You are the anomaly, not the norm. WFH takes discipline, work ethic and honestly the ability to manage a work life balance. Doing this is hard, like you said.
I'm substantially more productive at home. Not for any single reason, but as a result of small things coming together, for example.
More sleep. I can set my alarm 15 minutes before I start work instead of an hour and a half. So I'm more refreshed.
Commuting is mentally draining.
I get sick less. Less often as a sardine in a tin can. More sleep probably helps too.
Less distractions. There's just me in my home office room, at work there are 3 other people right next to me and a dozen within ear shot.
I get home stuff done during work breaks. When I step away from my desk at work I do so because I need a break from what I'm doing, not a break from everything. But there's nothing else to do at work so I sit and do nothing. At home i:
- unload the dishwasher
- walk to the shops to buy items for dinner
- sit in the park
And I find doing those things more refreshing than sitting in the break room staring into space, or walking through the city in the noise of cars everywhere.
So when I step back to my desk, at home I'm more refreshed ready to get back into it.
This also means when I finish work for the day, in office it's another hour or so to get home and then do chores. Vs at home I finish work and I can go for a walk in the park because I've done my chores already.
So I'm happier and less stressed. Which leads to less fatigue and burn out. So I'm ready to go again the next day.
Driving? Well, you have to be in at 8am so that thunderstorm, blizzard, morning twilight, yup, you have to drive through it. And the same the other way.
Catching a train? Is it on time? Will you get a seat or be standing for 30+ minutes. Will your connection arrive? If it's cancelled, what's the alternate route home if the line is closed.
Of course, your millionaire company owner has an apartment a short walk from the centre-of-the-city office.
In my experience, most people who struggle with WFH lack specific material things like space, a quiet home, a schedule anchored by the presence of loved ones who live nearby and a functioning community which they're a part of, good mental and physical health, coworkers who will help them without a fuss, and a million other things.
I think people who take the structure of their lives for granted say things like "problem is most people aren't disciplined:)", but this definition of discipline is directly related to how nice one's house and home life are. This pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality of "disincline" and "work ethic" lets you feel smug about the fact that you're doing better working from your nice home office as an L5 than your new intern who's working from the kitchen table in his family home next to three other people.
Office is an external discipline forced on you while WFH is an internal discipline no one watching over your shoulders, that's the difference.
For an undisciplined person anything can be distracting: birds chirping, picking up a delivery, cooking, a friend dropping by, daily chores like washing, organizing things, etc... it's an endless list really.
That alone is distracting enough for me. I hate the "look busy" vs. actually being busy game people play in offices.
I have severe ADHD and I don't even know what discipline feels like. That's precisely why I can't work in offices. In fact, other people are more productive when I am not in an office with them as well.
I'm cursed with the fact that a lot of my hyperactivity manifests as talking. It's actually problematic enough that I have been reprimanded for talking excessively at points in my past. I am quite charismatic too, so people end up getting locked in these hour+ long conversations with me lol.
At home, there is no one talk to but my significant other who often works during the same time. So, WFH skyrocketed my productivity. I go in the office two days a week, and I basically lose two days of work a week now.
The trick is getting those two days of being in the office and talking and interacting to sum up to be things you can put on your perf packet. those two days aren't "lost". they can be a different kind of work, which culminates into leading teams and mentoring people. work comes in many forms.
I WFH, even work on weekends. I notice that after working weekends I feel tired on Mondays, so I decided to spend Mondays on less technical stuff, e.g. customer meetings, interviews, lead generation etc
It is not easy to say that I'm not a very "internally disciplined" person. I once spent half a year procrastinating instead of working on a personal project. But when you're working for someone (regardless of place), they are paying you for it, and you would like to continue receiving the money, how is this not externally enforced discipline?
I've been WFH since 2016 and I never had an issue with focus when doing paid work. I do want to get paid.
> I've been WFH since 2016 and I never had an issue with focus when doing paid work. I do want to get paid.
YMMV. When I was freelancing, I charged by the hour. Working for 2-3 hours per day was just enough to keep me and the family afloat with some extra money to spare. I haven't saved a penny in 5+ years and haven't had any money for a downpayment on the apartment we were supposed to buy.
Unfortunately, switching to per-project payments would be terrible for me. The deadline would be too far into the future for me to feel the danger of failing the project.
I don't have too much of a problem with it but there are some obstacles depending on your home life.
My wife is hybrid, and on the days she's working from home I have to be firm about boundaries or I'll get significantly less done than on the days where it's just me. If you have kids, or live with your parents, I imagine it presents similar challenges. My sister moved back in with my father in 2020 due to the pandemic, and he was bizarrely disruptive to her work despite _also_ being remote. I'm not saying offices don't have this problem too (many such stories of loud and obnoxious coworkers), but it can be harder to have these conversations with loved ones.
