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Point 1 is very important, I can confirm with also a decade of doing this.

One note I'd like to add is pay attention to your lighting, have a special "work-mode" set of lights that you turn on when you work and then turn off when you are no longer working.

I use the same work desk for non work stuff, but I turn off my "office lights" and it's a completely different vibe.

Everyone's tastes will be different but as for me, these are my preferences:

- Office lighting: at least 20k lumens of 5000K light with high CRI. For me I like to approximate the brightness of daylight. It's especially useful during the cloudy days of winter. My office is in a basement so the cheapest way to do that is string lights (like for outdoor patios), but with high quality LED bulbs.

- Personal lighting mode: regular house lighting, 3000K (so skewing towards a more yellowish, incandescent-like light). I still enjoy high CRI because I can't stand things looking bland but that's less important. More spot lights, less ambient light.

Anecdotally, I don’t find point 1 to be necessary at all. Points 2 and 3 are vital, however. As long as I cut work off at the end of the day, I’m fine.

I agree with you. I continue sitting in my home office after I stop work, and I don't feel tempted to check in at all. #2 and #3 are paramount to me, though.

I believe there's still a mental separation you get from having separate physical spaces for work life and personal life.

E.g. there are times that I do break the rule (very rarely) and get on my work computer (e.g. download work documents for tax prep), and part of me feels like I'm back at work.

If you've not tried it before, it may be hard to relate or recognize the difference.

I don't know about everyone else, but once I close all my work apps, I completely forget about work. I just got other things I wanna do on my mind so I don't see why I would think about work.

Work to me is like going to the bathroom. I go, do my business, then leave and it's back to my normal day. With WFH, that's even more the case.

Yeah, working from home for four years now and I only have one office and desk. It's used for work, of course, but also when I'm writing for my self, or playing video games with my friends.

I don't have any problem disconnecting from work, but it probably helps that I have a different computer for work that goes in a drawer at the end of the day.

I do follow points 2 and 3 though and I think those are essential.

Sure, the important part is you do a clean break from work and work mode, there's many ways to do so.

Me, my work-desk and pc-gaming-desk are one and the same, but I have different keyboards (PC vs Mac) for the one or the other. It's not ideal though, I'd love to have a dedicated office space and time with e.g. an own kitchenette so I don't have to dart in and out of the shared space of the kitchen multiple times a day.

I'd say that's my main issue; my workspace is separate, but everything else isn't. And it disrupts my family members' days as well. I should go to the office more often.

Would be interested to know which lighting products you are specifically using. I've started dipping my toe into the pool of improved lighting, but the number of products out there is quite overwhelming.

10 years ago the specialty bulbs were all metal halide and CFLs but nowadays, they are LED and much better; some are even dimmable. Sites like 1000bulbs let you search by type, brightness (in lumens), color rendering index (CRI; over 90 is best), temperature (in K), angles (for spotlights).

Many people spend a small fortune on light fixtures and then use the cheapest bulbs in them. I prefer the opposite.

To extract one bit from that: I'm a huge fan of separate devices for separate purposes. Work laptop vs personal laptop. Work phone vs personal phone. Games device vs reading device. Social media device vs productivity device.

I'm much better at contextually driven focus than I am at working mentally to keep things separate. Which I've come to be ok with, in that a lot of my creativity comes from divergent thinking, from jumbling and sorting out things. But that flexibility is a pain when I want to really focus. Different devices help me be clear about what I'm choosing, raise a barrier to distraction, and make it way easier to notice when I'm off task.

E.g., I only use HN from what I think of as my distraction laptop. Social media, fun Slacks, and HN only work on this device. Which is old, so its battery doesn't last, and which is plugged in and kept in a hidden niche next to a not-super-comfortable couch. Taking this approach let me turn off the noprocrast setting here while keeping my fuck-around-on-the-internet time in check.

My recommendation (working 100% remote since 2018).

