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I’ve been working from home 100% for going on 10 years. I’ve had a mix of experiences re: disconnecting from work, and three things that I believe are key: 1.

I’ve been working from home 100% for going on 10 years. I’ve had a mix of experiences re: disconnecting from work, and three things that I believe are key: 1. Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door. Don’t go in that room except when you’re working. If you work from a laptop, (mostly) never take it out of that room. Obviously some don’t have this luxury, but if you do and you’re not doing this, I highly suggest trying it. 2. Remove work communications from your phone. If you have a separate email account for work (highly likely), remove it from your phone. If you have Slack or some other chat app installed for work, remove it or remove your work account. If your company truly cares about a healthy work-life balance, this shouldn’t be an issue. If you need it for oncall, only install it then, then remove it. 3. Stick to a schedule. Log on and off about the same time each day. Don't jump on work for an hour or two here and there throughout the whole day. Log on, put your time in, log off. Don't work on weekends. There are times when you may need to put in extra and/or odd hours, but this should be the exception, not the norm. With these three things in place, I am — quite successfully — able to get the pre-smartphone feel of disconnecting from work while working from home.

athenot 3y ago
Point 1 is very important, I can confirm with also a decade of doing this. One note I'd like to add is pay attention to your lighting, have a special "work-mode" set of lights that you turn on when you work and then turn off when you are no longer working. I use the same work desk for non work stuff, but I turn off my "office lights" and it's a completely different vibe. Everyone's tastes will be different but as for me, these are my preferences: - Office lighting: at least 20k lumens of 5000K light with high CRI. For me I like to approximate the brightness of daylight. It's especially useful during the cloudy days of winter. My office is in a basement so the cheapest way to do that is string lights (like for outdoor patios), but with high quality LED bulbs. - Personal lighting mode: regular house lighting, 3000K (so skewing towards a more yellowish, incandescent-like light). I still enjoy high CRI because I can't stand things looking bland but that's less important. More spot lights, less ambient light.
- spacemadness 3y ago
  Anecdotally, I don’t find point 1 to be necessary at all. Points 2 and 3 are vital, however. As long as I cut work off at the end of the day, I’m fine.
  - stavros 3y ago
    I agree with you. I continue sitting in my home office after I stop work, and I don't feel tempted to check in at all. #2 and #3 are paramount to me, though.
    - jader201 3y ago
      I believe there's still a mental separation you get from having separate physical spaces for work life and personal life. E.g. there are times that I do break the rule (very rarely) and get on my work computer (e.g. download work documents for tax prep), and part of me feels like I'm back at work. If you've not tried it before, it may be hard to relate or recognize the difference.
      - thrashh 3y ago
        I don't know about everyone else, but once I close all my work apps, I completely forget about work. I just got other things I wanna do on my mind so I don't see why I would think about work. Work to me is like going to the bathroom. I go, do my business, then leave and it's back to my normal day. With WFH, that's even more the case.
  - Falcorian 3y ago
    Yeah, working from home for four years now and I only have one office and desk. It's used for work, of course, but also when I'm writing for my self, or playing video games with my friends. I don't have any problem disconnecting from work, but it probably helps that I have a different computer for work that goes in a drawer at the end of the day. I do follow points 2 and 3 though and I think those are essential.
  - 3y ago
rqtwteye 3y ago
Good points. I religiously turn on my laptop at 9 in the morning and turn it off at 17:30. During that time I am always reachable but after that the laptop is off and I have no work related apps on my phone. Also: when I am on vacation I am gone and won’t work. My team has my phone number for extreme emergencies but that never happened so far.
- jader201 3y ago
  > Also: when I am on vacation I am gone and won’t work. My team has my phone number for extreme emergencies but that never happened so far. If you're already doing #1 (don't take your laptop out of the office) and #2 above, then this is automatic. But yes, those should especially be followed when you're on PTO.
tra3 3y ago
How do you disconnect and shutdown the problem solving part of your brain? I’ve found that writing a log or a daily summary, a core dump, if you will, helps me disengage. But not always.
- jader201 3y ago
  I feel like the other 3 points above all help with this. That's not to say that I don't log off, and still think about something I'm working on, or wake up thinking about it (this depends on what I'm working on, how much pressure I'm feeling, and how complex/interesting it is). But honestly, this doesn't feel any different than it always did. Pre-smartphones, I still would sometimes drive home and think about what I was working on on the way home, or "bring work home" with me. I think the brain thing is (mostly) independent of the WFH/WFO thing -- as long as you're doing the other three things above. Otherwise, the brain thing is compounded.
- dijksterhuis 3y ago
  I’ve found doing a “fake commute” where I go for a walk for 30-60 minutes after work is pretty helpful. being able to decompress walking around a leafy park is much better than trying to decompress stuck in a busy train with no seats.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Not OP but many years of working from home. The best thing I've found is Logseq. Any other note taking app would probably do, but the important thing is that it's a "daily journal" style where I brain dump relevant things into bullet points. This has come in really handy for many other reasons as well.
  - wpietri 3y ago
    I've been using Logseq for the last few months and it's wildly better for me than using things like Evernote for this. I used to be big on having a lot of structure in terms of notebooks and notes, a lot of which contained project journals of one sort or another. But the way Logseq makes journaling a primary interface makes things much easier. I tag some things I want to be able to find later, or link them to pages. But I have a lot fewer dedicated pages now, and have to worry a lot less about maintaining consistency in some sort of broad ontology.
riffraff 3y ago
