As someone who developed their career from the comfort of their bedroom, I always find it very interesting to see people all over the world from different cultures experiencing the same basic issues with this kind of work set up.
I absolutely loved working from my bedroom for years. It was great (despite the common down falls like the ones listed here). My family used to make fun of me at parties and seasonal celebration "OH YOU'RE NOT IN YOUR PAJAMAS TODAY", but joke was on them after a couple of years - I was making 5 to 10 times what they were per year, and I was waking up at 8:50am with no commute.
I eventually ended up investing in building my own "detached" office in the back yard - a dedicated space set up for working. This was by far the best thing I ever did. It created a visible boundary between home and work life, and I still didn't have to commute or work in any clothes other than my pajamas the majority of the time.
I couldn't image going back to a bedroom now. But even more so, I can't imagine how painful it is for people to sit in traffic every day, stressing they might be late, burning money on fuel and their car, and waking up earlier than they really should.
It's pretty reasonable to think you might spend $100 a week on a commute straight out of your own pocket. That money is gone forever. Now consider if you invest that money over 30 years in some low to medium risk areas and average 10 - 15% per year. That's a healthy addition to your retirement fund of around $1,500,000, plus a good amount of extra sleep.
EDIT: Okay 15% is maybe a bit hopeful and lucky. But still 7 - 10% will make a difference in your retirement.
> But even more so, I can't imagine how painful it is for people to sit in traffic every day, stressing they might be late, burning money on fuel and their car, and waking up earlier than they really should.
It's not only cash spend directly, it's also time spend. I was spending 2h a day in public transit, but when I tried to do it in car, it came down to less than 45 minutes a day. The parking was quite expensive so I doubted, I was paying 150$ a month for my public transit pass, but the closest available parking would be 250$ a month. Lets round it up to 1h a day and say that a month is 4 weeks, I was spending 20 hours a month. For some absurd reasons, I wasn't considering my time stuck in movement as part of my job hours. By refusing to pay for the parking, I was essentially saying that my time was worth 5$ an hour.
This is so weird that we all forget that our time lost while we go to work, is still part of our work time. Spending 2h a day in transit, that's accepting a 20% pay cut from the get go.
My job is flexible and I could work from home 1-4 days/week. But I still come in 4 days. The socializing is something that I really find worth it. I’ve made a lot of friends at work, and it’s also just nice to discuss technical problems in person.
Working in a different room (NOT your bedroom) is critically important to me. Sometimes it's fun to kick back and code, but the separate space that is yours, optimized for work, and assigned mentally to work is useful in that you can walk away from it and also leave your work behind. Going to bed at night with your laptop stashed close by does not inspire relaxation / restfulness.
> I eventually ended up investing in building my own "detached" office in the back yard
This is the thing I want most in work life right now. I have a separate semi-dedicated office room but it splits time as the guest room and has basically no auditory separation the rest of the house including a 3yo and a 1yo.
Edit: OP would you be willing to share pictures of your space? I love seeing how people set up separate office spaces.
I think you've no idea what commuting costs anymore. 100 a week would be absolutely ridiculous. If the company provides parking you're looking at around 70 per month. If you have to pay for parking that might be as much as 250 per month, so still way below 100 per week. This kind of contribution certainly adds up, but you're not looking at 1 million in retirement funds. Also, you built yourself a detached office, which isn't uncommon and you frequently needed to purchase office supplies and I'm guessing your own hardware and computer software. That's a substantial initial overhead that eats away at how much you might be saving by working from home.
Also, consider that many companies now allow employees to work from home for part of every week while still supplying hardware and office supplies. That 250/70 per month commuting cost is down to about 150/40. Just accounting for the expense of building your home office you could already be in the hole compared to people commuting only some of the time for the same job.
Also, none of this accounts for the additional considerations office's typically provide like free lunches and social/professional networking opportunities.
Personally, I'm a software developer so I can pretty much decide for myself if I want a job that allows me to work from home, and after doing the real math, I found you can basically go either way and expect roughly the same financial outcome, so the real choice is about what you actually want. I like the social aspects, so I take jobs where I can come in and expect coworkers to be present. What you want may be different, but neither option is inherently more advantageous.
