
Working from Home Can Make You Happier and More Productive - ingve
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/working-from-home-makes-you-happier-less-likely-to.html
======
quadrangle
As someone self-employed at home, I must say: it's easy to have a grass-is-
greener-on-other-side-of-the-fence feeling. Open office plans are awful, but
the options aren't only open-office or work-from-home. There's also better
office designs… For that matter, there are various setups to working from
home, some that work well, and some that lead to WELL DAMNIT WHY AM I WASTING
TIME REPLYING TO SOME BS ON HACKER NEWS‽

~~~
coldtea
> _Open office plans are awful, but the options aren 't only open-office or
> work-from-home._

In many companies, they are.

And even with "better office designs" there's also the daily commute.

~~~
quadrangle
Long daily commutes in single-occupancy motor vehicles are on the short list
of sources of society's greatest miseries, problems, and failures.

There are ways to make commutes meaningful, like a beautiful bike ride along
the river or a couple mile walk or carpooling with friends or good
podcast/audio-book/music during a drive… but even with all this, long commutes
eat up _so_ much of life. Add in the insanely massive list of ills caused by
car-centric life and infrastructure…

Probably the right balance is something like working one or two days a week in
an office with appropriate flexibility on how to use the space. I dunno.

Meanwhile, people should put much higher priority on living close to work,
above most other considerations about where to live.

------
ishi
My experience is that it's difficult to stay productive at home, since there
are too many temptations luring you away from work. And when the kids come
back from school, it becomes nearly impossible to do anything useful.

This funny piece by the New Yorker describes it pretty well:
[http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/i-work-from-
home](http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/i-work-from-home)

~~~
samstave
"OK Ill make you a _second_ lunch"

"No, you need to take the dog out - I am working"

"Ill just watch thi one segment of 'X'"

"Just a short nap to clear my mind"

There are far too many temptations to do other things at home - Each child is
a 10x multiplier.

~~~
GordonS
I have 2 kids, and working from home has only been positive for me - I think
the key is having a dedicated office room with a door. When I'm working, I'm
working. I'm upstairs in my office, my wife and kids are downstairs, so noise
isn't a problem.

I don't have to commute, so I save money, get to have breakfast and lunch with
my wife and kids (and help out), and after work I have time to cook us a
healthy meal from scratch (I actually enjoy cooking too).

I have a fiber internet connection, so no issues on that front.

I honestly have far more distractions on the 1 day a week I go into the office
(which is open plan and includes a co-worker who does little but chat _all
day_...).

~~~
swdunlop
You need to set expectations. When you are working at home, you are not
daycare, dogsitter, handyman or generally at leisure. I have worked at home
for eight years now, and my family generally understands this.

As someone who now manages a remote team, it can be tricky to help people
adjust to working from home. Some people just have to have that physical
partition because they or their family won't adapt. I recommend a co-working
space for those people; that partition can be essential for keeping them
productive and happy.

The other side of this coin is making sure you set that time aside for your
family and personal recovery. If you had a coworker who never left the office,
you should worry about ingrowth and their health. The same is true for a
remote worker who seems to be always online and always working.

------
bitL
I totally agree, I've never been more productive than at home/beach/forest
etc. where I wasn't constantly distracted by other people. Always wondered how
people get anything done when I am at crammed offices of Google or Facebook -
the noise/distraction level there is just off-putting and in stark contrast to
what I would call a productive environment :-/ Microsoft used to have rooms
with 4-6 people, SUN used to have single mini-offices for everyone; now that
is long gone in the name of cost-optimization and "sharing ideas".

