| Having been WFH for the last 15y… Chair: yes but doesn’t need to be expensive. I’m still dragging around an office chair from 2002. It just fits me. Separate your space. Make sure your work and home environments don’t collide. Once I learned this lesson, I bought a used RV and converted it. Power, A/C, fridge - just plug into the house and you’re good. Once the rats infested it and got me sick over and over, I switched to a Lowe’s Garden Shed. Now, replete with a basic folding table and all my stuff. Synergy. One mouse & keyboard + clipboard, shared across all machines. From left to right, I have a personal intel NUC, work MBP intel, work MBP m1, personal MBP m1. Each with an extra monitor positioned above the machine. So effectively it’s like a single giant machine but workloads can be isolated. So nice. Game changing. All y’all with your special mics - stop it. They suck for us on the other side of the call. Just get a set of headphones with a mic built-in. Beats, AirPods, etc. y’all with your fancy mics have no idea how inconsistent and awful they are for us on the other end. I lose at least 10-20m of my week with people futzing around with their fancy mic. Stop it. Again, separation of work space vs living space is paramount. You can poison your living space with all the positive and negative of work - it’s just hard to really let that stuff go without physically changing your environment. Polluting your living space with work will only work for so long. Other than that, I wish I could express how rudimentary you can go and get yourself a really good and productive space. FWIW, my keyboard is an old Dell, circa 2005 - still rockin - mouse, old Logitech (2007?). Desk is srsly just a jank folding table. It’s definitely less about the toys you buy than the protection of your work space vs living space - and making sure your just plain comfy sitting for hours on end as you forget to take a break. |
Depends on what works for you. For me it’s the exact opposite. I don’t think separating work and the rest of your life is natural or healthy way to approach things.
It feels really wrong to me to have these major parts of your life completely compartmentalized, not just in space but in time as well. For 8 hours a day I should only think about work, and ignore every other part of my life and vice versa?
For me the exact opposite works way better: I try go blend my work and my personal life as much as possible.
If I get stuck on something work related, I don’t stress out and try to push through it, trying to be productive because I’m inside this arbitrary 8-hour window. Instead I go do a chore around the house, get my mind off the problem. Usually this helps and gets me unstuck and I’ll continue with my work related things.
The reverse is also true: when inspiration strikes outside work hours and I just need to turn my idea into code, I’m not going to hold it in for hours (or even days if it’s a weekend) until it’s 9am on a work day, I’m going to grab my laptop and implement it right then and there.
I find trying to force myself into these time/space separated compartments for work an personal life extremely stressful. I’m actually one single person, this is not Severance. For me life/work balance means that these aspects of myself are balanced at all times, instead of switch between the two.