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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

  > You also get that intangible "separation" of your work life from your home life that your commute used to give you--hard to explain. A brief walk outside to and from the office allows me to reset into work-mode or home-mode.

A lifehack that I learned here on HN when I was working from home was to actually leave the door, then walk right back in and work. If I needed to do any housework, I would again leave through the door, and return "home".

This reduced all temptations to mix work and home life. It also made it clear to the other people in the house that daddy is now serious, and that even just a simple "hi, how are you" would require me to get up, leave, and return to answer. And then leave and return to go back to work. The social friction was important.

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Not going to lie, as much as I agree with this idea - even just going down to my busy street store in the morning wakes me up somehow - this comment does also read like a great prompt for a comedy skit.

For real.

The adherence to this technique needs to be total and absolute, but the situation has to call for an ever-escalating frequency of interruptions from family, work, the government, neighbors, etc.

We need some sketch comedians to get on this!

https://chat.openai.com/share/61fd3182-d513-498f-a85f-58876f...

That’s pretty good

Right away it misses the comedic potential of handling the ringing of the door bell. That really should have involved her opening the door, stepping outside to switch contexts (with the person who rang the bell standing there), immediately stepping back inside, closing the door, immediately re-opening the door to answer the bell, etc, etc.

You failed to explain the concept, and chatGPT did not understand it. What a waste of time.

I didn't think i failed to explain the concept?

I guess I sort of understand a bit of downvoting but... didn't expect that much.

Whatever... happy holidays everyone all the same! :)

its like that gif of grandpa simpson walking in and then walking back out again.

Or a sub-plot of Severance where they adapt the sci-fi concept for work-at-home

> It also made it clear to the other people in the house that daddy is now serious, and that even just a simple "hi, how are you" would require me to get up, leave, and return to answer. And then leave and return to go back to work. The social friction was important.

Suppose someone else went out the door, walked back in, and went to your work area. Were they then considered to be in the work area and so could talk with you without you having to leave and come back?

This reminds me of first learning VI. What context am I in!!!!!

I would go along with it - this is my family after all and I encourage creativity. But depending on the interruption, they might hear an answer that rings closely with "that can wait until I get home" or "don't hit her back, but try to resolve it between yourselves".

You need two hats. A work hat and family hat. This is the only possible social cue that will work in the long term.

I would completely expect my family to get behind this. I've worked remotely for many years now so my kids were (in theory) well trained to not bother me while I'm working. However, that started to get more lax post-covid. I also used to specifically work late at night and in the morning while they were at school. As they get older and stay up later, it has gotten more difficult to keep that schedule.

I recently moved my office to our third floor space. I'm hoping the extra work required to go up a flight of stairs will limit spontaneous interruptions during the day. I'm hopeful, but don't expect it to work long term.

Maybe I need hats...

I feel like this only makes sense in the US. As a non-US person, I still find it weird when people show up on video calls wearing hats (e.g. caps) at home.

What about an "On Air" light instead of the hat?

I'm now retired but headphones were my invibility hat. I was easy for the kids, headphones means daddy is not home, it was harder for my wife.

"honey, just write me on Slack if I'm wearing headphones." - not even sure if I'm being satirical or not.

this is 100% real life 0% satire, and doesn't work in a not-funny-at-all way if your partner is not a remote office worker. source: a friend

This is what I've wanted to have outside my office for a very long time.

  > You need two hats. A work hat and family hat.

That is a terrific idea and I'll try it if I'm back in the situation again. Thank you!

The neighbors will just have to get used to seeing me step outside occasionally to swap hats.

When I started working from home in earnest, I had to be really strict with the rest of the family about bursting into my office. They had to knock, then wait for permission to enter, and only then were they allowed to open the door. If they just barged in then they would be asked to leave. It took months to get them used to this idea.

It might sound unnecessarily pompous but really it’s just enforcing some basic courtesy.

Indeed, you could be in a meeting with a headphone and they would have no way to know if it's okay to enter the room without that.

Sounds like leveraging the: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect

Gotta trick those pesky neural Place Cells into operating the way we want them to.

The White House is actually designed to accommodate this. The main path between the West Wing and the residence is an outdoor colonnade.

If you walk out and in again to do housework, aren't you just pretending to not mix both? I tend to view this more as hypocrisy than anything.

I like the fact that because I work home, I have to mix work and home life actually. Breakfast, Laundry, cooking, lunch, doing groceries. I treat those as important "pauses" that forces me to move a bit my body, release the mind. The key is putting strong limit in the amount of those and planning them in advance so that you don't have unexpected and constant context switches. Like today I had set a reminder to clean up the nozzle of my printer at 12am. I definitely have to set alarms on my laptop because I tend to forget everything when focused. When you think of it, most people working at an office are also mixing work and personal if not home life, or even argue about things on hn.

As for kids, I send them to school so I tend to only have them home for 2 hours a day if I haven't finished work. The only issue is if they are fighting against each other because otherwise I tell them to do their homework. 2 hours of lower concentration out of 8 is not that big of a deal anyway. It is still better that 8 hours of lower concentration in an office.

Reminds me of a great book, the city & the city, where this concept is taken quite literally at the scale of an entire city. Complete with border checkpoints that can be used to exit one city and enter the other one.

This is a great book, I'd also add that the TV (BBC I think) mini-series does a surprisingly good job at getting the atmosphere of it.

Sounds like a manual variant of the mind-splitting tech in Severance!

It must take some cooperation from the others in the house, to avoid being often expected to make exceptions “just this once” and respond immediately.

I use the work notebook lid for this. At the end of the work day I slam it down and my brain stops thinking about work too (most of the time)

While this works for mental transition, if you have a spouse and kids, they're going to pretty much ignore this boundary. You'll have kids knocking on your door within minutes.

This is either a lifehack for productivity or a lifehack to convince a roommate/partner/tax preparer that you need a dog that you can take on walks as a business expense.

I would routinely -walk to work- complete with the coffee and stroll along the water, to end right back at my house.

Mentally it just put me in a different 'mode'

And preserved my home as the home

Somehow as I was reading this post, a mugshot of Ted Kaczynski appeared in the background.

Use co-working, Luke.

I live in a small village a half hour drive to the city. Some friction is necessary, but not that much.

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