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Comment by take_a_breath | Hacker News Reader

Not to diminish your experience, but a lot of your "calculation" seems to exists because of assumptions you have made. Isn't 9-5 the typical working day? Why does your commute need to be 1 hour each way?

I work a 9-5 with a 40 minute commute each way. That 40 minutes includes 20 minutes of walking which lessens my need for other exercise. I get plenty of time with my 17-month old. 6-8 in the morning and 5:30-7:30 at night.

On the flip side, my wife works from home and loves her breaks when she can spend time with our child. She is also often lamenting a lack of time for exercise and social activities.

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Not the original poster, but it's easy for a commute to be 1 hour each way even if you live very close to work. I'm about 18 minutes away from the office by car, but by bus, it takes about 1 hour or more, and monthly parking costs are insane. (several hundreds of dollars per month)

As for your wife, I may be misunderstanding if she works from home as a Mom or remotely, but my wife works from home as a stay-at-home-mom and exercises almost every day with two young ones. She takes long walks with the children, one in a stroller and the other in a front pack.

The other thing she does is a variety of workout videos. Our oldest actually does some of the workout with her and encourages her with the same phrases the people on the workout video use. (ex. "train your body!") It's cute.

I appreciate your exercise / decompression time. It's something I miss occasionally being remote. 8:30-5:30 with an hour on each end for a commute is definitely more of a typical workday I'd say for somebody in an office.

That said, imagine if you could do 40 minutes of walking with your child instead (or do the walk / ride / sport you wanted during that time), lose nothing, and still work the same hours?

Lamenting the lack of time for exercise and social activities is a problem of having children, not remote work. Working at an office, however, means you'll likely get first crack at that stuff because it's "on your way home" or "just a thing after work" but if you were working from home you could easily trade this time back and forth with your partner and they could do the same thing. That said, those interactions definitely require a bit more work than the social scene that's "built-in" at the office.

> I get plenty of time with my 17-month old. 6-8 in the morning and 5:30-7:30 at night.

Kids vary a lot in how much sleep they need. Sleeping 7:30pm to 6:00am is 10.5hr, while many 17-month olds need more like 12hr at night.

I had a 10 minute commute before I started working from home. The big thing that lets me see my kids more is that I am _already home_ when they get back from school in the afternoon. Previously, I only would see them when I got back home from the office, right at dinner time.

I tried working from home with 2 year old. Impossible. I actually sometimes work from home on days she is at child care.

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