Ask HN: First time working from home; what to do or not do?

Yeah, I recently started working (full time) from home too (about 6 months ago). In my particular case I combined starting remote work with moving to another country which made one negative aspect of remote work more acute: social isolation. It should definitely not be underestimated and it is very helpful to build things into your life that involve you in others' lives directly. Additionally having a good routine, and being intentional about it, goes a really long way! Figure out what works for you and what does not. For me, I chose one room in my apartment where I work, and when I leave that room I avoid work.

On the plus side, I think working from home can bring you much closer to family - it is crazy to think I spent so much time at work!! 9+ hours of my waking life was away from the people closest to me. Working from home gives you _a lot_ more flexibility so make the most of that! Wanna work at a cafe today? Go for it! Wanna sleep in a bit? Go for it! (but do not do this at the cost of a healthy routine). Make it a treat yo' self kind of thing. Good luck and hope you can make the most of this new mode!

1. Have a dedicated area that you only perform work.

Don’t use kitchen table. It’s good for your mental health to have a dedicated area where you only work and when you’re not “at work” - don’t use that area.

2. Get dressed for “work”, including shoes.

Don’t make you’re comfortable as if you just rolled out of bed and wearing sleep clothes. Get up. Get dressed. Putting on shoes is important. It tricks your mind into thinking your not “at home”.

3. Treat your working time as work.

Just because you’re home, don’t go get the mail. Take out the quick trash. Or other small errands around the house.

You’re work time should be for work. And just because you’re at home, don’t let others (spouse) trick you into doing house hold tasks.

4. Remove distractions.

If you like to game during the day, literally disconnect your Xbox during working hours.

5. Leave for lunch.

You can very easily get cabin fever by staying at home all day and night. Go outside for lunch. Even if you just pack your lunch. It’s important to movement and to get outside.

6. Establish a strong social outlet.

Most people don’t realize that working from home is incredibly lonely. It’s easy to get depressed. Find an outlet to talk to people.

One thing that really helped for me was "walking to work", I would walk to a coffee shop a few blocks away and then back home and go straight to my office. It really helped having a clear routine to delineate working time from home time.

Communication is the biggest challenge. Try to talk to your co-workers every day and overcommunicate even if it seems too much. Making quick screen recordings and narrating them for even little things is invaluable, it seemed like a hassle at first but soon you get the wrinkles out of the capturing side of it and people really appreciate it.

Don't just have a dedicated area, make it a place you want to work from. It seems obvious, but once you're working from home, it's easy to just cobble together a workspace in a room and call it an "office". Your office should feel comfortable, a place you want to spend a good amount of time in, but is not distracting. At the end of the day, it should also be a place you leave in favor of living life. I wrote about my home office just in case you want some ideas, https://medium.com/@9bplus/my-home-office-f531f662fc51. Been working from home for 2 years now.

The advice here is good but it only confirms for me that I would much rather commute to and from an office every day than work from home.

I'll skip the pretty standard advice here that basically boils down to "put clear boundaries so your brain is tricked into thinking you are at an office".

This brain hack never worked for me so I'll give you mostly the reverse advices:

1. Make a very comfy work place at home. It can be at your gaming machine as long as you don't stop work to game or browse HN/Reddit/what-have-you.

2. To build discipline, you have to change your mindset to goal-oriented and not hours-oriented. It's not about putting your arse at the chair at 9:00 and getting up at 17:30. Not at all. It's about "I want to achieve X and Y today".

3. One thing from the other advices I do like is: make sure you get social and human contact every now and then. It's extremely easy to never talk to anyone ever again if you work and rest at the same real estate. Go out for coffee or to pack lunch. Do that to refresh your brain and to have an excuse to exchange a few phrases with people.

4. If you are not a person that has an exact work and rest schedule, that's quite fine; everybody has been telling me that I shouldn't work a minute outside the work hours but I never found this to be productive. I sometimes had days during which my work hours have been all a haze and then I got a power surge at midnight. As long as working at random hours does not depress you (it does depress many though, have that in mind!) then it's quite fine to do it.

