6 ms·

Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment

43 points by cwan 14y ago

phuff 14y ago
I frequently speak with people in my neighborhood about my experience of working from home, and they say: "I don't think I could handle it." For me, it's just a different type of distraction. When I got bored when working in an office, I would take a break, go get a drink, walk around and see what everybody else was up to, and then go back to work refreshed. From home, when I get bored, I get up, get a drink of water, play with my kids for a couple of minutes and then go back to work refreshed. All that being said, I'm not sure this particular study has much to say in the way of helping those of us who do knowledge work from home. Call center work seems like it's different enough that I can see the type of work invalidating the applicability of this particular study to our particular line of work.
- stephengillie 14y ago
  Call centers are a very different type of work than most office work. And different types of call center work have very different implications. The company involved in this study was CTrip – China’s largest travel agency. [I think] Travel agencies are usually speaking with happy customers planning vacations. Tech support, customer service, and telemarketing call center employees would have had a significant reduction in utilization in this study.
the_cat_kittles 14y ago
I wonder how much improvement in morale can be attributed to not having a commute. I wonder if people who have a short walk to work are even happier than people who work from home, broadly speaking.
- jaggederest 14y ago
  I can't find a citation, but I believe that I read that a 20 minute addition to your commute has the same long-term quality of life impact as losing function in a limb. This is for two reasons: firstly, the long term impact of losing function in a limb is far less than people think, and the long term impact of an increased commute is far more than people think.
  - the_cat_kittles 14y ago
    do you know if commutes are as bad for people when they aren't the ones driving, so they could read for instance?
    - EvanKelly 14y ago
      I envy everyone who has access to public transportation to work. My commute is 1 hour maximum, but usually around 30-40 minutes, but even then, I daydream sometimes about being able to read or write while commuting. I have started listening to podcasts on my commute, and it's much more enjoyable than my music collection or any of the radio options here. I definitely should have started doing it earlier.
    - gmrple 14y ago
      [anecdotal] Last year I would allocate 4 hours a day for commuting to Chicago via train. I now commute 2-4 hours via car to work. I thoroughly enjoyed my commute to Chicago for quite/reading time and predictability. I hate my commute to work now. I will be moving closer soon.
      - jontas 14y ago
        I went through a similar experience, and I eventually discovered that audiobooks made my driving commute almost as enjoyable as the train.
        gmrple 14y ago
        Talk radio helps a bit, and I know my dad has done the same as you. I might just give that a try, I know my local library has quite a few on hand.
    - neutronicus 14y ago
      Well, there is this: long commutes are correlated with an increase the likelihood of divorce, especially early in marriage[1]. http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=104021&CultureCode=en http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=104021&...
- dripton 14y ago
  Last time I had two job offers, I chose a nice 12-mile bike commute over telecommuting. About 90% of the time, I'm happy with that decision. (The other 10% of days involve bad weather or rude drivers.) Of course, if I were telecommuting I could just go take a bike ride at lunchtime on nice days, and not have to deal with darkness or bad weather or packing work clothes or rush hour traffic. Though I worry that I wouldn't.
- hnwh 14y ago
  I had a 3 minute walk to work at my last job.. Even though the walk was great to get out and get sun and fresh air, there's still the downside of having to prepare, and be in the office. I hope never again to have to work in a situation where I don't work from home. Working from home is orders of magnitude better as far as my happiness goes, and I find that I am literally 3x more productive in getting my own work done (as opposed to being in the office and spending 3 hrs on my own work, and 5 hrs on everyone else's problems). I can actually see years being added to my life by working from home. Having to go in the office really turned me into a shadow of a person, and I actually saw myself aging.
- gwern 14y ago
  Called the 'commuting paradox'; eg. http://ideas.repec.org/p/zur/iewwpx/151.html http://ideas.repec.org/p/zur/iewwpx/151.html
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  Not having a nasty commute would surely be an improvement, but the social aspect of working face-to-face with your coworkers has a morale value as well (I've found).
zumbojo 14y ago
The most recent Freakonomics on Marketplace segment focused on this study: http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/08/23/there%E2%80%99s-cake-in-the-breakroom-a-new-marketplace-podcast/ http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/08/23/there%E2%80%99s-cake-...
tastive 14y ago