going 10+ years remote, I second all these! I would also add 1. disable notifications, if you can't get rid of work-connected devices: perhaps your work computer is your only computer, and you want to watch a movie on it, just configure chat/mail whatever to only work in _pull_ mode rather than _push_. Don't worry, if something is really important it will reach you. 2. enforce time boundaries through routine. E.g. go to the gym at 17:30 every day so logging off means physically detaching yourself. Or pick up your kids, or take the dog for a walk. Make yourself accountable to non-work. 3. corollary to 2: start work when work start, not before. Do not work in pajamas, do not check your email during breakfast. Do your own things, then start working. I have not been 100% good at doing all of these, but even doing this a bit has had massive positive effects to not doing it.
wmwragg 3y ago
Yep point 1 I think is the most important, but if you don't have the luxury of an office at home, having a start of work process, and an end of work process is really important e.g. at end of day, close laptop, put away in a drawer, and tidy up work paraphernalia, then sit down and have a cup of tea while reading a book. It mentally bookmarks the start and end of work, and allows your mind to reset from work mode.
- wpietri 3y ago
  Agreed. I've been using RoutineFlow to help establish routines and it has been great.
neilv 3y ago
> Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door. A small-apartment version of this is to have a work laptop at home (or carry it home from in-office), but to keep it in a drawer when not in use. Same with a work smartphone. For people who have to be reachable in emergencies, a real radio pager (best privacy, still company-issued, and it could maybe also go in the drawer), or their preferred automated emergency contact method to their personal smartphone (SMS, email, app). Optionally with a de jure on-call human in the loop. Or just a work-issued smartphone or tablet that can be configured in software to only alert on emergencies. When emergency contacting personally-owned devices, to minimize taint with business information, the only information conveyed is to check work laptop within X minutes. (The company should also have be a rock-solid log of each such contact, for various reasons.) (One early startup, where I was leading engineering and had bespoke MVP appliances as part of a factory production line halfway around the globe, and I hadn't yet set up a better alerting method, I just used an iPad for this. The iPad had 2 purposes, about the only things it could do: (1) compartmentalize the sketchy videoconferencing app we used, away from the Linux laptop that was early-startup powerful; (2) be a fairly discreet "picture frame" display in the evening, so that I'd notice emails from factory management or our alert system. With more time this could've been polished to be better for my nerves, but it was still definitely better than having the work laptop visible 24/7.)
wpietri 3y ago
To extract one bit from that: I'm a huge fan of separate devices for separate purposes. Work laptop vs personal laptop. Work phone vs personal phone. Games device vs reading device. Social media device vs productivity device. I'm much better at contextually driven focus than I am at working mentally to keep things separate. Which I've come to be ok with, in that a lot of my creativity comes from divergent thinking, from jumbling and sorting out things. But that flexibility is a pain when I want to really focus. Different devices help me be clear about what I'm choosing, raise a barrier to distraction, and make it way easier to notice when I'm off task. E.g., I only use HN from what I think of as my distraction laptop. Social media, fun Slacks, and HN only work on this device. Which is old, so its battery doesn't last, and which is plugged in and kept in a hidden niche next to a not-super-comfortable couch. Taking this approach let me turn off the noprocrast setting here while keeping my fuck-around-on-the-internet time in check.
makeitdouble 3y ago
These are all valid point if that's your thing. It reminds me of coffee brewing advice where the very first stated goal is "make repeatable brews" and the expert explains a very meticulous protocol they've repeated and perfected for years now。 It's nice and fine if you never get bored of it. When people bring their laptop in the kitchen or closet, or go to coffee shops, libraries etc. it's often not because they haven't found a perfected routine, but because they don't want to sit/stand in the same exact spot in the same posture 8h a day every weekday for decades. Point number 2 also has caveats: with a family it can be easier to allow semi-random interruptions a few times a day and work a bit after everyone's asleep than sticking to an ironclad schedule and being absolutely unavailable when your kid's having tea time or needs a quick help.
- jader201 3y ago
  For sure, a lot of the things you're describing boils down to the flexibility -- as a perk -- you get from working from home. But I believe it's the flexibility that make it hard for people to mentally disconnect -- it blurs the lines between work and life. And, to your point, that's totally fine if that's your preference. I think what we're both saying is that the three points I make above are, in a way, sacrificing some flexibility in order to maintain that separation. For me, I'm completely fine giving up some of that flexibility so that I can maintain the mental separation. But, to me, I have the best of both worlds in that I still have the option of flexibility in cases where I really need it. But I only try to exercise it when I really need it.
jtode 3y ago
The not having work on my personal phone was a big gamechanger for me as well, even before I worked from home. Not sure when or why I made the decision but very glad I did.
swader999 3y ago
If I didn't have to travel, I'd go for a desktop and it works better for the separation aspects too.
Roark66 3y ago
My recommendation (working 100% remote since 2018). 2b - have a separate work phone If people choose to send emails outside business hours it's their choice, but you don't have to answer. If you do, as part of your contract... Well, you saw the contract before you agreed right? 2c - Set clear boundaries between when you're off work, off, but on call and at work. How? Personally I don't mind being "on call" for <25% of a time, but I absolutely positively have to have extra money every single hour I'm on call(lets say 10~20% of normal hourly rate), and 150~200% rate for incident response time. That's the only way I can do it. But what if your employer pays you double the hourly rate all the time and "implies" it's a 24/7 on call commitment? Isn't that even better financially? Well, yes, but it's definitely not better for my peace of mind. Somehow I don't mind being on call when I see a tally for it at the end of each month, if it "just happens" (and frequently) I quickly start hating it.
korpsey 3y ago
I've been working from home since 2016 and I had similar problems with the addition of having a hard time "getting into work mode". It took me 6 months to adjust to it and I can't even think about going to an office anymore nowadays.
nerdchum 3y ago
I follow these similarly except use a coworking space and use a separate phone for work in case on call or something.