~~~
nine_k
Google NYC used to have cubicle-like individual desks on most floors, with
shoulder-high soft fiber walls separating them. These muffled noise pretty
efficiently; headphones are a still a better option, though.

~~~
bitL
Yeah. I always had to use earplugs and that gets tiring pretty fast :-( Not to
mention commute, which is such a waste of time. I solved it partially by
buying Novation Circuit and making music on a subway train while on my way
to/from work...

------
alexanderdmitri
Biggest upsides (+) along with flipsides (-) of working at home in my
experience:

\------------

+: Get to define your own hours for the most part

-: Convince your partner and friends these hours are real and you're not just making them up as an excuse to ignore them

\------------

+: Can work in your pajamas

-: End up looking like a bum when someone swings by

\------------

+: Get to spend more time with the kids

-: Young kids (mine are 1.5 and 3yrs) have absolutely no respect for what you're doing (my boys seem to have some sort of sixth sense to tell when I'm debugging & they'll have none of it)

\------------

+: Team discussions and communication tend to have more thought and planning
put into them

-: Some simple questions/coordination become games of phone tag and far-more drawn out then necessary

\------------

+: No commute

-: Home doesn't feel as relaxing when you've been working in it all day

\------------

For me, ideally there would be a happy balance. Maybe one and a half office
days a week and the rest from home. I do mostly enjoy working from home.

~~~
coldtea
All the "working from home" negatives are soft issues -- things that can
change with the right mindset/effort on your part (dressing properly, respect
from spouses/kids, coordination, etc).

The "work at office" negatives on the other hand are hard limits or require
change of ways of doing business for the whole company -- commuting, meetings,
fixed hours.

~~~
alexanderdmitri
I largely agree. The way you put it makes me think of the trade-offs when
choosing between configuration or convention.

------
shams93
As an engineer it is massively more productive. The work I'm doing is so
complex my brain would freeze in a loud open office. When you're trying to
solve a very hard problem at least fore silence is golden, no music no
headphones no random conversation just pure work and problem solving for me
it's engineering heaven to be able to control my space for noise and
distraction.

~~~
maxxxxx
Same here. I don't want to listen to music or other people talking. I also
hate earplugs.

In my cubicle it's often so loud I would be better off working in sports bar
during super bowl:)

Just give me a small office. It's even ok having a team with two or three
people.

------
thinbeige
20 years ago, the computer at my office was much better than my home computer
at home. The Internet there was way much better than my crappy 56k dial-up
modem. I had a nice landline phone with many buttons and I could call the
world for free--at the office.

Now, I have the best computer with 2x 5K displays and a all-in-one super fast
printer which is always working--at home. I've never had such a setup at any
office. And video call based meetings with screen sharing are more productive
than real meetings.

Why an office?

I made friends at the office, dated here and there, met my later co-founders.
However, I have made only a handful friendships at the office. So is it of
value? IDK. An office is a mixed bag.

------
0xcde4c3db
What's most interesting to me is that the work-from-home employees were
reportedly not just more productive and happier, but also physically
healthier. Although there could certainly be some uncontrolled variable like
crappy fluorescent lighting, poor HVAC, or pathogens in the building, it makes
me suspect that there might be a chronic stress component to working in a
space owned (in a psychosocial sense, not a legal one) by someone else.
Perhaps there would be some way to change office structure or culture to get
the benefits in the office building environment and not just at home. In one
of Jamie Zawinsky's old "gruntles" (not linked per the infamous referer
abuse), he mentions putting camo netting over his cube and that it made people
_ask_ to come in. In vague terms, that's the sort of effect I'm thinking of.

~~~
SyneRyder
_the work-from-home employees were reportedly not just more productive and
happier, but also physically healthier_

One of the key advantages I've found working from home is that when I want to
take a break, I'm inclined to get out of the house & walk around the
neighbourhood. I'd often choose to work from a park instead, getting sunlight
& fresh air. When I was doing that earlier this year, I was getting up to
16,000 steps a day, and that level of walking significantly improved my
health.

------
jokoon
I've read that unless you have a room dedicated for work, working from home
will not be a productive solution.

It really makes sense.

You can't have people coming and going.

When my girlfriend was out working, I was productive at working my personal
projects, but when she came home, made herself a meal, started some chores or
cleaning up, or even stood there next to me, I just could not work.

So the reality is just that you move your office to your home, so you will
actually need a larger place to live.

But I guess it's still cheaper and more ecologic to do things that way, so
actually you would get a raise.

What I would like, is a simple software that blocks a list of website of my
choice so I can stay productive. As long as it is self imposed, it would feel
okay.

