I started working from home due to some family obligations a few years back; the move preceded covid. All of the following are personal observations; some of them may not generalize:
- Efficiency is much worse at home. There are just a lot more distractions at a home office than at an office office.
- Hours are longer. Part of this is making up for the efficiency hit with more hours. The rest is a problem I think a lot of highly conscientious people are going to have with WFH: the work is RIGHT THERE. If you've got a deadline coming up and you're 15 feet from your computer, it's tough to justify not hopping on to get a couple more hours work in. If you'd have to drive across town and open up the building to get more work in, well... it can wait a day.
I've had to get around this by basically making the home office as much like an actual office as possible. I dress in the usual khaki and polo shirt engineer uniform, block a bunch of websites during the day, don't do any work around the house during working hours etc.
To help with the social isolation, I've had to take up a pretty social hobby on a set schedule that gets me out of the office/house and keeps me in at least decent shape.
Keeping the hours worked from getting out of hand is a problem I haven't completely solved and possible won't.
The US has one of the highest uses of antidepressants worldwide. Less human interaction and more alone screen time, even if work-related, is bound to exacerbate this.
I think I endorse basically all of this.
I started working from home due to some family obligations a few years back; the move preceded covid. All of the following are personal observations; some of them may not generalize:
- Efficiency is much worse at home. There are just a lot more distractions at a home office than at an office office.
- Hours are longer. Part of this is making up for the efficiency hit with more hours. The rest is a problem I think a lot of highly conscientious people are going to have with WFH: the work is RIGHT THERE. If you've got a deadline coming up and you're 15 feet from your computer, it's tough to justify not hopping on to get a couple more hours work in. If you'd have to drive across town and open up the building to get more work in, well... it can wait a day.
I've had to get around this by basically making the home office as much like an actual office as possible. I dress in the usual khaki and polo shirt engineer uniform, block a bunch of websites during the day, don't do any work around the house during working hours etc.
To help with the social isolation, I've had to take up a pretty social hobby on a set schedule that gets me out of the office/house and keeps me in at least decent shape.
Keeping the hours worked from getting out of hand is a problem I haven't completely solved and possible won't.
The US has one of the highest uses of antidepressants worldwide. Less human interaction and more alone screen time, even if work-related, is bound to exacerbate this.