My first experience at working from home

I've been working at home for about a year and can sympathize with the author. I've really been surprised at what an effect its had on me socially. I'm not the most outgoing person to begin with so the forced in-person interactions (both appreciated and unappreciated) that I got in my previous office settings were probably a lot more beneficial to me than I previously believed.

I feel like I have the additional challenge of being a web developer so when I do get the chance to talk to people, I don't have the "oh you won't believe this crazy guy I work with" stories. Everything is "oh you won't believe this wacky stacktrace I was getting." Cue glazed over eyes.

I love sitting here in my sweats, making fresh lunches, taking a short nap almost every afternoon to refresh, and being able to travel literally wherever I want as long as there's wifi. I miss people more than I thought I would. I think I'll probably join a coworking space before long even if it's only to go for a part of the week.

I've been working remotely for a few years. The first few months, if you've never done it before and don't know how to cope, definitely feel as the author described. It's your first time. You're just doing it wrong.

Best way I've over come the social needs is to work out of a local cafe once or twice a week. Get to know the people there. Learn their names. Make friends. Work on a crossword together.

Get a whiteboard. Plenty of notebooks. Take time to journal your day. Thoughts, frustrations, tasks. Explain things to yourself out loud.

Reward yourself. Take a walk to the park. Catch up on the New Yorker Poetry podcast.

I don't find motivation to be a problem so long as the team is good at planning and there's always something to do that I can take action on without bothering folks. Use a system and stick to it: pomodoro, GTD, whatever. Be systematic and work with intent. If you're stuck wondering what you should be doing you need to re-evaluate your process and plug the leaks: you should always know what needs to be done next.

Things that make working remote suck for your remote workers:

1. Hallway planning. Making decisions face-to-face in meat-space and not documenting them anywhere. Everything needs to go into an email list or task tracking system.

2. Poor communication. If you're never available online, refuse too many requests for chats, ignore emails... it can be really frustrating. The great thing about working remotely is that communication can be intermediated by scripts. Set auto-replies, status updates, reminders, alerts.

3. Never enough information. When you're working closely in a group face-to-face it can be easy to draw consensus on an issue and document it with a single, innocuous task in the task manager and not bother filling in the description, properly rating it, tagging it, etc. Always add enough information so that anyone can come along and take care of it without having to hunt you down.

I've been working from home for almost eight years now. At first, it was just me and my dogs while my wife went to work. That was definitely hard at first, to stay focused and productive. Every day Alicia would come home and I'd be desperate to get out of the house, she'd usually want to stay in and chill, though, having just had a full day interacting with people at work. I eventually learned that walking down to the library or coffee shop a couple times a week helped some. But coffee shops aren't ideal workspaces in that they don't provide reliable internet, space, often too noisy and sometimes feel like you're not welcome to stay for a long time.

The past few years my wife started staying home and we have two kiddos now. Being able to work from home while raising a young family is a huge advantage logistically speaking and I am thankful every time I get to have lunch with my kids or take a 15 minute break to play in the backyard. But there's also a lot of distractions that are sometimes hard to ignore and the problems of professional isolation and like and reduced networking opportunities.

To this end I started working with a couple friends on a project last year called SpareChair (https://sparechair.me) to build a community of people who work remotely and so we can get connected and provide easy access to a lot of places to work together. We're mostly active in Brooklyn/Manhattan right now to gather feedback and learn how to make this work. Would definitely love to hear any thoughts you all might have on SpareChair, too.

I worked full time remote for 12 years doing driver / kernel / firmware work for an IHV.

What I missed most about working in an office (and what I liked most about going to work at an office again 2 years ago) is the sense of separation and decompression that a commute gives you. If you're not careful, you can easily wind up always working all the time since your "office" is right in your living space.

I found this article really interesting. I've really enjoyed my recent experiences telecommuting. The main difference in my life, though, is that I'm close to the office. This allows me to go in part of the week and work from home another part.

I love being able to talk to my coworkers and go in for meetings, but when it comes down to it, it's really nice to be able to sit in the silence and comfort of my house and work when I need to get stuff done.

Both working in the office and at home have their pros/cons. It's all about preference.

I've been working from home for almost a year now. I agree with most of the article. My checklist of things I do for sanity goes something like this:

1. Set up regular lunch get togethers with friends.

2. Use Video Conferencing liberally. Don't keep trying to hash something out via email or chat for too long. At some point the higher bandwidth of face to face communication even over a VC will be much more efficient.

3. Keep a persistent group chat for you team open. IRC, Slack, Anything that is always on and provides a sense of presence for you. Don't be afraid to joke around and make small talk there. Out team even plays the occasional verbal logic puzzle there.

4. Stock some variety in your kitchen. You get bored of Bologne and PB&J after a while. You are going to want to provide some variety for lunches.