> Buy a whiteboard and write the goals for the day on it, for instance
As a solo dev the biggest productivity booster for me, from a physical and mental aspect, was purchasing a whiteboard. It honestly feels like some sort of hack. Prior to having one I would use pen and paper but that didn't quite scratch my itch - if I made a mistake I would have to scribble it out and that space was now wasted. I can't quite explain why but on a whiteboard my brain juices just flow. Made a mistake? Wipe it off. Need more space? Wipe it off (or purchase additional whiteboards).
My high school maths teacher once said something that has stuck with me since - "When you're stuck on a problem, start fresh on a blank piece of paper." - he must've meant a whiteboard ;)
When people envision working from home, it seems that "wearing pajamas" is a common trope.
That is not a good idea.
The thing about clothes is that they're part of a routine. I.e. I wake up, make some tea, put some fresh clothes on, turn on my computer, and now I'm in work mode. Ideally. In practice it doesn't always work like that, but it's still far better than waking up and just sitting down in front of my computer. Having a routine is really important for not getting lost.
They don't have to be business clothes or whatever, but just something fresh for the day. I'm the sort of nerd that wears chinos and a button up shirt even though I work from home and don't have video calls.
---
In addition, blurring work and personal life isn't good. You ideally don't want to work in the same room that you sleep, but this can't be avoided sometimes.
Variety is also key. Sometimes I go out and get work done from a local cafe for a change of pace.
As a woman the opportunity to wear clothes just for their warmth and comfort is something I will never turn down. Being able to wear pyjamas was definitely one of the top things about working from home. Men don't have the same issues of unpractical clothing and being judged on their appearance.
Agreed. Mindset / routine is important here - not just to get you started but also to separate home and work.
I wear office dress code most days (or some comfier version that is "nice-enough-for-video"). I work in a separate room, whose door I can close when the day is over. I've asked my family to text me or call just like they would at an office if they need something or want to talk.
When the day ends, the laptop and door closes, and my commute is short, but those subtle differences make it a change that works, and allows me to relax.
Agreed. When I worked from home I did everything I would do to prepare for a day in a regular office except the clothing selection was fully casual. My one biggest rule was that I had to wear regular street shoes. If I was wearing slippers or just socks, my mindset was that I wasn't "at work."
I agree that having a routine is important. But I think what makes the routine is up to the individual, clothes may be important for some, but not for others.
Sometimes I have unproductive weeks. It can be hard to overcome the miasma by refactoring code or picking favourites.
I have found the easiest way to get out of the funk is to start making Todo lists of my life. Get the things out of the way that are bothering me or need to be done as a priority and then slowly chip away at it.
Productivity isn't something you can hack. There is a maximum that you can do without sacrificing the quality of your work, and your goal should be to maximize quality, not to plan your day out in five minute intervals, that's a great way to burn out.
> plan your day out in five minute intervals, that's a great way to burn out
Oh for sure. I've tried planning the day's development into discrete tasks in 15, 30, etc. -minute blocks, and it's chaos. It's essentially micromanaging yourself onto an obstacle course where every 15, 30, etc. minutes you have the pressure of a hurdle to get over or else you're behind and feel demotivated. And development isn't linear - especially not on the scale of a day where you'll be revisiting and revising things - so making the development tasks discrete and completable in 30 minutes is a model that just doesn't match how reality works.
A more successful approach for me has been to set high-level targets on the scale of 5 or 10 hours that I can pace myself toward.
Achievable goals for the day on a sheet (digital or real) that you can cross off is a great perpetual motivator, especially if you reinforce it -if you need it- with rewarding yourself (peptalk or giving yourself a little slack/something)
It can also can be very satisfying at the end of a project to take at the long laundry list you’ve conquered (and sent the final invoice ;)
I can attest to the efficacy of scheduling life things with respect to mitigating the ambient cognitive load of life. Otherwise, you can fall prey to what feels like boredom, or the next best thing, which is cleaning the house/doing chores as a form of procrastination.
Beware: getting things out of the way first is a common mindset leading to never achieving long-term goals. There are always important tasks in life that aren't the most important at any given moment (and perhaps never are.)
I have had months and probably an unproductive year. But 25 years developing one application from conception to sell out is a long time. The payoff for creative work isn’t controllable or predictable.