I hope this is followed by similar studies for teleworkers in different professions. This specific study isn't generalize-able; it focuses on teleworkers where work units come directly to workers in short, easily measured spurts (unlike most IT positions, which often involve multi-day tasks). The next step is to perform the same sort of analysis where workers complete multi-day projects and communicate asynchronously with co-workers (email, issue trackers). Workers that only WFH one or a few days a week (as opposed to all the time or none) are also worth looking at; instinctually, I'd think this group would be the most abusive. Further, it sounds like the telework involved is relatively pleasant -- CTrip is a travel agency, which I imagine involves happier customer calls than ones to the phone company. The study might not even be representative of all call-answering telework in China, which is a pretty narrow focus.
aristidb 14y ago
Gotta applaud this Chinese firm for using scientific experiments rather than gut feeling to decide on important policies. However, please don't take far-ranging conclusions from this experiment. Call-center work is a fairly specific type of work with extreme values of "noise" and "distraction". For other kinds of work, the results might end up vastly differently. (Also, the Chrome spelling correction sucks. Just sayin'.)
- freehunter 14y ago
  I was looking through it hoping to find some amount of detail on collaboration from home (Skype, Google Docs, etc). I guess call centers don't need this quite as much as engineers would. I'm not sure how applicable this would be for a job like I feel many corporate types on HN (like myself) work. Programming (or other engineering) at a startup is different from programming (or other engineering) at a corporation, and I need significant face-time with my coworkers and people outside of my team just to get the most basic work done. As an anecdote, I get significantly less work done on the one day a week (today) when 90% of my coworkers work from home just due to the fact that I often need to collaborate with them. (Also, I've often wondered why Chrome's spell checker can mark a word as wrong, but when I copy it into Google search, Google knows it's spelled right. Should be the same system, I would think. The word uninstall comes to mind, I see that red squiggly right now.)
  - Osiris 14y ago
    It's interesting that you say that because I have the opposite experience. When I'm at the office I find that people around me talking causes a significant distraction. I use noise-canceling headphones almost all day at work just to block out the noise. In addition, I sit right next to a QA guy that works on my product and I can easy waste half a day dealing with his issues and questions. I find that I get significantly more work done while at home because I don't have the distraction of coworkers tying up my time. I also find I tend to put in at least an hour more a day because I work when I would normally be commuting.
    - varelse 14y ago
nostromo 14y ago
Here's the payload for those not wanting to hunt for it in the paper: "We find a highly significant 12% increase in performance from home-working, of which 8% is from working more minutes of their shift period (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 3% from higher performance per minute. We find no negative spillovers onto workers left in the office. Home workers also reported substantially higher work satisfaction and psychological attitude scores, and their job attrition rates fell by over 50%."
- mc32 14y ago
  Somewhere (can't recall) it was said that those who predominantly worked from home, while effective as a workforce, suffered from lack of visibility and thus tended to not get raises or promotions as much as those who remained in the office (I assume this was normalized for responsibility/position).
  - Buzaga 14y ago
    there was a post some weeks ago(by 37signals? don't remember) on how to treat this "telecommuters will feel/be seen as 2nd class citizens"... it's an important consideration...
  - mhurron 14y ago
    IIRC that was mentioned here and was most likely to occur in teams where just a few worked remotely while the majority came into the office and interacted with management. The same thing will happen if you come to work, quietly do your job, quietly leave and don't interact with management. Management won't promote the person they don't remember.
abraxasz 14y ago
Interesting initiative, but I see many issues in the study: - As others have mentioned, it is not generalizable to other types of jobs. Call-center work may be improved when working from home, but what about other types of jobs requiring more interaction/communication - But the biggest issue I see is with their mention of a "Randomized experiment". Well, technically it is randomized among those who volunteered for the experiment. So from a causal inference perspective, the results generalize only to the population of employees who volunteered, not to the entire company. More generally, one of the problems with these types of study is that the best it can give is an average gain from home working. But suppose the gain is null. It doesn't mean that this is not a viable option. Maybe there is a huge variance in the gain, depending on the individuals: maybe the gain in productivity is huge for some employees, while it is negative for some others. This could depend on the employee's self-discipline (whatever that means), his family situation (single/married, how many kids), where he leaves, is he introvert, etc... A useful study would be to randomized the assignment, stratifying by according to these covariates, in order to learn more about their effect on the performance of the employees.