athenot 3y ago

Point 1 is very important, I can confirm with also a decade of doing this. One note I'd like to add is pay attention to your lighting, have a special "work-mode" set of lights that you turn on when you work and then turn off when you are no longer working. I use the same work desk for non work stuff, but I turn off my "office lights" and it's a completely different vibe. Everyone's tastes will be different but as for me, these are my preferences: - Office lighting: at least 20k lumens of 5000K light with high CRI. For me I like to approximate the brightness of daylight. It's especially useful during the cloudy days of winter. My office is in a basement so the cheapest way to do that is string lights (like for outdoor patios), but with high quality LED bulbs. - Personal lighting mode: regular house lighting, 3000K (so skewing towards a more yellowish, incandescent-like light). I still enjoy high CRI because I can't stand things looking bland but that's less important. More spot lights, less ambient light.

spacemadness 3y ago
Anecdotally, I don’t find point 1 to be necessary at all. Points 2 and 3 are vital, however. As long as I cut work off at the end of the day, I’m fine.
- stavros 3y ago
  I agree with you. I continue sitting in my home office after I stop work, and I don't feel tempted to check in at all. #2 and #3 are paramount to me, though.
  - jader201 3y ago
    I believe there's still a mental separation you get from having separate physical spaces for work life and personal life. E.g. there are times that I do break the rule (very rarely) and get on my work computer (e.g. download work documents for tax prep), and part of me feels like I'm back at work. If you've not tried it before, it may be hard to relate or recognize the difference.
    - thrashh 3y ago
      I don't know about everyone else, but once I close all my work apps, I completely forget about work. I just got other things I wanna do on my mind so I don't see why I would think about work. Work to me is like going to the bathroom. I go, do my business, then leave and it's back to my normal day. With WFH, that's even more the case.
- Falcorian 3y ago
  Yeah, working from home for four years now and I only have one office and desk. It's used for work, of course, but also when I'm writing for my self, or playing video games with my friends. I don't have any problem disconnecting from work, but it probably helps that I have a different computer for work that goes in a drawer at the end of the day. I do follow points 2 and 3 though and I think those are essential.
- 3y ago