I have switched from working in bedroom, to working in a dedicated office, to working in a co-working space, to working from home in a dedicated office.
1. Working from the bedroom is hell. It's fun for the first few months but then you are likely to have severe eye strain and become very sleepy.
2. Working from a real office sets boundaries and forces a schedule. You have to wake up at xx:xx time and drive to office. But traffic for a downtown area is hell, so is finding a parking spot, finding a reasonable place to eat, etc... After a while, I got bored of the fact that there is little human communication since I was alone in the office. Also, I thought about all the time I wasted commuting to the office.
3. Working from a co-working space was a boost for the first 2-3 months then downhill. I need multiple monitors, my own whiteboard, where to put stuff, etc... It's not very sustainable. And everyone seeing what you were working on was not really for me.
4. Working from a dedicated office in my apartment was a good change; but after 1.5 years, I feel like I have become super-lazy to do any going outside and more likely to instead go to the bedroom for a quick nap.
I'm thinking now of renting an office but instead in the residential area I live in (think 2-5 minutes drive, 10 max). That should be the best of both worlds; though my only concern is that the residential area is super sleepy and it might affect my mood.
> You would think that the more time you spend working, the more results you produce.
No, if you are a remote worker who sits at a desk and forces yourself to work at specific times solely because you feel you should be working, you are doing it wrong.
Go the other way. Figure out what times naturally work best for you, and work at those times. If you are sluggish in the afternoon, take breaks. Work early mornings, late nights. Go spend time with kids if you have them. Then sit down and work while they spend an hour at a friends house after dinner.
If you are remote, you should not be spending more time working. You should be working less hours, but more effectively.
>Go the other way. Figure out what times naturally work best for you, and work at those times.
As someone with a tendency to procrastinate, this advice would easily turn into an excuse to avoid working at all. The best advice I ever got is that you don't need to feel motivated to do something - waiting to feel motivated is a trap. I think self-discipline is really important for remote work or working on personal projects at home.
I don't feel like I'm being more flexible than when I was working in an office, because I worked in a company with a "get stuff done, butt-in-chair doesn't matter" attitude. Hence I could just go to the dentist in the middle of the day or arrive at 11.30AM if I wanted to.
But now that I work from home, I actually like having a predictable schedule. Plus on top of that, even when you work remotely you still have meetings so that limits the flexibility a bit.
I don't think I'm doing it wrong. But it might not work for everyone.
I agree, but my employer runs a scrum meeting each morning. I've talked to them about moving the time later, but they are inflexible. Thus, I typically work starting at that time until quitting time. It's far from my most productive time, but it's forced upon me. They get whatever productivity I can scrounge up. If that's not much because I'm not working at peak hours, and often working at the worst possible hours for productivity, that's their problem. If they were flexible with this inane, pointless, stupid meeting, they would get productivity. Instead, they only get it when I need to do other things during the day, simply by coincidence. It's frankly amazing to me how employers ignore little changes that could impact things in a major way. But they do it on purpose. No one expects peak productivity anyway, and if they do, they really need to provide the incentives towards that goal. Otherwise, they get what they get, whether that be a new feature or bugfix or a few hours of HN. It's a crap-shoot. Whatever, it's literally not my business and therefore, I do not give a fuck about productivity since there are no incentives to do so.
I agree. That was a rhetorical statement, but looking back in hindsight, maybe I wasn't clear.
I didn't mean that the more time you spend working, the more results you produce. The Parkinson's law states the opposite - if you have more time in your hand, you will most probably be less productive and produce less results compared to the actual time you spent working on it.
Probably echoing something that's already been said here, but my number 1 advice to being high performing from your bedroom is _don't_ work from an actual bedroom. There's a psychological baggage of being in the room that you sleep in that shorts circuits the part of your brain dedicated to being up an active. It's not always possible but if there is another room with a flat surface in your home, do anything to make that your distraction free workstation. Did wonders for my productivity.
I personally hate working from home, and will only do it if there are reasons I can't work somewhere else, such as needing to be home for a plumber or being sick. I'd rather work anywhere else, whether that's an office, a library, or even a cafe.
