[Raphmedia]

On the opposite, I'd say it's a great way to destroy your sleep routine and habits. As a rule of thumb, your bed should be dedicated to sleep and cuddles with your significant other.

"This study indicates that the use of computers and mobile telephones in the bedroom are related to poor sleep habits" https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1365-2869...

"Computer use, TV viewing, and the presence of media in children's bedrooms may reduce sleep duration, and delay bedtimes." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23886318/

[gopalv]

> As a rule of thumb, your bed should be dedicated to sleep

CGP Grey had a pretty good video about living in the lockdown titled "Spaceship you".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck

I'd say that a lot of work that isn't really work can be done from bed, but it does mess up your training for "bed == sleep".

I used to work from bed before 2020, but the lockdown has made the "walk downstairs to work, grab a coffee along the way" into a natural thing rather than putting a number of other high attention activities (shaving, driving) between being awake-enough to sitting at my desk.

[dumbfoundded]

Solution: two beds. A work bed and a sleep bed.

[ineedasername]

Or pull a George Castanza and put a small mattress under your desk.

[Groxx]

There are a fair number of under-standing-desk hammocks out there: https://www.upliftdesk.com/under-desk-hammock-uplift-desk/

[st1x7]

This is also #1 in Grey's "7 Ways to Maximize Misery" Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o

[f69281c]

I've been institutionalized for suicidal depression a few times and aside from endorsing that video, I wanted to hijack your position in the comment hierarchy to express that a scary thing about the linked article is that a lot of people aren't going to get any counter-information; they're just going to get nudged into a lifestyle that they'll probably contemplate sweet release from at some point.

Every once in a while I see an article from a major publication that makes me recoil. And I don't know how to express it but the fact that someone's gonna kill themself (long) after following the article's advice isn't the worst part of it at all.

Most people don't actually kill themselves, they just desperately want out of a situation they can't convey to anyone, can't fix on their own, and makes no sense. It's like if someone's house got robbed and they got beaten into a hospital bed on every prime-numbered day of the month, but no one told them those rules and no one believed them when they talked about it. The day that poor bastard got fed up, burned their house down, and just started walking would be better than the thirty days before that, even excluding prime-numbered ones.

Anyway I'll be holding my breath for an apology article from the new york times so I guess I'll see you on the other side

[kaybe]

Oohh look at these people with more than one room!

(Ok it's valid for those.. but I'm still feeling a bit salty.)

[reaperducer]

Oohh look at these people with more than one room!

I feel ya.

Back when I was running a one-man startup, I had myself, my wife, and a cat in 450 square feet. Except when I was out gladhanding potential clients, I worked from my bed.

At least back then, I could decamp for Starbucks if I got the crazies. But today's studio apartment dwellers are really screwed. Especially if you live somewhere hot, somewhere cold, or a city that removed all of the public benches to "combat" homelessness.

[derekp7]

I would think that the perfect setup for that size would involve a queen-sized loft bed, but with a flip-down catwalk so that getting out of bed, you swing your feet down and they hit the catwalk at what would feel like normal floor height. Then steps at the end of the catwalk to get off it. Then have the steps and catwalk flip up during the day to give good access under the bed. On the underside would be a divider running the length of the bed in the middle, separating the two halves. Connected to that divider would be a good office desk on either side (so two people could work from home yet have their personal space).

I'm surprised that there hasn't been a real advertising push for solutions such as this during the last year. I can visualize it and probably draft up plans for it (when I do woodworking I always do my own plans). But I haven't seen this exact concept anywhere.

[coldtea]

>I had myself, my wife, and a cat in 450 square feet

So, like the average "family with 2 kids" size of house in most of the world :-)

[reaperducer]

The average global house size is much larger than that. China has the smallest at 500 square feet, so my point stands.

[ciceryadam]

House size maybe, but that leaves out bunch of other types of living. Not just apartments, but slum huts, refugee camp tents, and so on.

[8ytecoder]

In houses that size, rooms convert from living -> dining -> study -> bedroom multiple times a day. Most households would have a clear time on when the mat comes out at night or when food is served or when the TV is turned on or off so the kids can study ...etc. At least that's how it was for us.

[chordalkeyboard]

Subsistence agriculturalists make up 25% of the world's population and many of them (probably all) require more than 500 ft^2.

[LegitShady]

yes, even setting up a startup, he was not in a slum hut or a refugee camp.

[sjtindell]

I’m picturing someone in a Hong Kong “apartment” cage saying, “Wait you guys have whole rooms?”

[KMag]

My 350 square foot studio in a luxury building in Hong Kong served my wife and I fine for the first year of our marriage. (A last minute opportunity came up for her to join me a year earlier than expected, and the brand new luxury tower next door flooded the market and made it difficult to find someone to take over my lease.)