~~~
mnm1
It depends on the person, but as a generalization, that's simply not true. I
was more productive before getting a house with a separate office when I just
had my bedroom to sleep/work in. I'm still way more productive than in any
office situation, but the point is that you don't need a separate office at
home to be productive.

------
Alacart
Working from home for years now, I've found that I get more deep and
meaningful , uninterrupted work done. I've also found that I have a harder
time working a 'full' 8 hour day because it's more obvious at home that
there's more to life than just working.

Offices are designed to keep you there and focused on the work as much as
possible. At home I have my pets, wife (when she's not at work too), things I
like, in a location I chose to live. People call these distractions but
they're your life at least as much as your job is. At some point, working at
home, I'm going to stop and pet my cats, go for a walk with my wife, sip
coffee and read a book, visit a friend, whatever. When I have kids, I will get
to be there and see them grow up.

When you're able to get a good amount of great work done because you have that
uninterrupted time, it makes the idea of working 8 hours 'just because' seem
stupid and opposing your productivity and your happiness. I get more and
better work done these days. I make more money, for both myself and my
clients, working from home, and I much more rarely need sick/mental health
days because I'm basically happy and healthy all the time as a result of
working from home.

The things I miss, like socializing with a team, I can get other places. I
still talk to other devs during the day, just on the phone, over video chat,
or something like slack. I go to meetups dedicated to the things I'm
interested in, chalk full of smart and interesting people. I have friends to
socialize with, many of whom are from those meetups, so I get to talk about
tech even more if I want to.

Basically, the downsides for the employee/worker are heavily, heavily
outweighed by the benefits in my opinion. I also think that's the case for
companies as well, but only have my own small experience as a very small
employer to back that up so maybe someone else could comment there.

~~~
biztos
As a remote worker for a not-small company one downside I've noticed is that I
have basically no idea which way the wind is blowing corporate-politics-wise.
Most of the time it doesn't matter, but once in a while it does matter and one
is caught by surprise. When I worked in the office that was way easier to
gauge.

Another is that you don't have any chance to rub shoulders with the higher-
ups, so to the extent you are on their radar at all it's usually because you
either delivered something awesome very recently, or they see your name next
to a figure they'd like to spend on something else. This can negatively impact
career development.

Also, depending on _where_ your remote work is done, you can end up with an
advancement problem: much career development in tech is done by changing
companies, and most significant salary increases are backed by the prospect
that you might leave for more money. If you work remotely, or work locally
from home and insist on keeping it that way, then your options for changing
jobs are much more limited.

In terms of the _company_ I think they lose out in two specific areas:

1) Brainstorming, which I think is better done in person. 2) Mentoring, which
ditto.

However I agree that WFH, with the right people, is a win-win situation for
the employee and the employer.

------
biztos
When thinking about WFH as a "software person" I often come back to the case
of the writer.

In the ideal case, i.e. if we factor out the employers, what we do is not so
different from what novelists do. Of course it's not the same, but the
physical aspects of the work are remarkably similar when you think about it.

And where does the novelist usually work? In a home office if they can.

So while I am sometimes frustrated with my (very privileged) position as a
remote worker for a software company, I try to remind myself that in the ideal
version of the work I do, I already have the ideal workspace.

(And yes, in the ideal version the Programmer codes for four good hours a day,
just as the Novelist writes for about that long before going out into the
world for inspiration and Life.)

~~~
dasmoth
_In the ideal case, i.e. if we factor out the employers, what we do is not so
different from what novelists do._

I very much agree with this as an ideal case.

The voices saying "software should always be written by a team" are very loud
at the moment, though.