varelse 14y ago
As someone who has mostly worked from home for the past decade: 1) Really long commutes for the sake of my butt keeping a seat warm to keep a manager happy are dealbreakers. I have never made such a job work out for me. At the most recent example, my brief position at Google involved a 1-hour commute each way only to spend 8-10 hours in a dead-silent office, where no one significantly interacted and for which I was forbidden to telecommute by my mostly absentee manager, ever. Loved the food and the gym though. 2) Working at home 3-4 days a week is productivity Nirvana for me leading to patents, promotions and pay raises lather rinse repeat. 3) Working utterly and completely from home eventually leads to a sense of isolation and depression. 4) Despite #3, I prefer to do crunch mode work in isolation because I'm easily startled and prone to the excessive use of colorful metaphors when under the gun. My cat doesn't mind. My dog doesn't care. But I suspect coworkers in proximity would fear for their lives.
- Osiris 14y ago
  3) Working utterly and completely from home eventually leads to a sense of isolation and depression. I did that for about three months straight and I agree with the assessment. At my new job I work 3-4 days a week in the office and 1-2 days at home. I find a mix of office and home to be a good balance, though I do find the commute an utter waste of time.
  - stock_toaster 14y ago
    I work remote most of the time. I have a family, which I think has insulated me from the sense of isolation to a large extent. It is good to head into the office on occasion though (once every two or three weeks or so).
  - EvanKelly 14y ago
    Is this the case with an active social life as well? I don't find that most of my socializing and interaction comes from my co-workers (who are significantly out of my age range). I've never worked from home, but I'd really like to. I like to think as long as I still socialized after work (happy hour type stuff, kickball league, etc.) I wouldn't feel the isolation and depression.
vasco 14y ago
"The frequency of working from home has been rising rapidly in the US" I don't understand why they even mention the USA. Do they try to extrapolate that USA workers would react the same way Chinese workers did? I'm don't know if they would but it is reasonable to fear that the very different cultural environment could affect results. Or not, we don't know. Hence my question.
- patrikmcguire 14y ago
  A lot of classical psych studies get completely different results when run in non-Western societies (I'd link but Wikipedia cites a print publication |:). There's a tendency to view everything in the West as "the default" and deviations from that as culture bound. So to answer your question, it would be a pretty tenuous extrapolation from Chinese to American workers.
forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
In my opinion, as a a worker from home now for several years it is the best thing ever. BUT, it is a skill that you have to learn. I had to read and watch-attend many productivity programs for "getting it". Probably I will get a job teaching people how to do it in the future, because as networking speeds increase to Gygabits/second (thing google fiber in every house ten years from now), having instant hidef video would mean even more jobs would be possible from home.
jmadsen 14y ago
I tend to reply to "Does working from Home work?" with "Does working from Work work?" Having spent a few years in a corporate environment, and many more as a consultant in other people's corporate environments, I can tell you first hand that the amount of work you do has very little to do with where your chair is located. Either you are the type of person who gets stuff done, or you aren't. There are huge distractions everywhere you go. People who get things done incorporate them into their schedules & stay productive. Others use them as a welcome escape from actually working. That said, home workers are 1) monitored more closely and 2) fresher from not having to deal with commutes, so no surprise to see the numbers show them as "more productive"
- enraged_camel 14y ago
  Your post comes across as very cynical, and I disagree with it completely. The type of environment someone is in always has an effect on their productivity. In my case this effect is huge. For example, I build software demos for a living (Sales Engineer at a software company), which requires big chunks of uninterrupted time. I cannot find that at work, even with noise-canceling headphones. If I'm at home though, or even a coffee shop, I get in "The Zone" very easily and can stay in it for quite a while before needing a break. This way, I've built demos in one day that would otherwise have taken me over a week.
lurkinggrue 14y ago
I seems to work more when I am home.
enraged_camel 14y ago
Another benefit of working from home is not having to worry about preparation rituals such as shaving or making sure you have clothes to wear. These are fairly important for me. On rare occasions I get to work from home, I find that being able to jump straight to work after I finish my breakfast is very refreshing. Said breakfast also tastes better since I had more time to prepare it.