5. Dressing for work is something that I, again, found optional. I am quite fine working in my pyjamas and I never felt lazy because of it. Dress comfy! I've spent days with pyjamas and a blanket on my legs.

---

Truthfully, your biggest hurdle is NOT to think "I am at home, I can slack". There are multitude of ways to cope with that but mine was to switch to a goal-oriented mindset and not an hours-oriented one.

If you can overcome the laziness because you're at home and are not closely supervised then honestly, you'll be just fine.

You may be different but I find it impossible to work from home.

I go to a co-working space. It's worth the $150-$300 per month for a shared space.

If you want to do business go to a place where other people are doing business, otherwise you might be like these guys...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW3lhfVpLL4

To make the advise from HN more relevant, perhaps it is better to follow up in a week or two and describe your experience working from home. Are you indeed easily distracted? Or, are you working crazy hours? Are you more/less productive? Are you happier? Are you less stressed, more stressed? Are you eating more/less, etc. It is also relevant to whether or not you live alone, have a family...

Working from home is not for everybody, and can create a myriad of unexpected issues, some of which can be easily solved, others require more effort. For others it can be a blessing.

The one thing to bear in mind, though, and which is repeated often in the responses below is that by working from home a lot of necessary actions which force you to structure your daily life suddenly fall away. Getting up, showering, dressing, getting to work, etc, don't just prepare your mind to get into 'work' mode or whatever, but also force you to think about grocery shopping, breakfast, dinner, planning for the weekend, planning recreational activities and more.

As someone 90 days into a full remote from home job, I would highly recommend you meditate on whether you are the sort of person that actually wants to exist in what could effectively be a prison in the shape of your home. (Or wherever you decide to work from.)

I have seriously underestimated how important human contact is, even if just with effective strangers.

If it's not compatible with you, you will start a countdown clock to ??? once you start on this journey.

Working inside an office is apparently like having guard rails for an invisible road that many people do not require, but people like me might not thrive without.

I'm now faced with the awkward fork in the road of going back to my old job, which would (probably? hopefully? gladly?) take me back, or forcing some evolution to make myself compatible with this prison I fought so hard to procure.

Hi. I've been working from home for about 1.5 years and have had spells of working remotely from coworking places.

I am very distractible. It was and remains very difficult. However, I think I'm in a zone now where work is a place I go to in my head, rather than a place that exists in reality.

Meta-advice: keep trying things. There is no settled consensus. For now, this is a very individual choice.

How you work at home / live your life:

Some people advise a strict separation between work and home. I don't agree. The best benefits of working from home are cooking more of my own food, doing chores during the day, and working the hours that I choose. Exception: never code from your bed.

I have put some effort into making my desk area nice. It helps.

The real question is staying motivated when you don't see faces, or hear voices, or are even in physical proximity to anyone that you work with. I find that I need voices/faces to believe that anyone cares that I exist. I have a very supportive spouse, so a lot of that is taken care for me. Even so I leave the house once a day, minimum. I often go to the library, cafes, or restaurants. And I have a regular "hack session" with a friend of mine in a similar situation on Mondays. Mostly we just chitchat with the excuse that we might actually hack on something, but it's important.

How you work with co-workers:

General theme: many things that used to happen randomly or accidentally now will have to be done intentionally.

You probably have standups or some other regular way to check in with your co-workers. Keep doing those and take them seriously. Always ask more questions than you think you should. You don't get chances to ask them later.

Build informal and private channels for your team. It's important for your team to have a place where your team talks among yourselves and where you feel you have privacy. My current company isn't that nosey (and we're the Slack admins anyway) so a private Slack channel works. If you have to go to Signal or Keybase, do it and say it's for "emergency ops".