My house is my sanctuary, it's my safe space where I can retreat back to after a day of work. I put a high priority on keeping my work life and my personal life separate. I won't work on weekends unless it's an emergency (I'm also usually not sober enough to work for those 48 hours anyway, even if the called).
> I personally hate working from home, and will only do it if there are reasons I can't work somewhere else, such as needing to be home for a plumber or being sick.
I've been a remote employee for 10 years now (plus 4 being a freelancer) and I've tried every productivity hack under the sun and the only thing that has worked for me is: do meaningful work.
And be ready to catch that wave of productivity when it hits. Personally I can't work 8 hours straight. I try to make work a part of life, and it's not bad since it's a creative job. Have some structure to fall back on but take advantage of the flexibility when it is useful. Get Excersise in during the day, your mind a body will have more energy. Go to a coffee shop/library and get around other people. Get in your 8 hours in the most comfortable way possible.
For me 2 things helped to overcome the "drag" work:
- I only work from one place in my house, and it's not the bedroom. It's a dedicated desk. I do not work from anywhere else, and I don't do anything other than work at that desk.
- When I need to work on something boring, I set the time on my Apple watch to 1 hour, and get to work. When the timer is done, whether the work is done or not, I take a break.
In rare cases where I need to keep track of a ton of stuff, I haven't found anything better than a spiral bound notebook.
I'm single dad with 3 young kids and I would never change from working from home. After leaving the kids at daycare in the morning, I come home and quickly clean up the house. I do stuff like meal prep and laundry in pauses during the day. I spend quality time with my kids in the evening instead of doing chores. When they go to bed, I can relax, read a book and workout. I don't know how I would do any of this with 1-2 hours of commute.
In term of productivity, I'm more productive at home without the distraction of a workplace. I don't have any special setup. Just a laptop really. Not even headphones. I have a nice office space setup in my basement with a whiteboard and an extra monitor but I rarely use it. I'm more often working from the kitchen or living room.
I still love going to the workplace (or another place) from time to time. There's no substitute to interacting with people in real life.
> The best thing to do in that situation is to accept the fact that you are not feeling in the zone. But the solution is not to give in into that feeling and start binge watching NetFlix either
Ah I disagree, as a sample side of one.
I tried pushing through for a while and doing a small amount of work / refactoring, but it didn't really click.
Finally decided to try not working on the days I wasn't in a groove, and have found that if I do, I have much better ideas and crank out a massive amount of work over the next couple days until I wake up feeling out of the zone.
Most people would probably benefit from not having a 2 day block weekend, but rather having downtime on say Sunday and Thursday. In the same way athletes have staggered rest days.
I'm lucky enough to have a job where I can do this, but it was also a semi-requirement during my last job search.
I find that reducing the number of decision making events by relying on a routine helps. When and where are you endlessly watching Youtube or Netflix? Is it the first thing in the morning after you grab your phone or is it happening at your desk. Depending on the answer, you want to establish a routine so you don't have to think about what you want to do next.
Let's say it's your phone first thing in the morning that is causing this problem. You could put your phone and charger far away from your bed. Then establish a sequence of actions that take you from bed to desk, without getting anywhere near your phone.
This is not an all-or-nothing method, where you fail even if you miss one step in the sequence in your routine. You start by making one or two adjustments and then build on your success.
I start a timer on my phone and run it up to ~ 8 hours to mark the end of the day. While the timer is running, I don't do anything too leisurely (e.g., playing video games). If I want/need to do something unrelated to work, I stop the timer.
The idea isn't to work exactly 8 hours per day. It's to get a sense of how much of my time is going towards work-related activities.
I work remotely and I agree with everything here except the title: don't work from your bedroom, have a dedicated space for it at home even if it's part of the living room. If you can afford a separate room for it, do that instead.
High-paid developers do not typically do "Finalize the columns of the Users table" kind of tasks. Typically, you have a set of complex products, and spend your days in reviewing designs and defining product requirements. The kind of tasks in this article is for beginner devs, and these rarely work fully unsupervised, hence pajama work is off the table
Working from home is my natural mode for the last 20 years. I use basement so privacy/distraction is not a concern. So far works just fine for me. I own/co-own couple of companies but no other employment. I mainly develop and maintain/sell/lease my own products and do the same thing as a consulting gigs for other companies.