5. Be responsive but only during regular working hours. It helps your team to know when they can contact you and get a response. After 5pm I don't respond to txts or emails unless they are emergencies. But before then I make sure people get a quick response from me even if it's just that I'll have to get back to them later.

6. And lastly join a Gym. I swim regularly but you might run or play some basketball or lift weights. When your place of work is your home it can be hard to disengage. A gym is a good way to leave the work behind and reset the mental clock as well as meet other people.

Since I work in sales, I am stuck to the typical 9-5 availability schedule.

If I feel like I'm in a rut, I go to a coffee shop to change it up. I have one 40 feet from my front door, or I take a longer walk on a nicer day to the coffee shop I frequented from my last apartment.

It forces you to shower, dress like a real human being and can sometimes substitute for that human interaction.

Working from home for 3 years now, and I love it.

I think what people in general tend to forget is that you can work from home but you don't have to. Renting a spot in a coworking space is very fun and helps with the loneliness.

> Degradation of social skills

I've noticed this if I spend too much time without meaningful face to face conversations. Translating my thoughts into coherent sentences becomes a little more challenging.

Agree with many of these points. I've worked from home for the last 3 years and I love it, but it definitely has it's downsides.

I think the worst for me is not being able to switch off at 5pm. Without the journey home to empty my mind a little, I do find myself thinking about work for the rest of the night.

I've also been working from home for the last 10 months, and while I love the freedom, I do also miss the times when you can cheer with your co-workers over an accomplishment and the general chit-chat over small breaks and lunch break.

I also agree with the author that a bad day working from home is worse than at a job. Since I'm a solo-founder it means I'll not get paid on a bad day, but at a job you typically get at least something done – and get paid.

Really agree with the point of pressure, that having a bad day whilst working from home feels way more terrible than having one while at the office (production-wise)

How do you guys communicate while working remotely?

At my current job we have daily two daily meetings (in the morning and in the evening) where everyone tells what he's done or we discuss something with a whole team. These meetings lock us to particular schedule and make traveling hard. I'd like to suggest my boss to get rid of these daily meetings but I don't know with what to replace them.

I've been working remotely about 5 or so of my 10+ professional years. Working remotely can be a very different experience depending upon job roles. Most of the articles linked on HN are for already-isolating back office jobs like development, but for roles like customer support, sales, an outsourced front desk receptionist, or other highly communication-heavy roles you will not really feel as lonely probably. For coders and asset-producers with pretty clear expected (and more importantly, asynchronous) output, solutions typically focus upon forcing your job duties to include more actual human interaction even if it might not be in-person. However, higher value consultants typically will be communicating a lot more with their clients and spending half your day at Starbucks is going to be few and far between.

Secondly, the "freedom" people tend to talk about is pretty minimal in some roles and being remote tends to reinforce the need for your role to be available as much as possible. If you're the on-call contact in operations where it's arguably more important that you're available immediately rather than that you just make some deadlines (transactional work), you really can't just take off very often like you can oftentimes with very asynchronous, start-stop workflows like development. You're not about to work at Starbucks much unless you can be guaranteed that you won't have a really important call come in. I would have lost precious availability time if I was working at Starbucks a few days ago when I had to manage a production outage and get on the phone and start talking authoritatively quickly. It's one thing to have a kid or pet in the background, it's another when you're obviously sitting at a coffee shop.

For work-life separation, I recommend separate devices from your personal belongings for starters. It's oftentimes substantially cheaper than getting a separate room or larger residence. I have a company-provided laptop that I do my work on as well as a company-provided phone, and that helps keep things separate from the rest of my life. If I have to reach for that phone or RDP / ssh into that machine, that's time I've spent for the company, not for me.

After ~13 years of working mostly from a home office I decided to rent a small office "downtown" in the little village I live in a couple of years ago. It is nice sized room (19'x11') in a building right on a river with two windows looking out at the river and the hills beyond (seen in the top image here: http://zoopdoop.com/)

I now love walking to work as much as I used to love working from home and I don't see myself going back to a home office anytime soon.

If you are a software developer and your aggressive manager is not a developer, don't work remotely. I worked for several months in this condition. The experience was very bad. The manager couldn't understand the difficulty and complexity of programming. He was just pushing and pushing to make sure I was working. I worked 10-12 hours per day, but he was still not satisfied. Finally, I worked on-site. The communication became much better and he could see I am working. And I did not need to work too long every day.

Coming up on my 3rd year now working from home and running my own company. I agree with most of this article. The lack of social interaction is probably what I miss the most. Overall it has been a positive change for me though. I had serious issues concentrating while coding at my last job. Working from home has mostly solved that. I've found in the last year it is easy to stop working at 4:30-5 since we have had our first child, before that I was doing 10-12 hour days because I could.

