Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

> If they talk about how great it was to do their laundry during work hours, thumbs down.

I've worked from home, successfully, for many years, and I disagree with that criteria. Everyone works from home differently, and I know people who can rock their work exactly because of the added flexibility to care for their home and family on their work breaks. It decreases the stress in their life to slice their day in different ways, and allows people with busy lives to do better on all fronts.

There are many different ways to manage remote teams - some are hands-off, only concerned about whether the work is done. Some monitor their people to be sure they are 100% online during "working hours". Many are in a middle ground, with expectations set of specific response times to Slack, IMs, emails, etc. Likewise, there are many different remote working styles. Some people do well with a typical 8 hour day. I tended to target a 40 hour week, but that would be made of many 2-3 hour chunks throughout the week, not 8 hour blocks.

At the end of the day, you have to trust your team to do their work. The companies that are resistant to their remote people handling personal tasks during their "working day" don't truly have that trust.

The way I see it, too, is that companies that don't embrace flexible work hours in fully remote companies (as opposed to just flexible working arrangements) aren't really a remote company. They're just pushing off the capital cost of having an office to the employee themselves. It's a pretty dishonest thing to pass themselves off as a remote company if they expect you to work like you do in an office environment.

The flexibility of being able to intermingle personal tasks throughout the workday is paramount to remote work. It totally does reduce stress and it allows you to work when you're productive and not work when you're not. I find that I'm a very bursty developer and I think that's more the rule than the exception in our profession. Remote work arrangements really help accommodate that reality where output is not constant throughout the day.

> They're just pushing off the capital cost of having an office to the employee themselves.

I made the same comment elsewhere. Completely agree with your post here.

Seriously.

I don't regularly work from home, but I have solved several difficult problems while doing laundry, and I can specifically think of one time recently that was during a workday while I was folding towels. I know it's happened other times as well, I just can't specifically think if it was during the day while working from home.

I've also solved problems while showering, mowing the grass, eating dinner, and laying in bed trying to fall asleep.

Who knew -- developing software involves lots of thinking. You don't have to have your butt in a seat in front of the computer in the office to think. Sometimes doing something completely different is just what's necessary to break through -- whether this is getting up to get a drink, going for a walk, or doing sometimes completely non-computer-related like laundry.

Absolutely agree. My profession is more creative and most of my eurekas happen when I'm doing mundane house chores. Something about the mind wandering about I suppose. I don't think it's a coincidence either that some of our best ideas often come just before we fall asleep.

My high-school math teacher used to say that we have our best ideas for solving problems in the shower and on the toilet. :)

There's actually scientific support for that theory. You gave an example of 'diffused mode' [1] of thinking as opposed to the 'focused mode' of thinking.

Neither is necessarily 'better'; both have their place in our daily lives. The 'diffused mode' regularly doesn't get the credit it deserves as people (e.g. educational systems) are hammering too much on the 'focused mode'.

If you are interested in learning how to use the 'diffused mode', more things related to learning, and optimizing the way you learn I can recommend the free course on Coursera called Learning How To Learn by Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski.

[1] https://staciechoice1010.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/focused-vs...

[2] https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

An office space, with a computer always on your face and the expectation that you will be working is probably the worst environment possible for any kind of creative work.

... Or not. Make it an open office space, with people taking around you. Then you'll get the worst possible.

The hard time I have with having a computer in front of me is that I always feel the need to use it (eg surf hacker news), even if that isn't the best course for solving the problem I am grappling with. Sometimes a shower or a walk helps me disengage visually so I can spend some time with my thoughts.

Yeah. What I like about remote work:

- I can focus

- I can go on a walk w/ my dog, wife, kid(s) whenever I want

- I can sit and think without worrying that I don't look busy to some stupid manager...

Lots of reasons, and they're all perfectly acceptable. Good leaders will realize that the best work often happens when you're not directly working (e.g. in the shower, doing laundry, going for a walk). Being able to step aside and do these things throughout a workday is a productivity boost.

Agreed. I routinely fold laundry during my morning standup call. It's a zero-mental-effort task that gets me on my feet while I chat with my coworkers in a meaningful way. Since I'm at home, my wall-sized dry-erase board is right there. Anything I need to note gets written down, then I resume folding.

One of the things people often forget about in this discussion is the lost company time from being at the office. Yes, valuable conversations can happen in the hallway, but more often than not a lot of non-work chatter does too. I'm fine with that -- I don't want to work in a POW camp -- but to me it highlights how ill-considered the "laundry folders = bad workers" mentality is in many cases. I worked in a cube farm for 5 years, then from home for the past 4 years. I'm vastly more productive at home.

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