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Comment by _eht | Hacker News Reader

I have also been working out of my garage for the last eight years and I'm just now in the process of finding an office. I don't have any kids, but I still feel like I'm going stir crazy.

Sometimes you just need to put some distance between where you sleep and where you work.

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I work from home. Here's how I get around this: after waking up and having breakfast, I go for a short (~10 minute) walk or bike ride around the block. When I get back, I start working. That kind of "fake commute" is sufficient to trick my brain into separating work from everything else I do in the same space.

When you end the day, do you have a second fake commute home?

In my case, gym.

Makes more sense to just sleep at the office and commute home in the morning.

This actually does the trick. I go to a nearby coffee shop to get my coffee. It's like, changing context allows you to switch to "work mode".

This is my trick too. It works out nicely if you have a dog, then you can walk them at the same time.

My dog doesn't wake up that early.

Doesn't work for me. The moment I enter my house again, my brain immediately smells home (=rest) and I cannot work again.

This. The longer I 'work from home' the more I discover the importance of separate physical spaces for certain activities. If I spend enough time on entertainment in the same space that I work all day, over time working in that space seems to become more and more 'energetically mixed' (for lack of a better term) and it seems to get harder to focus on specific non-entertainment tasks. I now refuse to eat, sleep, or indulge in entertainment in the same space that I work. I don't even let myself read fiction books where I work. I try to do all deep thinking while walking outside, read fiction in bed before sleeping, and only work while standing at my desk.

I'd theorize that this has something to do with the fact that the hippocampus is implicated in both determining locational context (for navigation) as well as task management and executive function. I've read a bunch of books on the topic of willpower that indicate that decision-making is a fairly expensive on a metabolic level, so this makes sense to me -- it's like you're minimizing the array of actions from which your hippocampus has to scan when it determines what to work on from locational context.

When I worked from home I did something similar to what a previous poster has said. I would go to a cafe in the morning and work from there until lunch, I found I needed some humans around me for at least part of my morning to focus. Then after lunch I'd go home and work until 6 or so then go to the gym. Just doing this, the feeling of coming home from the gym, allowed me to have that mental space from work and home time.

I worked from home for 6 months and it was completely miserable. I have a small office at home and I tried really hard to see it as a separation from my "home", but I just couldn't focus in there. I could barley get work done knowing my bed and tv were just a few feet away. It was also really, really lonely.

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