43 points by cwan 14y ago

phuff 14y ago

I frequently speak with people in my neighborhood about my experience of working from home, and they say: "I don't think I could handle it." For me, it's just a different type of distraction. When I got bored when working in an office, I would take a break, go get a drink, walk around and see what everybody else was up to, and then go back to work refreshed. From home, when I get bored, I get up, get a drink of water, play with my kids for a couple of minutes and then go back to work refreshed. All that being said, I'm not sure this particular study has much to say in the way of helping those of us who do knowledge work from home. Call center work seems like it's different enough that I can see the type of work invalidating the applicability of this particular study to our particular line of work.

stephengillie 14y ago
Call centers are a very different type of work than most office work. And different types of call center work have very different implications. The company involved in this study was CTrip – China’s largest travel agency. [I think] Travel agencies are usually speaking with happy customers planning vacations. Tech support, customer service, and telemarketing call center employees would have had a significant reduction in utilization in this study.

the_cat_kittles 14y ago

I wonder how much improvement in morale can be attributed to not having a commute. I wonder if people who have a short walk to work are even happier than people who work from home, broadly speaking.

jaggederest 14y ago
I can't find a citation, but I believe that I read that a 20 minute addition to your commute has the same long-term quality of life impact as losing function in a limb. This is for two reasons: firstly, the long term impact of losing function in a limb is far less than people think, and the long term impact of an increased commute is far more than people think.
- the_cat_kittles 14y ago
  do you know if commutes are as bad for people when they aren't the ones driving, so they could read for instance?
  - EvanKelly 14y ago
    I envy everyone who has access to public transportation to work. My commute is 1 hour maximum, but usually around 30-40 minutes, but even then, I daydream sometimes about being able to read or write while commuting. I have started listening to podcasts on my commute, and it's much more enjoyable than my music collection or any of the radio options here. I definitely should have started doing it earlier.
  - gmrple 14y ago
    [anecdotal] Last year I would allocate 4 hours a day for commuting to Chicago via train. I now commute 2-4 hours via car to work. I thoroughly enjoyed my commute to Chicago for quite/reading time and predictability. I hate my commute to work now. I will be moving closer soon.
    - jontas 14y ago
      I went through a similar experience, and I eventually discovered that audiobooks made my driving commute almost as enjoyable as the train.
      - gmrple 14y ago
        Talk radio helps a bit, and I know my dad has done the same as you. I might just give that a try, I know my local library has quite a few on hand.
  - neutronicus 14y ago
    Well, there is this: long commutes are correlated with an increase the likelihood of divorce, especially early in marriage[1]. http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=104021&CultureCode=en http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=104021&...
dripton 14y ago
Last time I had two job offers, I chose a nice 12-mile bike commute over telecommuting. About 90% of the time, I'm happy with that decision. (The other 10% of days involve bad weather or rude drivers.) Of course, if I were telecommuting I could just go take a bike ride at lunchtime on nice days, and not have to deal with darkness or bad weather or packing work clothes or rush hour traffic. Though I worry that I wouldn't.
hnwh 14y ago
I had a 3 minute walk to work at my last job.. Even though the walk was great to get out and get sun and fresh air, there's still the downside of having to prepare, and be in the office. I hope never again to have to work in a situation where I don't work from home. Working from home is orders of magnitude better as far as my happiness goes, and I find that I am literally 3x more productive in getting my own work done (as opposed to being in the office and spending 3 hrs on my own work, and 5 hrs on everyone else's problems). I can actually see years being added to my life by working from home. Having to go in the office really turned me into a shadow of a person, and I actually saw myself aging.
gwern 14y ago
Called the 'commuting paradox'; eg. http://ideas.repec.org/p/zur/iewwpx/151.html http://ideas.repec.org/p/zur/iewwpx/151.html
sliverstorm 14y ago
Not having a nasty commute would surely be an improvement, but the social aspect of working face-to-face with your coworkers has a morale value as well (I've found).

zumbojo 14y ago

The most recent Freakonomics on Marketplace segment focused on this study: http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/08/23/there%E2%80%99s-cake-in-the-breakroom-a-new-marketplace-podcast/ http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/08/23/there%E2%80%99s-cake-...

