This chestnut 'home has too many distractions' line is getting old. Work has equivalent distractions, and those people actually get paid to distract you. It takes time management wherever you sit your butt.
For you maybe. For some of us, the office is like a monastery compared to home and is the only place where deep work is even close to possible. As we return to normal, I hope more employers embrace a hybrid approach that allows everyone to thrive.
Mitigation until such time employers acknowledge decades of empirical evidence that open offices and cube farms sabotage productivity, health, morale. (Never.)
And yet in my home it's accurate. Of course, your mileage may vary.
Where I work, it's like a library. Quiet, serene, productive, but tense.
At home it's noisy, disjointed, non-productive [hey look, I'm on HN!], and full of disruptions [slack, 5+ zoom meetings per day, kids screaming [Brother keeps hitting me!!!], and wife trying to live her life [TV, music, etc...]. But it's relaxed.
I prefer working from home, I feel like it's better, but there is a lot that can be improved.
For many, when they have a question or an item to discuss, that moves to top of mind and the first impulse is to go interrupt whatever the person is doing to satisfy it. This is made even worse when these types of employees are in management positions because saying “not now” isn’t an option. I used to work with a guy who would regularly have unimportant questions come up and if we didn’t have an immediate answer he would say “let’s go ask X.” I’d usually say, “let’s bring it up in our next meeting or ask in an email, I don’t want to interrupt what he’s doing.” He’d say “who cares, let’s go bother him!” Zero consideration for other people’s time. That experience permanently scarred me I think.
To this day I pretty much never call anyone at work without an appointment or at least pinging them asking when they have a few minutes to chat. I realize most here probably get that but I think the average workplace has a few people like that and it only takes one or two on a team to make a massive impact on productivity.
In my experience at work, I've seen the opposite. The people most distracted get the least done and it's obvious to everyone on the team. Plus obviously you do need to pay attention to some distractions. Going too far in one direction is not good. I think, however, most people lean more towards distractions than focus.
The point is choice. There are door-open and door-closed times of every day. In an open office, there is no choice, it's door-open always, and that sucks.
And thus a veneer of legitimacy curtails the otherwise dragging distraction of guilt.
Most of the world is not like that. For example[1], avg apartment size in Bangalore 1260 sqft and in Mumbai is 700 sqft. Most of the knowledge workers live in dense cities around the world and it is not feasible for them to move to the US suburbia.
[1] https://realty.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/residential...
Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, … are (essentially) open plan.
My experience at google was the cube walls not even being tall enough to do anything when you were sitting.
And it looks exactly like other non-productive things at work: in my morning standup i can say: " i got pulled into a meeting about 'random irrelevant issue' so thats my day"
'Home distraction' are considered slacking