Hacker News Reader

The efficiency I gain from working out of a home office would be very hard to give up.

I calculated an extra 90 minutes per day that’s required to work in an office. Once in an office there are a number of distractions that prevent deep work. Tasks are perfectly doable so long as they don’t require much focus or creativity.

I find that for creative or problem-solving type activities two things are pretty crucial:

1. You need to be able to get up out of your chair and go do something else for a bit with zero friction.

2. You need to be able to start early or work late when you are in a good flow state with zero friction.

Working in an office destroys both of these almost completely because of the subtle (or not so subtle) pressure to do all your work in one contiguous 8-hour stretch each day where any time spent out of your seat is not considered work, even though many thorny problems have been solved during a walk or a workout, etc.

What makes sense when 20% of employees are more productive at home and 80% are less?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com