tastive 14y ago

I hope this is followed by similar studies for teleworkers in different professions. This specific study isn't generalize-able; it focuses on teleworkers where work units come directly to workers in short, easily measured spurts (unlike most IT positions, which often involve multi-day tasks). The next step is to perform the same sort of analysis where workers complete multi-day projects and communicate asynchronously with co-workers (email, issue trackers). Workers that only WFH one or a few days a week (as opposed to all the time or none) are also worth looking at; instinctually, I'd think this group would be the most abusive. Further, it sounds like the telework involved is relatively pleasant -- CTrip is a travel agency, which I imagine involves happier customer calls than ones to the phone company. The study might not even be representative of all call-answering telework in China, which is a pretty narrow focus.

aristidb 14y ago

Gotta applaud this Chinese firm for using scientific experiments rather than gut feeling to decide on important policies. However, please don't take far-ranging conclusions from this experiment. Call-center work is a fairly specific type of work with extreme values of "noise" and "distraction". For other kinds of work, the results might end up vastly differently. (Also, the Chrome spelling correction sucks. Just sayin'.)

freehunter 14y ago
I was looking through it hoping to find some amount of detail on collaboration from home (Skype, Google Docs, etc). I guess call centers don't need this quite as much as engineers would. I'm not sure how applicable this would be for a job like I feel many corporate types on HN (like myself) work. Programming (or other engineering) at a startup is different from programming (or other engineering) at a corporation, and I need significant face-time with my coworkers and people outside of my team just to get the most basic work done. As an anecdote, I get significantly less work done on the one day a week (today) when 90% of my coworkers work from home just due to the fact that I often need to collaborate with them. (Also, I've often wondered why Chrome's spell checker can mark a word as wrong, but when I copy it into Google search, Google knows it's spelled right. Should be the same system, I would think. The word uninstall comes to mind, I see that red squiggly right now.)
- Osiris 14y ago
  It's interesting that you say that because I have the opposite experience. When I'm at the office I find that people around me talking causes a significant distraction. I use noise-canceling headphones almost all day at work just to block out the noise. In addition, I sit right next to a QA guy that works on my product and I can easy waste half a day dealing with his issues and questions. I find that I get significantly more work done while at home because I don't have the distraction of coworkers tying up my time. I also find I tend to put in at least an hour more a day because I work when I would normally be commuting.
  - varelse 14y ago

nostromo 14y ago

Here's the payload for those not wanting to hunt for it in the paper: "We find a highly significant 12% increase in performance from home-working, of which 8% is from working more minutes of their shift period (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 3% from higher performance per minute. We find no negative spillovers onto workers left in the office. Home workers also reported substantially higher work satisfaction and psychological attitude scores, and their job attrition rates fell by over 50%."

mc32 14y ago
Somewhere (can't recall) it was said that those who predominantly worked from home, while effective as a workforce, suffered from lack of visibility and thus tended to not get raises or promotions as much as those who remained in the office (I assume this was normalized for responsibility/position).
- Buzaga 14y ago
  there was a post some weeks ago(by 37signals? don't remember) on how to treat this "telecommuters will feel/be seen as 2nd class citizens"... it's an important consideration...
- mhurron 14y ago
  IIRC that was mentioned here and was most likely to occur in teams where just a few worked remotely while the majority came into the office and interacted with management. The same thing will happen if you come to work, quietly do your job, quietly leave and don't interact with management. Management won't promote the person they don't remember.

abraxasz 14y ago

Interesting initiative, but I see many issues in the study: - As others have mentioned, it is not generalizable to other types of jobs. Call-center work may be improved when working from home, but what about other types of jobs requiring more interaction/communication - But the biggest issue I see is with their mention of a "Randomized experiment". Well, technically it is randomized among those who volunteered for the experiment. So from a causal inference perspective, the results generalize only to the population of employees who volunteered, not to the entire company. More generally, one of the problems with these types of study is that the best it can give is an average gain from home working. But suppose the gain is null. It doesn't mean that this is not a viable option. Maybe there is a huge variance in the gain, depending on the individuals: maybe the gain in productivity is huge for some employees, while it is negative for some others. This could depend on the employee's self-discipline (whatever that means), his family situation (single/married, how many kids), where he leaves, is he introvert, etc... A useful study would be to randomized the assignment, stratifying by according to these covariates, in order to learn more about their effect on the performance of the employees.