Lots of people live in distracting, annoying places. If I open my window, I will hear some idiot gun it off the line in their straight-piped car from the stoplight near my apartment, several times an hour. There is a constant din of tire noise from the nearby freeway. The firemen at the station down the block do their thing every now and then. If I close my window, it regularly reaches 78F+ in my apartment. I have been battling property management to fix my A/C for months now, and every HVAC technician they send does nothing to fix the problem. My old neighbors used to play shitty music during the day.
Especially in HCOL places with mega-offices where these RTO mandates often stem from, sometimes it really is just easier to work in an air-conditioned office where you can get free coffee, snacks, and maybe some quiet if you're lucky or can slink away to an unused meeting room.
I 100% agree with you though that, at least for me, the discipline of getting up early in the morning, being well groomed and presentable, and battling traffic both ways is greater for me than taking steps to make myself comfortable and productive at home.
During COVID, like everyone else, our company went to WFH. Conversely, when we had a round of redundancies some of the people that were perceived to be important or productive in the office, turned out to be nothing of the sort, and were surprisingly let go.
They talked. A lot. They worked... very little.
The discipline in the office is to do the work, not go to the 'water cooler' and chat to anyone that was there or organise frivolous meetings.
The 16 pings a minute. The 6 hours of meetings a day because people aren't getting the information they need organically each day. The "hey, can I call?"'s during what I thought would be my free half hour in the afternoon. This is definitely not what it was like in the office.
Unfortunately, I recognize this doesn't change unless an org goes 100% back onsite.
Why wouldn't it work with 2 or 3 unified days onsite and 2 or 3 days wfh, with a no-meetings, minimal-interruptions directive on wfh days? I think this structure, if well managed, would work even better than the old 5-days-in-office.
I agree that this would work, and be ideal. I think it only scales to a certain size organization though. At my company, I'd guess we have over a thousand developers across hundreds of teams, and more supporting staff. There's no possibility of getting everyone in at once.
You can't easily tell a coworker to go away when they start talking to you at your desk. You can mute your notifications and schedule calls. Sounds like you have bad organisation skills.
I have discipline problems but when I am on site, my days are more filled with bullshit, e.g. random conversation over projects that lead nowhere, background conversations on unrelated topics, explaining stuff that aren't worth it, coffee breaks etc.
So while I believe it helps in term of team cohesion and for this purpose, on site is better, in term of productiveness it's a net negative.
Hard disagree. Working from home is a skill that does takes time to develop, but it's no more out of reach than developing the skill of being productive in an office. It was a terrible decision for companies to yank away that opportunity from employees.
Every system in place for measuring output and bringing transparency to work done by office workers/software developers finally make sense in the context of working from home.
Either your tickets get done or you have a really good explanation for why they haven't but because you dug into the problem are able to display deep knowledge of the problem.
Discipline has nothing to do with this. Your work will have expectations and deadlines and they will either be met or another human being will grade you with an F. Whatever human trait causes people to do work under those circumstances might be shame, fear, social pressure manifesting itself as work output, I can say for certain it isn't discipline.
It seems too take more discipline to attend a workplace than to do the same work from home. I don't understand your position.
To me, what you're saying is like how banks won't give people mortgages when the monthly payments are half what their current rental is because of person's "inability to pay".
WFH requires discipline, but allows you more freedom to mould your environment to your needs.
It's taken me a decade to find the perfect balance, which is total complete silence, but I would be absolutely powerless in turning an open-space office job into the monk's retreat I need.
I think that he is the norm, actually. Slacking off in the work is easy too, there are many empty discussions that feels like a work, discussions that are not work at all but you still count it as working time. If no one sees your monitor you can watch the same youtube. But, since you are at office you clock at as working.
It also takes discipline to work at the office. and as you said, most people aren't disciplined. They just stay at the office, doing absolutely nothing productive and wait for the clock to tell them they can go home.
I'm not disciplined at all when it comes to my work and I'm still massively more productive at home. What are you talking about?
Having non-work activities that are fulfilling like cooking/cleaning to break
up the work to get out of the rut of brain-fry is so nice. Having non-work non-screen things to at work is so necessary.
More sleep. I can set my alarm 15 minutes before I start work instead of an hour and a half. So I'm more refreshed.
Commuting is mentally draining.
I get sick less. Less often as a sardine in a tin can. More sleep probably helps too.
Less distractions. There's just me in my home office room, at work there are 3 other people right next to me and a dozen within ear shot.
I get home stuff done during work breaks. When I step away from my desk at work I do so because I need a break from what I'm doing, not a break from everything. But there's nothing else to do at work so I sit and do nothing. At home i: - unload the dishwasher - walk to the shops to buy items for dinner - sit in the park
And I find doing those things more refreshing than sitting in the break room staring into space, or walking through the city in the noise of cars everywhere.
So when I step back to my desk, at home I'm more refreshed ready to get back into it.
This also means when I finish work for the day, in office it's another hour or so to get home and then do chores. Vs at home I finish work and I can go for a walk in the park because I've done my chores already.
So I'm happier and less stressed. Which leads to less fatigue and burn out. So I'm ready to go again the next day.