Living in my 350sqft studio during the pandemic, I personally have tried a lot of these "tips," but haven't found much success. It turns out the brain is pretty good at building contextual clues related to its surroundings. Even if I'm sitting at my "play" desk (different chair, different room corner, different computer with its own keyboard/mouse/monitor), playing a game, with the lighting scheme completely different, I'm still _physically_ in the same place. I've still got the same noise from upstairs neighbors, same surroundings, same deco, same food options, same _temperature_ even (remember complaining about offices being too cold?). It's not enough to kick my brain out of "work" mode, and as a consequence, I'm always thinking about work in the back of my mind.

This is of course all separate from whether you can actually physically go offline from work, too. If a Slack ping at any time causes you to reopen your work laptop, even if you have different surroundings, you can't really fully escape "work mode." If you always wake up immediately into dealing with work, your bed becomes a "work area" too...

I have found myself missing the work commute more and more. Granted, I had a pretty nice one (15min train, 10min walk; not spending hours in traffic), but the biggest benefit I'm retroactively realizing was the clear separation between work and home. Working on finishing up a commit? Too bad, gotta run to catch a train, and then I'm no longer in work mode. Thinking about that bug the next morning? Maybe, but can still allow some personal time in the morning because not really "at work" until the physical commute in.