2b - have a separate work phone If people choose to send emails outside business hours it's their choice, but you don't have to answer. If you do, as part of your contract... Well, you saw the contract before you agreed right?

2c - Set clear boundaries between when you're off work, off, but on call and at work. How? Personally I don't mind being "on call" for <25% of a time, but I absolutely positively have to have extra money every single hour I'm on call(lets say 10~20% of normal hourly rate), and 150~200% rate for incident response time. That's the only way I can do it. But what if your employer pays you double the hourly rate all the time and "implies" it's a 24/7 on call commitment? Isn't that even better financially? Well, yes, but it's definitely not better for my peace of mind. Somehow I don't mind being on call when I see a tally for it at the end of each month, if it "just happens" (and frequently) I quickly start hating it.

> Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door.

A small-apartment version of this is to have a work laptop at home (or carry it home from in-office), but to keep it in a drawer when not in use. Same with a work smartphone.

For people who have to be reachable in emergencies, a real radio pager (best privacy, still company-issued, and it could maybe also go in the drawer), or their preferred automated emergency contact method to their personal smartphone (SMS, email, app). Optionally with a de jure on-call human in the loop. Or just a work-issued smartphone or tablet that can be configured in software to only alert on emergencies.

When emergency contacting personally-owned devices, to minimize taint with business information, the only information conveyed is to check work laptop within X minutes. (The company should also have be a rock-solid log of each such contact, for various reasons.)

(One early startup, where I was leading engineering and had bespoke MVP appliances as part of a factory production line halfway around the globe, and I hadn't yet set up a better alerting method, I just used an iPad for this. The iPad had 2 purposes, about the only things it could do: (1) compartmentalize the sketchy videoconferencing app we used, away from the Linux laptop that was early-startup powerful; (2) be a fairly discreet "picture frame" display in the evening, so that I'd notice emails from factory management or our alert system. With more time this could've been polished to be better for my nerves, but it was still definitely better than having the work laptop visible 24/7.)

Good points. I religiously turn on my laptop at 9 in the morning and turn it off at 17:30. During that time I am always reachable but after that the laptop is off and I have no work related apps on my phone.

Also: when I am on vacation I am gone and won’t work. My team has my phone number for extreme emergencies but that never happened so far.

> Also: when I am on vacation I am gone and won’t work. My team has my phone number for extreme emergencies but that never happened so far.

If you're already doing #1 (don't take your laptop out of the office) and #2 above, then this is automatic. But yes, those should especially be followed when you're on PTO.

Yep point 1 I think is the most important, but if you don't have the luxury of an office at home, having a start of work process, and an end of work process is really important e.g. at end of day, close laptop, put away in a drawer, and tidy up work paraphernalia, then sit down and have a cup of tea while reading a book. It mentally bookmarks the start and end of work, and allows your mind to reset from work mode.

Agreed. I've been using RoutineFlow to help establish routines and it has been great.

These are all valid point if that's your thing. It reminds me of coffee brewing advice where the very first stated goal is "make repeatable brews" and the expert explains a very meticulous protocol they've repeated and perfected for years now。

It's nice and fine if you never get bored of it.

When people bring their laptop in the kitchen or closet, or go to coffee shops, libraries etc. it's often not because they haven't found a perfected routine, but because they don't want to sit/stand in the same exact spot in the same posture 8h a day every weekday for decades.

Point number 2 also has caveats: with a family it can be easier to allow semi-random interruptions a few times a day and work a bit after everyone's asleep than sticking to an ironclad schedule and being absolutely unavailable when your kid's having tea time or needs a quick help.

For sure, a lot of the things you're describing boils down to the flexibility -- as a perk -- you get from working from home.

But I believe it's the flexibility that make it hard for people to mentally disconnect -- it blurs the lines between work and life.

And, to your point, that's totally fine if that's your preference. I think what we're both saying is that the three points I make above are, in a way, sacrificing some flexibility in order to maintain that separation.