varelse 14y ago

As someone who has mostly worked from home for the past decade: 1) Really long commutes for the sake of my butt keeping a seat warm to keep a manager happy are dealbreakers. I have never made such a job work out for me. At the most recent example, my brief position at Google involved a 1-hour commute each way only to spend 8-10 hours in a dead-silent office, where no one significantly interacted and for which I was forbidden to telecommute by my mostly absentee manager, ever. Loved the food and the gym though. 2) Working at home 3-4 days a week is productivity Nirvana for me leading to patents, promotions and pay raises lather rinse repeat. 3) Working utterly and completely from home eventually leads to a sense of isolation and depression. 4) Despite #3, I prefer to do crunch mode work in isolation because I'm easily startled and prone to the excessive use of colorful metaphors when under the gun. My cat doesn't mind. My dog doesn't care. But I suspect coworkers in proximity would fear for their lives.

Osiris 14y ago
3) Working utterly and completely from home eventually leads to a sense of isolation and depression. I did that for about three months straight and I agree with the assessment. At my new job I work 3-4 days a week in the office and 1-2 days at home. I find a mix of office and home to be a good balance, though I do find the commute an utter waste of time.
- stock_toaster 14y ago
  I work remote most of the time. I have a family, which I think has insulated me from the sense of isolation to a large extent. It is good to head into the office on occasion though (once every two or three weeks or so).
- EvanKelly 14y ago
  Is this the case with an active social life as well? I don't find that most of my socializing and interaction comes from my co-workers (who are significantly out of my age range). I've never worked from home, but I'd really like to. I like to think as long as I still socialized after work (happy hour type stuff, kickball league, etc.) I wouldn't feel the isolation and depression.

vasco 14y ago

"The frequency of working from home has been rising rapidly in the US" I don't understand why they even mention the USA. Do they try to extrapolate that USA workers would react the same way Chinese workers did? I'm don't know if they would but it is reasonable to fear that the very different cultural environment could affect results. Or not, we don't know. Hence my question.

patrikmcguire 14y ago
A lot of classical psych studies get completely different results when run in non-Western societies (I'd link but Wikipedia cites a print publication |:). There's a tendency to view everything in the West as "the default" and deviations from that as culture bound. So to answer your question, it would be a pretty tenuous extrapolation from Chinese to American workers.

forgottenpaswrd 14y ago

In my opinion, as a a worker from home now for several years it is the best thing ever. BUT, it is a skill that you have to learn. I had to read and watch-attend many productivity programs for "getting it". Probably I will get a job teaching people how to do it in the future, because as networking speeds increase to Gygabits/second (thing google fiber in every house ten years from now), having instant hidef video would mean even more jobs would be possible from home.

jmadsen 14y ago

I tend to reply to "Does working from Home work?" with "Does working from Work work?" Having spent a few years in a corporate environment, and many more as a consultant in other people's corporate environments, I can tell you first hand that the amount of work you do has very little to do with where your chair is located. Either you are the type of person who gets stuff done, or you aren't. There are huge distractions everywhere you go. People who get things done incorporate them into their schedules & stay productive. Others use them as a welcome escape from actually working. That said, home workers are 1) monitored more closely and 2) fresher from not having to deal with commutes, so no surprise to see the numbers show them as "more productive"

enraged_camel 14y ago
Your post comes across as very cynical, and I disagree with it completely. The type of environment someone is in always has an effect on their productivity. In my case this effect is huge. For example, I build software demos for a living (Sales Engineer at a software company), which requires big chunks of uninterrupted time. I cannot find that at work, even with noise-canceling headphones. If I'm at home though, or even a coffee shop, I get in "The Zone" very easily and can stay in it for quite a while before needing a break. This way, I've built demos in one day that would otherwise have taken me over a week.

lurkinggrue 14y ago

I seems to work more when I am home.

enraged_camel 14y ago

Another benefit of working from home is not having to worry about preparation rituals such as shaving or making sure you have clothes to wear. These are fairly important for me. On rare occasions I get to work from home, I find that being able to jump straight to work after I finish my breakfast is very refreshing. Said breakfast also tastes better since I had more time to prepare it.