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Comment by errantmind | Hacker News Reader

A simple answer is: working from home requires the ability to hold yourself accountable for your productivity to a much greater extent than if you were in an office. Yes, working at home is a different setting, with different distractions, but, based on my experience, there are a lot of extra motivators present in an office, like peer pressure, justifying the commute, being held accountable for the perception of working, contribution recognition, easy socializing, etc.

For better or worse, none of those are as impactful when working from home and the worker is forced to fuel their productivity themself.

I left my job a year ago to work on my own projects full-time and it took several months for me to find ways to really motivate myself to be consistently productive

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It also requires you to hold others accountable to a much greater extent. Part of what drove me away from remote work was the additional effort required to get people to respond to anything. When you were remote, you were invisible.

Really? I find the opposite is true, if you aren't pushing commits that speaks pretty loudly.

It sounds like you are pushing commits and not shuffling tickets around a system of black holes.

I have also found that many people have problems with async/written communication or even just paying attention to email or tasks. It is related to their general competence, communication skills and habits, and level of interest.

It is a big problem.

For me if they can't handle git comments or slack then they can usually manage to show up for a phone call. And in my projects that is generally not the best, but it is good enough to be able to keep projects moving forward.

If it was a programmer rather than manager or client who did not reply to chat/email or handle git properly, in my opinion there is no excuse and that is a fireable offense. I mean, it should be fireable for managers and clients too but sometimes keeping the gig seems worth it.

You expect people to respond to git comments?

This, for better or worse, drives me to work harder. I have anxiety around being perceived as not working hard enough. I have been full time remote at the same position for around 8 years with a large timezone difference.

I have a small part of my day when I report to my team what I have done the previous day. I always want to make sure it seems like I have a few significant tasks that I completed. Sometimes, when things are going well, it does not take much time to achieve this and I feel good with 5 hours of work. Sometimes I get stuck on a tricky problem and work 9 or 10 hours.

My co-workers (who are not work from home) all seem to think I am very productive, so I guess it works!

Mind sharing some tips or resources to learn more about self accountability?

I hated this at first but at work when we moved to wfh we started using gitlabs time tracking features on all tickets. At first I felt like it made me rush everything to hit the estimated times and lost quality but after a few weeks I just ignore the estimated time and do it as fast as possible without sacrificing any quality. No one actively checks the time or cares if you go over as long as there is some extra quality to show for it but someone might question the fact that you spent hours on a very simple bit of work which keeps me on topic because I want to have something to point to to show where those hours went.

I just shared a few of my thoughts in response to the comment below

To some degree that is definitely true. But in the other hand there usually should be communication and tools such as git that record and communicate effort which would make a lack of accomplishment pretty obvious.

I don't work at home all the time, but I've been struggling to find some metric to hold myself accountable for my own quality and intensity of work. Do you mind sharing your experience?

Metrics didn't work for me other than a binary, honest assessment of whether or not I worked on a particular day 'in good faith'. I treat it as a negotiation between my present and future selves. When you resolve to do something in the future, you are telling your future self that you know better than they do. This often fails for people because you have a much better understanding of your intent and reasons when you make the decision than when it is time to act. To counter this I decided to strengthen my 'resolve', which I define as the strength of my decisions. If my decisions are strong, they are much more easily recalled and felt when it is time to act.

In my experience there has to be a balance though. I can't always live by the decisions I have made in the past. I have to have some time each week where I live purely in the moment, with no prior plans guiding my actions. This way my future self doesn't begin to resent my past self.

At first it is odd to reason about yourself as different people at different times, but now I find it odd I ever thought to project an unchanging version of my present self into the future, as if time was not a factor to be considered.

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