Personally, I think it's great to just have 1 or 2 remote days per week. Really helps with overall time spent commuting and breaks up the monotony of the daily routine.

I've been working from home for the last 4 mos. For the most part it has been very positive. I've enjoyed the looser schedule and have spent quite a bit less on food and gas. The biggest benefit has been that I have not had a single insomniac episode. I have slept very well. I'm reminded of this as I am transitioning back to working in the office. Over the last two weeks I have been setting up an office for two coworkers and myself. Yesterday was the first that I moved my PC in and worked at the office although still alone till the rest of the furniture arrives. Last night I slept maybe a total of 3 hours before my first full day at the office. Not sure why, I am only accountable to myself at this point for when I come and go yet here I am up and going on 3 hours sleep again...

Simple solution to the loneliness thing: get a webcam. You can see the office, they can see you. I saw a business that ran like that. Seemed okay. It wasn't a dev who was remote though, and that may matter.

Also some people don't like the feeling of being watched.

I would really like to work from home one day per week. But all in all, I enjoy the interaction with my coworkers. I have a strong reclusive streak, and being forced to interact with other all day has a positive effect on me.

Also, I live in the city, but my workplace is in a pretty rural area, next to a field. On my way to work, and from my office, I get to see rabbits, roe deer, horses, cows, a kestrel hunting... I would not get to see any of that if I worked from home. I do feel a little guilty at times for staring out the window so much, but having grown up in the city, I totally love that awesome view.

I've been working remote for 10 years. For the first 6 years I worked from home and I lived in various countries as a bonus (since the location wasn't tied to the work).

For the last 4 years I've been based in a coworking space. I can highly recommend it. The biggest benefit to me was that it forced me to have set times to finish work. When I worked from home I would always work a little bit longer.

Now I switch my computer off, leave the coworking space in the evening, go home and relax. There is no temptation to start working again.

I work from home two days a week and the issue I have is actually switching off so I typically start early and then keep going with less breaks than in the office. Maybe this feels easier because it is more comfortable at home and not an abrasive environment like an office. Pros vs cons also depends on both the home and office environment e.g. if you have dedicated working space at home vs a very noisy office or vice versa.

Also, just to say I love Lagos and the western Algarve - it's such a beautiful place

This is why I work from cafes whenever possible. If I actually work from a quiet room by myself I start to slip into sadness. My brain craves the presence of other humans.

That said, I prefer cafes to offices. It's nice to be around people with no real ties to your source of income. It eliminates the stress of needing to manage all of your actions more carefully.

Also, I find that over time I make actual friends coffee shops. Co-workers rarely make good long-term friends.

I am on my first month working from home. While I am not a huge fan of it, either I work from home, or I lose my job.

My biggest gripes about telecommuting is that I have a hard drive focusing. Something about the process of getting up and getting ready and LEAVING the house, puts my brain into this mode of "time to work!" While telecommuting I can get up and get ready, but there's nothing there that convinces my brain I'm going to work.

The worst thing is the feeling that you are always at work. In this situation I discovered going to the gym is helping me to switch the mode (it could be running, swimming...just any physical activity). If I keep working remotely this year I would like to: - Keep two computers, one for work and other for my spare time. - Keep a room of my house as my private study or, if it is not possible, work somedays from a coworking space.

I've been working from home for 7+ years now and wouldn't trade it for the world. I get to have breaks and lunch with my wife and 7 kids and my flexible schedule means I can do the 'bus driving' and other errands whenever I'm needed. I keep in constant contact with my co-worker via hangouts and the occasional phone call.

I have less distractions and am more productive on my worse day at home than my best in any office.

>>> When you have a bad day at work you still have the sensation of accomplishment. You drove to work, attended meetings, take care of some stuff… you actually did some tasks. >>>

Probably not a very original thought but this strikes me as very similar to the same game mechanics / psychology involved in grinding ladder-type MMOs.

Is it possible the mundane office environment is created to be somewhat addicting?

Even though I haven't worked from home for longer than a week, I completely understand what the author means, My first 2 days were ok ok.. but then rest of the day were very bad... you don't realize or feel the break from work and off-work.

When you drive back home you feel the sensation of work is "finished" but at home you are always in the feeling of "work"

Now I just need a cafe that isn't closed in the middle of the day, actually has heat in the winter, has chairs that support those of us that weigh over 98 lbs, and that attracts people/encourages them to hang out. Man this town needs another coffee shop...

I actually find an office environment to be more distracting than working from home. At the office you have noise and people wanting to chat, at home I can work for a six hour stretch, uninterrupted.

When I was a grad student I spent most of my time working in the labs. I too experienced deterioratingn social skills. Got a retail job at the mall on weekends to interact with more people.

Mirror?

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That's quite funny if you're working from home with a dodgy internet connection