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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I'm going a bit bonkers working from home, to tell the truth. The biggest problem is the fuzzy line between work and home.

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Worked from home for about 7 years ... at first this was a problem, but the biggest step you can take to solve this is getting an office space in your home, where the only thing you do there is work ... it helps a lot if it has doors that you can shut so that you can give yourself the mental feeling of 'going' to work.

The second thing you can do is have set hours ... doesn't mean you force yourself to be up at 9am ... but do make it regular, even if it is from 12pm to 3pm (or whatever) take it seriously. No TV (can't stress this enough), no running to the store, or the post office to take care of that quick thing.

Those two things really helped me a lot, hope it helps you out too.

"The biggest problem is the fuzzy line between work and home."

This is something you learn to manage. The fuzzy line is there whether or not you work from home. If you are a programmer or other IT type you probably already have the ability to do _some_ work from home and possibly have to be on-call sometimes (or all the time -- which I've done before).

There are ways you can manage this line while working from home, but having worked on-call, in both remote and non-remote settings, separating yourself is far more difficult when working from home.

Even when working on call, or doing some work from home, you can still maintain the mindset, "This is my home. I'm at home now. Work can't touch me here." I have tried to maintain that separation while working mostly from home -- by even physically removing myself from my office outside work hours -- but, over a long period of time, I can't help but feel my personal life is my work. I can never fully separate myself from where I normally work.

However, it's not fair to say that everyone will have the same experience, there are a lot of factors: work load, expected duties, office communication, and even your office layout -- I was worn down the most when I didn't have a dedicated office. Personally, I can't wait to get back to an office setting.

This hits the nail on the head, for me. I thought staying motivated would be my primary problem before I started, but what's definitely worn me down the most is the lack that delineation -- both in my routine and in the physical separation of work and home.

I've tried to remain positive -- and have for the most part -- but after time, and especially when I have projects at work accumulating, it's extremely easy to feel trapped at work/home.

I love working from home, although my trip into town for a Ruby user group meeting was the first time I've been outside in three weeks.

I'm not a naturally social person, so without being forced to interact with other people by work I'll tend to only talk to my wife and the daily Skype meeting with colleagues in the office.

That's probably not healthy.

this was exactly my experience as well. another big factor was the im/email only communication 99% of the time started making my coworkers feel like anonymous web people. kind of surreal. I lasted about a year and a half before I ended up going back to an office gig.

You've heard of skype, yes?

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