rqtwteye 3y ago

Good points. I religiously turn on my laptop at 9 in the morning and turn it off at 17:30. During that time I am always reachable but after that the laptop is off and I have no work related apps on my phone. Also: when I am on vacation I am gone and won’t work. My team has my phone number for extreme emergencies but that never happened so far.

jader201 3y ago
> Also: when I am on vacation I am gone and won’t work. My team has my phone number for extreme emergencies but that never happened so far. If you're already doing #1 (don't take your laptop out of the office) and #2 above, then this is automatic. But yes, those should especially be followed when you're on PTO.

tra3 3y ago

How do you disconnect and shutdown the problem solving part of your brain? I’ve found that writing a log or a daily summary, a core dump, if you will, helps me disengage. But not always.

jader201 3y ago
I feel like the other 3 points above all help with this. That's not to say that I don't log off, and still think about something I'm working on, or wake up thinking about it (this depends on what I'm working on, how much pressure I'm feeling, and how complex/interesting it is). But honestly, this doesn't feel any different than it always did. Pre-smartphones, I still would sometimes drive home and think about what I was working on on the way home, or "bring work home" with me. I think the brain thing is (mostly) independent of the WFH/WFO thing -- as long as you're doing the other three things above. Otherwise, the brain thing is compounded.
dijksterhuis 3y ago
I’ve found doing a “fake commute” where I go for a walk for 30-60 minutes after work is pretty helpful. being able to decompress walking around a leafy park is much better than trying to decompress stuck in a busy train with no seats.
freedomben 3y ago
Not OP but many years of working from home. The best thing I've found is Logseq. Any other note taking app would probably do, but the important thing is that it's a "daily journal" style where I brain dump relevant things into bullet points. This has come in really handy for many other reasons as well.
- wpietri 3y ago
  I've been using Logseq for the last few months and it's wildly better for me than using things like Evernote for this. I used to be big on having a lot of structure in terms of notebooks and notes, a lot of which contained project journals of one sort or another. But the way Logseq makes journaling a primary interface makes things much easier. I tag some things I want to be able to find later, or link them to pages. But I have a lot fewer dedicated pages now, and have to worry a lot less about maintaining consistency in some sort of broad ontology.

riffraff 3y ago

going 10+ years remote, I second all these! I would also add 1. disable notifications, if you can't get rid of work-connected devices: perhaps your work computer is your only computer, and you want to watch a movie on it, just configure chat/mail whatever to only work in _pull_ mode rather than _push_. Don't worry, if something is really important it will reach you. 2. enforce time boundaries through routine. E.g. go to the gym at 17:30 every day so logging off means physically detaching yourself. Or pick up your kids, or take the dog for a walk. Make yourself accountable to non-work. 3. corollary to 2: start work when work start, not before. Do not work in pajamas, do not check your email during breakfast. Do your own things, then start working. I have not been 100% good at doing all of these, but even doing this a bit has had massive positive effects to not doing it.

wmwragg 3y ago

Yep point 1 I think is the most important, but if you don't have the luxury of an office at home, having a start of work process, and an end of work process is really important e.g. at end of day, close laptop, put away in a drawer, and tidy up work paraphernalia, then sit down and have a cup of tea while reading a book. It mentally bookmarks the start and end of work, and allows your mind to reset from work mode.

wpietri 3y ago
Agreed. I've been using RoutineFlow to help establish routines and it has been great.

