts of grit would be: - Six pack and can run a marathon when old. - Recognised in their field. - Earned enough through work (not through the insane rise in housing prices) to be able to stay in their home for a decade without working. Checking all these boxes, would be the master of grit.

davidjnelson 7y ago

Written communication skills are crucial to successful remote work. Both writing and reading.

Madmallard 7y ago

Same reason some toddlers pass the marshmallow test and others don't.

tibbydudeza 7y ago
Thanks you made me google it ... wow interesting.

JesseMReeves 7y ago

I've always been a night owl and WFH seems to fix my mental health after years of trying to force myself to work during "normal office hours" (let's just agree to call them bricklaying and farming hours) in noisy office environments (I'm doing a mixture between natural science and AI which requires plenty of focus). I'm slowly regaining trust in my ability to focus, getting into flow, and feel "normal" again. I'm starting my day with food-related stuff, sports and work communication, then going for an open-end session only towards late afternoon when communication slows down, working into the night.

saeranv 7y ago

>> “All of this said, chronic procrastinators will procrastinate just about anywhere,” Pychyl adds. “That’s just something that’s inherent. It’s just your disposition, and it’s not going to change overnight.” Well that's depressing.

iambateman 7y ago

The article has some official-sounding theories about WFH, which may be a little more high-minded than necessary? Success working from home boils down to two things: 1. Desire to work from home and 2. Space free from distraction. I am the only long-term WFH guy working with an office of 40 “In office” folks who have found themselves at home. Some of them complain, others don’t. Some of them have toddlers (!!), others don’t.

f0rfun 7y ago

Because they have no young kids

PeterStuer 7y ago

I started WFH when the company I worked for had moved to a place where commuting meant 3 hours stuck in traffic each day. I never 'missed the office'. I found most people that do are confusing work with having an actual social life, which they lack because they spend the time it would take to build one listening to podcasts while stuck in traffic.

aszantu 7y ago

I've had so man bad experiences with ppl that I just came to hate them in general. I feel bothered by noises from outside, I hate my neighbour who just wants the house clean and asks me to clean outside of my room. She just wants a friend, but she akss for a thing back to just talk about how bad her back is and blabla... I liked the first few weeks of quietness when social distancing started,no I'm bothered by every noise that comes into my space.

gargs 7y ago

I am of the opinion that autonomy plays a major role in whether you enjoy working from home or not. If you have the autonomy to execute on a clear purpose that you have planned for yourself, there is seemingly no difference in whether that work is carried out in an office or at home. In my experience, all the need for constant feedback and 'catching up' is mostly a side effect of poor project management caused by kicking off work on unbaked requirements or where the estimations haven't been done well or where the dependencies were assumed to be in some state while they're not really there. That said, you could still catch up from home, if not more, simply because you don't have to scurry around looking for a quiet place or finding the colleague.

jokoon 7y ago

You need a home office, a separate room in your home. It's too easy to get distracted otherwise. Simple as that.

l_davis 7y ago
Some of us don't have the space for a separate home office. That being said, I WFHed part time before the pandemic, so the new part for me is being home 100 percent of the time. My workspace is a table in my (multipurpose) living room. I've made a small tweak or two since the pandemic but it is basically the same as before. My work and personal habits are better since the pandemic started. Several reasons. Part is that it is springtime, and I am much less of a couch potato naturally then. And the other part is that I have been taking the risks of getting sick and the associated issues like the economic problems seriously and making conscious efforts to take care of my health, reorganize my home, take steps towards bolstering my economic security, etc. I think that small distractions are OK (it's actually unhealthy to stay in your chair for too long) as long as they are kept under control.
- teddyh 7y ago
  CGP Grey did a video about the importance of having different spaces for different activities¹, and in one of the comments for the video², one Vallejo B. said that they have handled the lack of physical space by using tricks to fool the mind into thinking it is a different space, using different lighting, sounds, tastes for different modes. Like stage set design, a simple difference goes a long way, and as long your own brain is fooled, it works. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck&lc=Ugzl3DOl0s0oSv6osRp4AaABAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck&lc=Ugzl3DOl0s0oS...
lawn 7y ago
While I agree that a home office is very good, saying that it's as simple as just having a home office isn't always enough. It's downplaying the issue. For instance having a set schedule, regular breaks, getting fresh air and filling the social need is not something that comes naturally to everyone or that a home office magically solve.

echelon 7y ago

I'm finding WFH incredibly distracting for an odd reason: my home office is where I work on my side hustle. Having to share my innovation space with work work is jarring, and I'm having a lot of difficulty disentangling the two. I now spent a lot of my work day thinking about my startup since I'm in the place where I used to do that in isolation. Ultimately I'm now a lot less productive at both. It's driving my focus and energy down.

Eridrus 7y ago

I feel.lioe so much of this discussion misses that all of these things about people are both situational and mutable. I've done some WFH on every job I've had, with wildly different results, depending on how motivated I was to do the work. Just because WFH did not work for you once doesn't mean you're not suited to it.

higeorge13 7y ago

It's a little bit too early to judge whether WFH works for everyone and i think that some companies are doing a wrong move deciding to go fully remote forever at these circumstances. The main point is that we were forced to work from home due to a global emergency, but it is way different to do it by choice and in companies formed with a remote work culture. Also i think there is some excuse for employees' current lack of productivity (due to the health concerns or summer break approaching) which will probably change in the next few months. People are probably seeing WFH as a chance to do their work from a beach house, an island, next to a pool and it's perfect because it's summer but most of them will hate it in the winter. Hence i foresee a lot of people currently loving it will change views after a few months or so and also a lot of companies getting frustrated with their employees and will request the majority of them to return to their premises.

olnluis 7y ago

I've been a remote worker since before the lockdowns started. My life is more of a mess now because work has become more intense since everyone started working remotely. It would be easy to ignore a single person asking for favor at 8PM but sometimes it's a whole team discussing stuff at night.

unsignedint 7y ago

I'm definitely in the group that works better in the office: 1) My productivity seems to be polarizing. In some day I feel I have accomplished a lot more, but in other days not great. Generally, many things seem to take longer to attain. 2) My working environment simply sucks. I only have cluttered desk with my personal equipment. I improvised the TV to use as my secondary monitor, but is definitely not optimal from ergonomic standpoint, so mostly ended up working on the tiny laptop screen. I upgrade to better chair, and that at least helped me a lot. 3) I don't have air conditioning, and if the WFH prolongs, this will be problematic. 4) My workout level certainly has dropped for a while after the lockdown WFH started. I have gradually improved this, by establishing daily walking, and remote work out sessions.

richardjennings 7y ago

Some people have ideal conditions to work in at home. Some people will struggle with increased costs and induced domestic stresses. Some people can communicate and socialise remotely. Some people will struggle to find reason to leave the house. Some people will repurpose commute times and flexibility to their advantage. Some people will stop looking after themselves.