(A reasonable number of novels _are_ collaborations, but the authors generally
come together "organically" rather than being thrown together by the
publishers. Closer to starting a contacting shop with a couple of friends than
the standard software team setup).

~~~
biztos
I admit that my novelist analogy breaks down a little when you're building,
say, Facebook.

But how many people who wished to be writers ended up working in advertising,
or government, or someplace else where they do write a lot, in collaboration
with others and subject to requirements handed to them by their bosses?

I think most of us write software the way a copywriter writes copy at
McCann[0]. It's great to make Creative Director, but...

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCann_Erickson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCann_Erickson)

~~~
dasmoth
Interesting analogy and one I'll give some thought to.

I can't really see copywriters doing the kinds of "team rituals" (daily
standups, etc.) that are _de rigueur_ in parts of the software world -- but
maybe I'm wrong about this.

------
Tade0
As someone who switched to remote work over two years ago I have an
observation: the most exhausting part of the day is the commute.

I used to commute by bus - 70-80 minutes one-way trip. After I bought a car,
which shaved a good 20 minutes off of that time, I noticed my productivity
went up. A friend of mine even went as far as to move to a place close to the
office and that changed the quality of his life(and naturally productivity)
considerably.

To me the hardest part about working remotely is managing distractions and
monitoring your health - I found that without a daily march to the office it's
much easier not to notice that you have e.g. a fever and are too weak to work.

------
adamredwoods
I disagree with this blanket statement the article is making. I think
flexibility is key here, being able to work from home or being able to go into
the office to connect with co-workers. In this article's study, it seems that
the employees still had to go into the office one day a week.

~~~
bspn
I agree. In my first full-time remote job I quickly realized how much I missed
the personal interaction that comes with being in an office setting. Sure,
needless meetings get tiring quickly but in my current role I now have the
flexibility to balance in-office time with working from home so I have a
little more control over the amount of "dead time" I have to suffer through.

------
mpermar
I've worked from home for the last 10 years. Before that I had regular jobs
but also ran hobby Open Source projects from home too.

Reflecting on this time I don't think I would have done it differently. I'm
certain that I'm more productive and happier at home. But as you gain family
responsabilities, i.e. wife/husband+kids things become considerably more
challenging and unavoidably productivity decreases. Today with two kids and
wife, I know I am still way more productive than I would be on an office, but
also less productive than I was 10 years old. The reason I think I am still
way more productive working from home has been discussed over an over: much
less interruptions. Also, something that is not discussed that often is that (
if you are a professional - some others would say dumb ) you end up working
way more hours at home.

That holds true as long as we are talking about engineering work. However, I
don't think it is true when we move above the management scale. When you move
into more managing roles, even if they are technical management (architect,
lead, CTO, ... ) things become very challenging at home if your company is not
fully distributed. Many things that were natural when you were an engineer
start to feel awkward like having all team members on physical site and a
manager on a different contintent, having all managers on a place but you on a
totally different part of the world, etc. etc. It is very easy get out of the
loop and keeping up with everything becomes stressful.

I think working from home in general is great but it needs to be part of the
company's DNA.

------
samstave
No, it does not - especially if you have multiple kids, ADHD and or you need
to interact closely with people face-to-face.

The comment that "makes you happier and massively more productive" reads to me
is if that line was written by someone still in their 20s.

------
Tempest1981
We used to have an informal "Work at Home Wednesday". It's helpful if the team
can agree on a specific day or two. Then you still get in-person in-office
communication the other 3-4 days a week.

Higher-up managers tend to worry if they don't see people at their keyboards,
in my experience. (More visible with open-office floor plans.) So if it's just
1 or 2 days, they tolerate it better.

------
tluyben2
For me personally (I have worked 80% of my professional life of 25 years from
home) it is all about time management. Doing traditional office hours would
and does basically squash my productivity. I see that with many people around
me: they work but not in a way I would describe as productive. The work gets
done eventually but there was way too much interference. That is required for
a team to work sometimes, but if you need to produce, quiet and your own
comfort zone is probably preferable. Depends on what you do ofcourse. Mixing
job roles in one open office (sales, product dev, pm and software dev) is one
of the more efficient ways to get very little done in the alotted time. That
is why I think, if someone has the discipline and the right job for it,
working from home is efficient.

------
kartan
> Well, the Open-Plan Office Nazis have it all wrong

I stopped reading here. "All" wrong? "Nazis"?

Different people have different needs and experiences. Some people are social
and need other people's interaction to function. Some people need more
guidance on their work. Other people will be happy if they were alone in the
world.

Open plan offices have advantages and disadvantages, to know them helps to
create better places to work, or if an open plan office is right for your type
of business.