The two of us now live in a 700 square foot 4 BR, where we use one BR as a walk-in closet and another as a study. Our landlord claims 13 family members lived in this unit when he was a kid.

[refurb]

700 sq ft and four bedrooms? I’m in a 700 sq ft two bed/two bath and the 2nd bedroom is tiny. I couldn’t imagine how small they must be to to get four of them.

[greggman3]

450sqft is large for many people. Tokyo has > 100k listings for places under 160sqft

[plumeria]

What about public parks? You can always sit in the grass (not in winter however).

[KMag]

My wife and I lived and worked the first two weeks of December in precautionary quarantine, unable to leave an 86 square foot area, along with our luggage from a 1 month trip. I was within a couple of inches of being able to touch opposite walls (the narrow way) with my finger tips. Hong Kong changed the rules from quarantine-at-home to hotel quarantine while we were out. (We booked a place 2.25x as big, but had a problem with our booking 6 hours before check-in and had to find another booking last-minute.)

I thought I might go stir crazy or have elevated levels of conflict with my wife, but it worked out okay. On the other hand, I can understand why the Council of Europe deems 8 sq. m. (86 sq. ft.) the minimum prison cell size for two prisoners.

[LeifCarrotson]

Wow, I don't think I have ever seen an 86 square foot hotel room. I live in what's locally a small, 50-year-old suburban ranch home in the Midwestern US, but even my guest bathroom is at least that big. That really drives home the disparity behind the "we're all in the same boat" memes where one boat is a yacht and one's a castaway raft - though most seaworthy rafts are on the order 86 square feet...

For me, quarantine was the best couple months of my recent working life. My home office is way nicer (quieter, fewer interruptions, better computer and peripherals, better chair etc) than my work office, I got to have brunch, lunch, and an afternoon snack with my kids, had no commute, played fetch with the dog or took walks in the woods for breaks, got a ton of projects done around the house and in the workshop, played with my kid in his play room, and I'm a bit of an introverted hermit so being home without a stream of social visitors was really a cherry on top.

I don't know how to properly say sorry or thank you to urbanites for whom quarantine was more like a prison experiment. I guess I'll try with "I'm sorry that your experience was so difficult. Thank you so much for caring and for going through that quarantine."

[gommm]

Wow, that must have been rough, I was lucky in that I came back just before they changed to the hotel only quarantine. One of my friend had to go through hotel quarantine and ended up getting a windowless bedroom during the entire 14 days (the hotel website definitely didn't mention that when booking).

By the way, always fun to meet people from HN in HK, so shoot me an email and we could have lunch or drinks after the fourth wave is over.

[KMag]

When we came back, it was the period where (if you arrived in the evening), you'd spend the first night in a government hotel, and then 13 nights in any hotel that would take you. At 2 a.m. in the government hotel, we discovered a problem with our booking the next day. We called up one hotel's front desk at 3 a.m., and the poor guy on duty told us they accepted quarantine guests. We kept trying to get our original booking problem ironed out for the next 6 hours, but eventually gave up at 9 a.m.

Luckily, we gave the second hotel's front desk a second call at 9 a.m. to double-check they accepted quarantine guests before making our online booking. The day shift guy who came in told us that they didn't accept quarantine guests.

Now, it's a bit better organized, with an official government list of all acceptable quarantine hotels. Though, prices have gone up significantly for those few hotels. When we arrived, there was a government list, but it was just a subset of all hotels accepting quarantine guests, and of course prices shot up and vacancies vanished for those hotels on the government list.

[goblin89]

A recent problem for me: I have only one room to myself, and prefer to keep work out of it. I am used to working outside from cafes, esp. coffeeshops, rotating my surroundings little by little. As of late, though, all relevant establishments are shut down in the vicinity, which disrupts both my work and sleep schedule.

Of course, I understand the need for such measures. Hopefully I’ll manage to continue consulting through this without losing a customer.

[Raphmedia]

I believe that even working on a small desk next to your bed would be better than working directly from the bed.

[SulfurHexaFluri]

Have been working from home from my bedroom for the last year, got a small desk with a 27" monitor and a second hand high end office chair. At the least its significantly better ergonomics than using a laptop in bed. Downside is I can't use my camera in calls since my background looks like crap and usually has my bf sleeping behind me.

[manigandham]

Some conference apps have the ability to automatically blur or replace the background.

[fastball]

I really don't think we have enough evidence to backup this assertion.

[Raphmedia]

We know that having a dedicated sleeping space contributes to the quality of sleep, but there are no studies on the size and boundaries required to create that space.

Using the bed as a workspace means you're bringing your work with you to bed. You completely erase any possibility of separation between workspace and sleep space.