For me, I'm completely fine giving up some of that flexibility so that I can maintain the mental separation. But, to me, I have the best of both worlds in that I still have the option of flexibility in cases where I really need it. But I only try to exercise it when I really need it.

going 10+ years remote, I second all these!

I would also add

1. disable notifications, if you can't get rid of work-connected devices: perhaps your work computer is your only computer, and you want to watch a movie on it, just configure chat/mail whatever to only work in _pull_ mode rather than _push_. Don't worry, if something is really important it will reach you.

2. enforce time boundaries through routine. E.g. go to the gym at 17:30 every day so logging off means physically detaching yourself. Or pick up your kids, or take the dog for a walk. Make yourself accountable to non-work.

3. corollary to 2: start work when work start, not before. Do not work in pajamas, do not check your email during breakfast. Do your own things, then start working.

I have not been 100% good at doing all of these, but even doing this a bit has had massive positive effects to not doing it.

I've been working from home since 2016 and I had similar problems with the addition of having a hard time "getting into work mode".

It took me 6 months to adjust to it and I can't even think about going to an office anymore nowadays.

The not having work on my personal phone was a big gamechanger for me as well, even before I worked from home. Not sure when or why I made the decision but very glad I did.

How do you disconnect and shutdown the problem solving part of your brain?

I’ve found that writing a log or a daily summary, a core dump, if you will, helps me disengage. But not always.

I feel like the other 3 points above all help with this. That's not to say that I don't log off, and still think about something I'm working on, or wake up thinking about it (this depends on what I'm working on, how much pressure I'm feeling, and how complex/interesting it is).

But honestly, this doesn't feel any different than it always did. Pre-smartphones, I still would sometimes drive home and think about what I was working on on the way home, or "bring work home" with me.

I think the brain thing is (mostly) independent of the WFH/WFO thing -- as long as you're doing the other three things above. Otherwise, the brain thing is compounded.

I’ve found doing a “fake commute” where I go for a walk for 30-60 minutes after work is pretty helpful.

being able to decompress walking around a leafy park is much better than trying to decompress stuck in a busy train with no seats.

Not OP but many years of working from home.

The best thing I've found is Logseq. Any other note taking app would probably do, but the important thing is that it's a "daily journal" style where I brain dump relevant things into bullet points. This has come in really handy for many other reasons as well.

I've been using Logseq for the last few months and it's wildly better for me than using things like Evernote for this. I used to be big on having a lot of structure in terms of notebooks and notes, a lot of which contained project journals of one sort or another. But the way Logseq makes journaling a primary interface makes things much easier. I tag some things I want to be able to find later, or link them to pages. But I have a lot fewer dedicated pages now, and have to worry a lot less about maintaining consistency in some sort of broad ontology.

I use paper. Sometimes I refer back to the last few pages but rarely go back further than that. 99% things... Seem like really good ideas but if they don't stick then they probably don't need a dedicated home. And if they do stick.. well, I'll have to flip a few pages and copy them into my personal wiki or something so they can have a longer life.

I leave my home office and connect with my kids or go outside. Just the action of getting up and leaving the work space and starting a new activity seems to do the trick for me, YMMV of course.

You need to do this even if you don't subscribe to the idea of work life separation. You'll find better solutions to complex problems if you can rest, exercise, pursue a hobby or other distraction for part of each day. The subconscious needs recruitment for anything non trivial. Log it and state the problem that isn't yet solved explicitly in writing. Then affirm to yourself that you will come back with a solution.

> How do you disconnect and shutdown the problem solving part of your brain?

I dont.

Instead, I substitute MY OWN projects and goals and things INSTEAD OF work's goals. So instead of killing my innate curiosity and problem solving, I change its focus to serve me.

I follow these similarly except use a coworking space and use a separate phone for work in case on call or something.

If I didn't have to travel, I'd go for a desktop and it works better for the separation aspects too.