~~~
goalieca
For me, open plan is all wrong. Perhaps for the author as well.

------
siliconc0w
Abstractly, you're choosing to only hire from a limited radius, taking these
really expensive knowledge workers and shipping them all into a big room where
common sense and study after study shows they can't concentrate. It's kinda
bizarre. Forgetting a wider cheaper talent pool and increased concentration -
even the math around commuting alone should be enough:

    
    
        E = size of engineering team
        C = round trip commute (45 *2 ~= 90 minutes)
        P = Productivity increase per day
        H = Avg hours worked per day per engineer
    
        (E*C)/(H*60) = P 
        For a 20 person engineering team:
        (90 minutes * 20 engineers)/(8*60) = .1875 or 3.75 more engineers or almost another working day per week.
    

I like the absurdity of the self driving analogy - We're inventing this
fantastic new technology so we can better shuttle people around instead of
bits which we're already pretty good at. My theory is that the people making
these decisions are usually extrovert MBA-types who like the 'energy' of open
offices and or most tend to generally model successful companies who have, so
far, yet to make a big move here but the dominoes seem like they have to fall
at some point.

------
yosito
I've been working remotely for three years. It was mostly a positive
experience, but I've decided to move back to an on location job due to a few
negatives that were making me unhappy;

* My routine decayed over time and work and rest became too intertwined. I felt too stressed while relaxing and too lazy while working. * As an extrovert, long days at home in front of the computer are isolating. * Collaboration with coworkers was so difficult that projects often took much longer than needed, delayed by "phone tag" and simple misunderstandings that usually took 24 hours to correct, vs 30 seconds in an office.

Of course, working remotely does have advantages and there were some times I
was very happy to be doing so. I'm surprised it hasn't become more common for
companies to offer remote work allowances. Say three months of working
remotely a year, and working from the office the rest of the time. They could
specify "all hands on deck" weeks, for the busy times of year, and otherwise
employees could schedule remote time like they schedule vacation time, they'd
just get a lor more of it.

------
greggman
If you're more productive at home that's great but I most definitely am not.

I'm single. I look forward to the social aspects of work. Maybe if I had a
family that would be different but I doubt it.

At work I can compile our 100k file program on the corp distributed build
system. It's at least 100x faster than building at home. Sure if you're doing
web stuff maybe your laptop is ok or maybe you're doing backend and ssh is all
you need get into the system. I was working on a giant desktop app. It took 1
to 4hrs to build at home.

At work I have a 30inch monitor, a 24inch monitor, and a workstation class PC
with 12 cores, 64gig of ram, 256gig SSD, 3TB of storage. At home I have an
gamer PC with 16gig of ram. The work machine is much faster.

Also when I worked on AAA games working at home was basically impossible
because there are terabytes of data modified by the artists daily and I need
access to that data to do my job. There are also dev kits that have to stay at
the office because of NDAs etc. I'm sure other programmers have similar
requirements.

~~~
Imagenuity
So remote into your work system. Isn't that the solution to all the things
listed above?

~~~
greggman
Really, how do I remote into my Xbox One dev kit? How do I debug GPU blue
screen drive bugs remotely?

------
cooervo
Having worked remotely for 2 years it all depends. Its not perfect, it depends
of the company, there are terrible places to work at remotely.