neilv 3y ago

> Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door. A small-apartment version of this is to have a work laptop at home (or carry it home from in-office), but to keep it in a drawer when not in use. Same with a work smartphone. For people who have to be reachable in emergencies, a real radio pager (best privacy, still company-issued, and it could maybe also go in the drawer), or their preferred automated emergency contact method to their personal smartphone (SMS, email, app). Optionally with a de jure on-call human in the loop. Or just a work-issued smartphone or tablet that can be configured in software to only alert on emergencies. When emergency contacting personally-owned devices, to minimize taint with business information, the only information conveyed is to check work laptop within X minutes. (The company should also have be a rock-solid log of each such contact, for various reasons.) (One early startup, where I was leading engineering and had bespoke MVP appliances as part of a factory production line halfway around the globe, and I hadn't yet set up a better alerting method, I just used an iPad for this. The iPad had 2 purposes, about the only things it could do: (1) compartmentalize the sketchy videoconferencing app we used, away from the Linux laptop that was early-startup powerful; (2) be a fairly discreet "picture frame" display in the evening, so that I'd notice emails from factory management or our alert system. With more time this could've been polished to be better for my nerves, but it was still definitely better than having the work laptop visible 24/7.)

wpietri 3y ago

To extract one bit from that: I'm a huge fan of separate devices for separate purposes. Work laptop vs personal laptop. Work phone vs personal phone. Games device vs reading device. Social media device vs productivity device. I'm much better at contextually driven focus than I am at working mentally to keep things separate. Which I've come to be ok with, in that a lot of my creativity comes from divergent thinking, from jumbling and sorting out things. But that flexibility is a pain when I want to really focus. Different devices help me be clear about what I'm choosing, raise a barrier to distraction, and make it way easier to notice when I'm off task. E.g., I only use HN from what I think of as my distraction laptop. Social media, fun Slacks, and HN only work on this device. Which is old, so its battery doesn't last, and which is plugged in and kept in a hidden niche next to a not-super-comfortable couch. Taking this approach let me turn off the noprocrast setting here while keeping my fuck-around-on-the-internet time in check.

makeitdouble 3y ago

These are all valid point if that's your thing. It reminds me of coffee brewing advice where the very first stated goal is "make repeatable brews" and the expert explains a very meticulous protocol they've repeated and perfected for years now。 It's nice and fine if you never get bored of it. When people bring their laptop in the kitchen or closet, or go to coffee shops, libraries etc. it's often not because they haven't found a perfected routine, but because they don't want to sit/stand in the same exact spot in the same posture 8h a day every weekday for decades. Point number 2 also has caveats: with a family it can be easier to allow semi-random interruptions a few times a day and work a bit after everyone's asleep than sticking to an ironclad schedule and being absolutely unavailable when your kid's having tea time or needs a quick help.

jader201 3y ago
For sure, a lot of the things you're describing boils down to the flexibility -- as a perk -- you get from working from home. But I believe it's the flexibility that make it hard for people to mentally disconnect -- it blurs the lines between work and life. And, to your point, that's totally fine if that's your preference. I think what we're both saying is that the three points I make above are, in a way, sacrificing some flexibility in order to maintain that separation. For me, I'm completely fine giving up some of that flexibility so that I can maintain the mental separation. But, to me, I have the best of both worlds in that I still have the option of flexibility in cases where I really need it. But I only try to exercise it when I really need it.

jtode 3y ago

The not having work on my personal phone was a big gamechanger for me as well, even before I worked from home. Not sure when or why I made the decision but very glad I did.

swader999 3y ago

If I didn't have to travel, I'd go for a desktop and it works better for the separation aspects too.

Roark66 3y ago

My recommendation (working 100% remote since 2018). 2b - have a separate work phone If people choose to send emails outside business hours it's their choice, but you don't have to answer. If you do, as part of your contract... Well, you saw the contract before you agreed right? 2c - Set clear boundaries between when you're off work, off, but on call and at work. How? Personally I don't mind being "on call" for <25% of a time, but I absolutely positively have to have extra money every single hour I'm on call(lets say 10~20% of normal hourly rate), and 150~200% rate for incident response time. That's the only way I can do it. But what if your employer pays you double the hourly rate all the time and "implies" it's a 24/7 on call commitment? Isn't that even better financially? Well, yes, but it's definitely not better for my peace of mind. Somehow I don't mind being on call when I see a tally for it at the end of each month, if it "just happens" (and frequently) I quickly start hating it.

korpsey 3y ago

I've been working from home since 2016 and I had similar problems with the addition of having a hard time "getting into work mode". It took me 6 months to adjust to it and I can't even think about going to an office anymore nowadays.

nerdchum 3y ago

I follow these similarly except use a coworking space and use a separate phone for work in case on call or something.