[+] [-] jonny383|6 years ago|reply
I absolutely loved working from my bedroom for years. It was great (despite the common down falls like the ones listed here). My family used to make fun of me at parties and seasonal celebration "OH YOU'RE NOT IN YOUR PAJAMAS TODAY", but joke was on them after a couple of years - I was making 5 to 10 times what they were per year, and I was waking up at 8:50am with no commute.
I eventually ended up investing in building my own "detached" office in the back yard - a dedicated space set up for working. This was by far the best thing I ever did. It created a visible boundary between home and work life, and I still didn't have to commute or work in any clothes other than my pajamas the majority of the time.
I couldn't image going back to a bedroom now. But even more so, I can't imagine how painful it is for people to sit in traffic every day, stressing they might be late, burning money on fuel and their car, and waking up earlier than they really should.
It's pretty reasonable to think you might spend $100 a week on a commute straight out of your own pocket. That money is gone forever. Now consider if you invest that money over 30 years in some low to medium risk areas and average 10 - 15% per year. That's a healthy addition to your retirement fund of around $1,500,000, plus a good amount of extra sleep.
EDIT: Okay 15% is maybe a bit hopeful and lucky. But still 7 - 10% will make a difference in your retirement.
[+] [-] jbb123|6 years ago|reply
Where can I get this return reliably at "low risk"?
[+] [-] vsareto|6 years ago|reply
Everyone should get the chance to experience it.
[+] [-] dwild|6 years ago|reply
It's not only cash spend directly, it's also time spend. I was spending 2h a day in public transit, but when I tried to do it in car, it came down to less than 45 minutes a day. The parking was quite expensive so I doubted, I was paying 150$ a month for my public transit pass, but the closest available parking would be 250$ a month. Lets round it up to 1h a day and say that a month is 4 weeks, I was spending 20 hours a month. For some absurd reasons, I wasn't considering my time stuck in movement as part of my job hours. By refusing to pay for the parking, I was essentially saying that my time was worth 5$ an hour.
This is so weird that we all forget that our time lost while we go to work, is still part of our work time. Spending 2h a day in transit, that's accepting a 20% pay cut from the get go.
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
How do you do that?
[+] [-] zeroonetwothree|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sailfast|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zrail|6 years ago|reply
This is the thing I want most in work life right now. I have a separate semi-dedicated office room but it splits time as the guest room and has basically no auditory separation the rest of the house including a 3yo and a 1yo.
Edit: OP would you be willing to share pictures of your space? I love seeing how people set up separate office spaces.
[+] [-] tikiman163|6 years ago|reply
Also, consider that many companies now allow employees to work from home for part of every week while still supplying hardware and office supplies. That 250/70 per month commuting cost is down to about 150/40. Just accounting for the expense of building your home office you could already be in the hole compared to people commuting only some of the time for the same job.
Also, none of this accounts for the additional considerations office's typically provide like free lunches and social/professional networking opportunities.
Personally, I'm a software developer so I can pretty much decide for myself if I want a job that allows me to work from home, and after doing the real math, I found you can basically go either way and expect roughly the same financial outcome, so the real choice is about what you actually want. I like the social aspects, so I take jobs where I can come in and expect coworkers to be present. What you want may be different, but neither option is inherently more advantageous.
[+] [-] petargyurov|6 years ago|reply
As a solo dev the biggest productivity booster for me, from a physical and mental aspect, was purchasing a whiteboard. It honestly feels like some sort of hack. Prior to having one I would use pen and paper but that didn't quite scratch my itch - if I made a mistake I would have to scribble it out and that space was now wasted. I can't quite explain why but on a whiteboard my brain juices just flow. Made a mistake? Wipe it off. Need more space? Wipe it off (or purchase additional whiteboards).
My high school maths teacher once said something that has stuck with me since - "When you're stuck on a problem, start fresh on a blank piece of paper." - he must've meant a whiteboard ;)
[+] [-] andrewzah|6 years ago|reply
That is not a good idea.
The thing about clothes is that they're part of a routine. I.e. I wake up, make some tea, put some fresh clothes on, turn on my computer, and now I'm in work mode. Ideally. In practice it doesn't always work like that, but it's still far better than waking up and just sitting down in front of my computer. Having a routine is really important for not getting lost.