Usually if everyone works remotely if better, but if you are the only one its
not so good.

It's way better than open plan office.

I think the ideal would be 3 days remote, 2 tops at office with everyone on
the same day at office so you can integrate or make pair programming sessions.

------
atemerev
In other news, the sky is blue, and vegetables are good for your health.

------
relaxitup
These kind of generalizations are entirely humorous. Whether remote or on-site
works better for someone is entirely situational, and mostly depends on the
personality/disposition of the person. For many many people, remote just
doesn't work for them for many reasons, and on-site is where they may thrive.
Ridiculousness.

------
11thEarlOfMar
It's an interesting experimental outcome, but I wonder to what extent the
results are impacted by the type of work being done. From the TEDx talk, the
company, C-Trip, was actually based in Shanghai. It's a travel agency.

It's not mentioned, but if the employees' salary has a variable component and
the more they sell the more they earn, then eliminating their commute and
giving them an extra 1-2 hours per day to sell travel services, and thereby
earn more money, will certainly increase their productivity. I would be
interested in knowing if that is the case for these workers.

What if the workers were instead, say, an AP/AR department at a fortune 500
company? Would they see the same increase in productivity? The same decrease
in turnover and absenteeism? I am not arguing that they wouldn't, only that
I'd expect different types of work to have different degrees of improvement.

------
newjobseeker
I have the option to work from home, but I almost exclusively work in the
office now. Even though the open concept can sometimes be distracting, I am
much more productive and happier at the office. On the occasion when I do work
from home, I end up working longer hours, feel like I accomplished less, and
am more tired.

------
Overtonwindow
I work from home and I am bored out of my mind. I don't enjoy it and it's a
terrible love-hate relationship. I crave and need human contact, and that
distracts me from my work. Additionally being at home means everything is a
distraction.

------
christophilus
For those of you software engineers who-- like me-- work from home in a non-
tech hub, how do you network/socialize/meetup with other tech people?

------
Kiro
Happier, sure, but massively more productive? I think you need really good
management for this to hold. In my last company WFH basically meant a day off.

------
ignawin
Come on Hacker News, less click-baity next time. This was a Buzzfeed like
article in terms of generalization and Nazi references.

------
binaryapparatus
Not having to travel to work is great. Having very tolerant boss (me) is
awful. Having boss that's not me is even worse.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_G...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#NowWhat)

------
remir
I also see ecological reasons to justify working from home. Less people on the
road= less traffic, less pollution.

------
perlpimp
"few pundits seemed to object when Yahoo, IBM, and Aetna rolled back their
work-from-home policies."

News reported that - insinuating that work from home doesn't work for those
companies. however it is a known fact that it was a round about way to lay off
some people without actually doing it directly.

------
m3kw9
The title should say "..more productive - For Me"

------
jordache
is it me or do these magazines, inc, fastcompany all consist of crappy filler
material that is typically associated with a clickbait title?

~~~
Kiro
Yeah, what is this? "The results will astound you.". Sounds like a parody. I
thought Inc Magazine was serious.

------
schpet
Comfortable

Not drinking too much

Regular exercise at the gym

------
tek-cyb-org
working from home is definitely not productive for me.

------
aaron695
Numerous studies show this not to be the case. It's bad for your mental health
and it's bad for your work.

Obviously this doesn't count for everyone, a single mum forced to do a 2 hour
commute might be worse off having to go to work. Same for some personalities.

The article seems to be hiding the source? Is it in the TED talk? But from
memory the Singapore company employees did non-teamwork work, fairly menial
labour.

And it's a really old study, that was talked about years ago.

~~~
dasmoth
_Numerous studies show this not to be the case. It 's bad for your mental
health and it's bad for your work._

Care to cite some?

(Although I'd argue that averages shouldn't matter here, it ought to be about
what works for the individual -- and the constant "team, team, team" refrain
in contemporary management speak seems like a somewhat-deliberate attempt to
distract from that).

