Ask HN: How often do you work from home? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How often do you work from home?

5 pointsjpmoyn8 comments

I was talking to a colleague about working from home, and what a healthy amount of it looks like. I mentioned that among my peers it seems like most get at least 1 day a week from home, which to me seems like the perfect number. He told me that he thinks 1 day every two weeks. I have interviewed for companies that allow 2 days from home per week, which to me seems like too much.

How often do you work from home? Is it good for your productivity? Your work/life balance?

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Two days a week. If my work environment continues to get louder/more crowded, I'd likely move up to three.

As I type this, I can overhear 3 distinct conversations, over my headphones. I am _vastly_ more productive at home. Coworkers tend to make async pings over chat rather than walking over to context switch you. There's less visual/audial distractions. There are less spurious discussions, since someone can't just "Grab you." I additionally have more desk space, a more comfortable work environment, and a generally more peaceful surrounding at home.

(This on top of the obvious benefit of gaining 2 hours back of every day, and throwing off all the stress that comes via sitting in traffic for those 2 were I commuting)

After a mix of personal offices and open spaces over the last decade, having a door, or the ability to work largely remote, have become significant drivers in my career choices. The quality of life is just so much higher.

I have been working from home 2 days a week for the past year. It is usually Tuesday and Thursday. I have about a 3.5 hour round trip commute, so I just asked if it was ok if I worked two days from home and my boss was fine with it and his boss was fine with it. I also see many doctors and so I make sure to schedule all my appointments on a Tuesday/Thursday.

I'm typically at the same level of productivity when working from home as I am in the office. There are distractions in both areas. At home, it is the dogs and at the office it is coworkers.

I work from home all the time. In fact I have been doing it for the past 11 years.

Some places I've also WFH-ed at: my car, on bus & train, on aeroplane just before taking off, car dealer, co-working spaces or friends and/or customer offices, various hotels and cafes, etc. I've even been on motorcycle trip where I've had to pull over and get something urgent done before reaching my destination.

The key to everything is discipline, a bit of preparation and being diligent with your work. At the end of the day most bosses don't care where you are (I've never seen mine, nor the team I work with in person, they are half-way across the world) as long as your job is done, preferably very well.

To be clear I started working remotely out of necessity but I've had an eurika moment when I read "The 4 hour work week" by Tim Ferris. This is one of my all time favorite books and I strongly recommend reading at least some chapters from it if you intend to work from home.

At least once a week, usually more. Often, those are the most productive days: Sitting in a comfortable, familiar environment to my liking, and being able to focus on code (or whatever else is at hand) without distractions. Not having to prepare for work and commute helps a lot, too, in terms of wasted time and psychologically.

In fact the pure knowledge of not having to get up early and go through the whole morning routine to spend all day in my office often suffices to make the evening before feel like it's going to be a weekend day the next day, despite the usually increased productivity.

As for meetings, I don't like to stay home for meetings that I substantially care about, because I think that even with video conference a lot of communication bandwidth is lost, but for meetings where my attendance is merely necessary, it works very well.

Never!

This is great for work/life balance. I'm not tempted to even be aware of work when I am at home. I can devote my time fully to my family.

I will admit to a few other things that help productivity and work/life balance:

1. I get solid office walls. Some work locations are behind multiple layers of heavy doors.

2. I get extreme flex-time, so I can show up and leave at strange and random hours. This is really helpful for dealing with any family issues that may arise.

3. I'm only expected to work 40 hours per week, for real.

4. My commute is 3 minutes by car or under 20 minutes by foot. It's just 0.9 miles. This is the benefit of not living in an urban environment. There is a small house right behind my workplace (you could commute via pole vaulting) that is expected to go for $180,000.

I WFH 1 day per week, on Wednesday. I am actually more productive on Wednesdays because I don't get bothered by coworkers, and I am able to focus on what I need to do. I would prefer 2 days from home per week honestly.

I work from home for 1 day a week. While it may not be the MOST productive day I get out of the week, overall I think it prevents me burning out on my coworkers, and my company overall. It's worth mentioning I am a developer, so the work lends itself to being manageable remotely.

Every day, for almost 20 years now

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