They don't have to be business clothes or whatever, but just something fresh for the day. I'm the sort of nerd that wears chinos and a button up shirt even though I work from home and don't have video calls.
---
In addition, blurring work and personal life isn't good. You ideally don't want to work in the same room that you sleep, but this can't be avoided sometimes.
Variety is also key. Sometimes I go out and get work done from a local cafe for a change of pace.
[+] [-] sjf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sailfast|6 years ago|reply
I wear office dress code most days (or some comfier version that is "nice-enough-for-video"). I work in a separate room, whose door I can close when the day is over. I've asked my family to text me or call just like they would at an office if they need something or want to talk.
When the day ends, the laptop and door closes, and my commute is short, but those subtle differences make it a change that works, and allows me to relax.
[+] [-] RegBarclay|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bproctor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robinduckett|6 years ago|reply
I have found the easiest way to get out of the funk is to start making Todo lists of my life. Get the things out of the way that are bothering me or need to be done as a priority and then slowly chip away at it.
Productivity isn't something you can hack. There is a maximum that you can do without sacrificing the quality of your work, and your goal should be to maximize quality, not to plan your day out in five minute intervals, that's a great way to burn out.
[+] [-] odyssey7|6 years ago|reply
Oh for sure. I've tried planning the day's development into discrete tasks in 15, 30, etc. -minute blocks, and it's chaos. It's essentially micromanaging yourself onto an obstacle course where every 15, 30, etc. minutes you have the pressure of a hurdle to get over or else you're behind and feel demotivated. And development isn't linear - especially not on the scale of a day where you'll be revisiting and revising things - so making the development tasks discrete and completable in 30 minutes is a model that just doesn't match how reality works.
A more successful approach for me has been to set high-level targets on the scale of 5 or 10 hours that I can pace myself toward.
[+] [-] prox|6 years ago|reply
It can also can be very satisfying at the end of a project to take at the long laundry list you’ve conquered (and sent the final invoice ;)
[+] [-] blueboo|6 years ago|reply
I can attest to the efficacy of scheduling life things with respect to mitigating the ambient cognitive load of life. Otherwise, you can fall prey to what feels like boredom, or the next best thing, which is cleaning the house/doing chores as a form of procrastination.
Beware: getting things out of the way first is a common mindset leading to never achieving long-term goals. There are always important tasks in life that aren't the most important at any given moment (and perhaps never are.)
[+] [-] Nevermark|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csomar|6 years ago|reply
1. Working from the bedroom is hell. It's fun for the first few months but then you are likely to have severe eye strain and become very sleepy.
2. Working from a real office sets boundaries and forces a schedule. You have to wake up at xx:xx time and drive to office. But traffic for a downtown area is hell, so is finding a parking spot, finding a reasonable place to eat, etc... After a while, I got bored of the fact that there is little human communication since I was alone in the office. Also, I thought about all the time I wasted commuting to the office.
3. Working from a co-working space was a boost for the first 2-3 months then downhill. I need multiple monitors, my own whiteboard, where to put stuff, etc... It's not very sustainable. And everyone seeing what you were working on was not really for me.
4. Working from a dedicated office in my apartment was a good change; but after 1.5 years, I feel like I have become super-lazy to do any going outside and more likely to instead go to the bedroom for a quick nap.
I'm thinking now of renting an office but instead in the residential area I live in (think 2-5 minutes drive, 10 max). That should be the best of both worlds; though my only concern is that the residential area is super sleepy and it might affect my mood.
[+] [-] codingdave|6 years ago|reply
No, if you are a remote worker who sits at a desk and forces yourself to work at specific times solely because you feel you should be working, you are doing it wrong.
Go the other way. Figure out what times naturally work best for you, and work at those times. If you are sluggish in the afternoon, take breaks. Work early mornings, late nights. Go spend time with kids if you have them. Then sit down and work while they spend an hour at a friends house after dinner.
If you are remote, you should not be spending more time working. You should be working less hours, but more effectively.
