I've also thought about that a lot. I had a friend at a previous employer who considered starting a food truck business instead of doing software development.
Learn to say no to your boss. Work, computers and internet are only a small part of life.
Personally, it's not worth the stress. I was in the hospital for stress induced heart failure last year and work was a contributing factor along with urban life. Now I divide my time amongst other things. The market where I live is competitive and anyone who expects me to work a 60 hour week for them all the time and attack me for not doing so can politely fuck right off as it's not worth my life. Thankfully I don't have to deal with this; companies don't like paying overtime and I'm thankful to work for a company that respects my time.
I think loving ones work is the only way to really maintain good work/life balance while working from home.
My work/life balance is essentially balancing things between my hobbies and my family. So, it's a much nicer situation than if I was working on something I didn't love and I had to balance that with hobbies and family life.
Please man up and don't do it to yourselves and to other people.
That said, outside of paid work, I often work/read up on stuff which benefits ME, whether it is professional or personal development.
Actually, my salary is on par with the standard salaries for my area. No, it's not SV level, but salaries in Dallas are much lower than SV across the board.
Cost of living is so much cheaper, though, that I'd rather work at a defense contractor in Dallas than at a unicorn in SV. I can handily afford a 1500 sq. ft. townhouse on $65k/year, here... (I could afford it on less actually... I was making $42k when I first moved in). I don't think anybody in California can say that.
My company recently forced Vodafone Mobile device Management upon us, since that happened many people also stopped syncing their own smartphones (what a horrible app on Android). But I am in R&D where I guess deadlines are less strict...? Even during my PhD the lab would be mostly empty at 18:00 though I guess the people that were still working were the ones ending op at MIT.
I guess there is a reason we don't have a booming start-up culture here :)
Would the Netherlands (one of my favorite places in the world) have a booming startup culture with changes in laws and cultural norms? No, I don't think so. Anyone who wants to be involved with that stuff moves themselves over anyway.
It's odd because the Europeans were the first real entrepreneurs with colonialism, but it seems like that part of European culture (or maybe those particular minded Europeans) were exported and sent off as well.
I'm personally very interested in colonial era history and subsequent history of the Americas since that was the beginning of modern North/South America, and would love to run across a writeup someday attempting to breakdown the differences between new/old world thinking. Because even the Latin nations like Mexico are significantly different in how entrepreneurship is admired than from say, Spain or Italy.
If you own your business, no matter what, you are always thinking of your business. Especially when your business is small and will always be small enough that you're the only significant leadership in the entire company. You won't be doing too much delegation of responsibilities in a food truck.