With only one bedroom available, your only way to assign a dedicated sleeping space is to use your bed to sleep and a desk to work.

Throwing in some anecdotal opinion, I live in a studio style open apartment and have no issue sleeping well in my bed even if I can see my workspace. I however had issues sleeping back when I lived in a smaller apartment and used the bed as my main computer space.

Is it objectively better or worst? There's no study backing either theories. However, I believe that even working on a small desk next to your bed would be better than working directly from the bed. Otherwise you'd be effectively training yourself to think about work while lying down in the comfort of your sleeping area, instead of training yourself to fall asleep and relax.

[fastball]

I think all of this is overemphasizing how much we are subconsciously "training" our bodies to do anything.

As with most human behavior studies, I have yet to see a sleep study that managed to satisfactorily demonstrate causality in place of correlation when it comes to working in bed ruining your quality of sleep.

In this particular case, you could imagine that people who work from their bed tend to be on screens in their bed until just before bedtime, causing them to be more "wired" than people who have a dedicated office space and avoid screens in their bed entirely.

[ineedasername]

Oh, so you have 1 room? Must be nice. I had 3 walls and a plastic tarp I time shares with a neighbor as a shower curtain, and had to tap out tcp-ip on an old telegraph machine. Got quit good, tapped out about 0.3 kb/m (kilobits per minute)

[chasd00]

wow a telegraph? i had to shout one or zero to another guy half a block down.

[chordalkeyboard]

Gosh I was so happy when they invented zero.

[ineedasername]

You had a guy down the block? All I had were pigeons and no redundancy. There were a lot of literally dropped packets.

[themodelplumber]

Nitpick: "are related"..."may reduce"...these are links, not causation.

I tested this myself and found A) my sleep did not get any worse when I worked from bed and B) if anything, it got better, especially during times of illness, because I was able to get some important things done at the higher-energy highs and this in turn helped me get better sleep later.

IMO the bed and laying down in general is a great place to do mental activities including work tasks. I continue to get great results from planning (incl. pseudocoding) while laying down.

Anecdata, but I'm noticing that a lot of people aren't testing this themselves, just trusting somebody else's bell curve, along which they may actually plot at any given point.

[echlebek]

It's also a great way to destroy your neck and back. If you thought you had problems with ergonomics at your desk, it will be way worse typing away in a bed.

[chasd00]

yeah I can't imagine 8 hrs of coding from a bed. i have bad posture and even I know that would be bad news.

[hrktb]

TBF, coding 8 hrs in any single posture is bad for you.

[mhh__]

What if my significant other is a copy of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler?

[jedimastert]

We can't change who or how we love

[slowmovintarget]

The gravitational time dilation from proximity to the book does not work in your favor, better to leave it on the shelf while you sleep.

[ISL]

The book helps -- clocks deeper in a gravitational potential run slow relative to those higher in the potential.

As I recall from Hartle, to paraphrase: "The experimentalists in the basement live longer than the theorists upstairs, but the view is worth it." My recollection from the associated problem is that the difference, over a lifetime, is microseconds.

MTW won't give even that much aid :). Good luck with your studies; there's a lot to learn.

[andybak]

I have a perfectly good sleep routine. It's just that it involves a laptop, a mobile phone, a tablet and occasionally a VR headset.

[jjice]

When I was in middle school (early 2010s), I can't tell you how much time I spent on social media at night on my phone in bed. I swear I must've gotten 4-5 hours of sleep on average. Somewhere around my senior year of high school I started placing my phone across the room instead of lying in bed with it. Who would have guess that my sleep improved drastically. I never go to bed with technology.

[musicale]

> As a rule of thumb, your bed should be dedicated to sleep and cuddles with your significant other.

Sounds like the first sentence of the article:

> For years, sleep experts have held one piece of common wisdom above all else: that devices have no place in the bedroom.

[axguscbklp]

I've been using computers in bed for many years and as far as I can tell, I have no problems whatsoever with sleeping. Sometimes I stay up late surfing the web and then don't get enough sleep because I have to wake up the next morning to do some bullshit, but I'd do the same thing if I was sitting in a chair - I don't surf the the web at night because my computer devices tempt me into doing it, I do it because it's fun.

[hrktb]

That's addressed in the article:

> A primary argument against using devices in bed is that it can further erode the boundaries between work and home, and disrupt your sleep cycle.

Basically the adjustment is to rebuild routines and habits surrounding the new use cycle of the bed.

So, it's not trivial, but not a biological limitation nor something that can't be managed.

[devwastaken]

Having a seperate office for work helps significantly in seperating your habits. I would imagine a bed office might do the same, though obviously having health repercussions.