[+] [-] nabnob|6 years ago|reply
As someone with a tendency to procrastinate, this advice would easily turn into an excuse to avoid working at all. The best advice I ever got is that you don't need to feel motivated to do something - waiting to feel motivated is a trap. I think self-discipline is really important for remote work or working on personal projects at home.
[+] [-] Insanity|6 years ago|reply
I don't feel like I'm being more flexible than when I was working in an office, because I worked in a company with a "get stuff done, butt-in-chair doesn't matter" attitude. Hence I could just go to the dentist in the middle of the day or arrive at 11.30AM if I wanted to.
But now that I work from home, I actually like having a predictable schedule. Plus on top of that, even when you work remotely you still have meetings so that limits the flexibility a bit.
I don't think I'm doing it wrong. But it might not work for everyone.
[+] [-] mnm1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinpaladin|6 years ago|reply
I didn't mean that the more time you spend working, the more results you produce. The Parkinson's law states the opposite - if you have more time in your hand, you will most probably be less productive and produce less results compared to the actual time you spent working on it.
[+] [-] planetzero|6 years ago|reply
Most businesses will also have meetings during regular business hours.
[+] [-] phreack|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|6 years ago|reply
My house is my sanctuary, it's my safe space where I can retreat back to after a day of work. I put a high priority on keeping my work life and my personal life separate. I won't work on weekends unless it's an emergency (I'm also usually not sober enough to work for those 48 hours anyway, even if the called).
[+] [-] legooolas|6 years ago|reply
Why are you working if you're sick?
[+] [-] clarry|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rammy1234|6 years ago|reply
This one thing will make you high performing software developer working from anywhere in the world.
[+] [-] terminaljunkid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] armandososa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckyscs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eurasiantiger|6 years ago|reply
Maybe if you wrote the entire codebase yourself just a week ago so everything is still fresh in your memory.
In most real-world situations that is not the case, and refactoring becomes a careful task that leads to regressions even with testing in place.
[+] [-] kevinpaladin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0zg|6 years ago|reply
- I only work from one place in my house, and it's not the bedroom. It's a dedicated desk. I do not work from anywhere else, and I don't do anything other than work at that desk.
- When I need to work on something boring, I set the time on my Apple watch to 1 hour, and get to work. When the timer is done, whether the work is done or not, I take a break.
In rare cases where I need to keep track of a ton of stuff, I haven't found anything better than a spiral bound notebook.
[+] [-] niclupien|6 years ago|reply
In term of productivity, I'm more productive at home without the distraction of a workplace. I don't have any special setup. Just a laptop really. Not even headphones. I have a nice office space setup in my basement with a whiteboard and an extra monitor but I rarely use it. I'm more often working from the kitchen or living room.
I still love going to the workplace (or another place) from time to time. There's no substitute to interacting with people in real life.
[+] [-] huffmsa|6 years ago|reply
Ah I disagree, as a sample side of one.
I tried pushing through for a while and doing a small amount of work / refactoring, but it didn't really click.
Finally decided to try not working on the days I wasn't in a groove, and have found that if I do, I have much better ideas and crank out a massive amount of work over the next couple days until I wake up feeling out of the zone.
Most people would probably benefit from not having a 2 day block weekend, but rather having downtime on say Sunday and Thursday. In the same way athletes have staggered rest days.
I'm lucky enough to have a job where I can do this, but it was also a semi-requirement during my last job search.
[+] [-] quantguy11959|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danial|6 years ago|reply
Let's say it's your phone first thing in the morning that is causing this problem. You could put your phone and charger far away from your bed. Then establish a sequence of actions that take you from bed to desk, without getting anywhere near your phone.
This is not an all-or-nothing method, where you fail even if you miss one step in the sequence in your routine. You start by making one or two adjustments and then build on your success.
[+] [-] allochthon|6 years ago|reply
The idea isn't to work exactly 8 hours per day. It's to get a sense of how much of my time is going towards work-related activities.
[+] [-] fbelzile|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Solvitieg|6 years ago|reply
You're just doing surface-level work if you're able to watch Youtube videos.
[+] [-] atilaneves|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irishloop|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DaveSchmindel|6 years ago|reply
Have the benefits of contextualizing your short-term goals outweighed the cost in time it takes to make the table for small tasks?
[+] [-] kova12|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FpUser|6 years ago|reply