In other companies where I've been remote, or part of a remote office, I've found that the Donut Slack app has been very helpful. It just randomly assigns you a "date" of sorts with a co-worker, and it is almost as good to do over video chat. You need these kind of random unstructured interactions with coworkers both for your social needs and to be effective in a large organization. It may seem weird to take a coffee to your desk and have no official business talking to a coworker, but it really helps.

Do you with others? In particular, with children? Then it's crucial that you have an office or similar with a door you can shut. Then you have to nicely train everyone you live with to not do things like shouting to you through the shut door on the assumption that you're free because they can't hear you listening to a conference call.

Find a co-working space near you. I'm currently working two days a week at a local shared office and rent my own desk.

There's about eight desks in our room, and during the day, aout 4-5 are in use. It helps me a great deal to go out in the morning, go to my office, and have the luxury of a good desk with a big monitor, an atmosphere that encourages working and sometimes a little chat at the coffee machine.

One item that is often overlooked that I wished more remote team mates would do: Get a business line for your internet connection or better yet, get a second line and use it only for work so you can segment your network activities between home and work.

You want a static IP address for at least one on-all-the-time box to route all traffic through and get a domain pointed at it. You don't want to have to deal with an ISP that thinks they can determine which ports you want open.

I`m working from home for quite a long time already. If you`re interested I`m a writer and that`s an example of what I`m writing: https://ivypanda.com/essays/compare-and-contrast-paper-the-v.... All that was mentioned by people here is important, but the most important when you`re working from home, it`s to schedule work perfectly. If you`re wouldn`t have scheduled work would be never-ending.

I wrote about the challenges of remote work here:

https://www.culturefoundry.com/cultivate/digital-agency-life...

Try to avoid/mitigate them :)

Do not check HN

Listen to all the advice from everyone who works at home, and then throw it out. Everyone is different, and everyone finds their own most productive setup and techniques. So try different things. Take people suggestions and see how they work, but feel free to reject them if they don't feel right for you.

My personal advice is to make sure you do not work too much the first couple months. It is easy to let work become a pervasive part of your life when your office is always right there. So find ways to make a clear break between when you are working and when you are not.

At the same time, do not just replicate the office experience in your home. People who set aside a desk, get dressed, and work standard hours from home are completely missing the freedom of the experience. I tend to work in blocks of time over 12 hours each day... I get up early (4 AM), work for a couple hours, then have breakfast with my family... then work more, then go on a walk with my wife, then work more, etc. If I need a break, I will stop and play a game for 15 minutes or so. I take lunches, I run errands, I do things. After 4 PM, I shut work down for the evening and just spend it with family or on hobbies. Find the balance that maximizes your productivity for work, but that also lets you enjoy flexibility and freedom.

My partner is also remote and I work from home. This probably the best possible working situation I've ever had. Just do work when you're feeling productive, go for walks, get out of the house in the morning. Don't over work, because once you've set that bar you can't lower it. Realistically you will get done in 2 hours what takes an office worker a whole day.

A lot depends on the expectations of your workplace.

Roll out of bed whenever and work in my PJs? Not when my meetings are all over video.

Change up my work hours to take random long breaks and work odd hours? Not when a fair portion of my work is collaborative.

You need to take the time to find out what works for you.

For me, the most important thing I do is "act" like I am at work. I.e., shower, shave, put on work clothes, sit at a desk, and only take the type of breaks I would in an office environment (e.g., make coffee)

Get a gym membership, and make a plan to use it. The time you used to spend commuting is now at least partially for the gym.

Going to the gym gets you out of the house, adds the physical activity you might lack, and will help with the weird bouts of depression that _can_ come with remote work.

Since you're on a small team, I'd add that finding a hobby or show everyone likes and can be a safe topic of conversation to bond over, even when things are stressful, will help keep lines of communication open. Making a watercooler Slack channel with that topic helps a lot.

Go to bed early, wake up early. Go to gym before "work" early morning.

This way your mind and body will be full of energy, sharp and fresh

Do whatever in which you have an interest any access.

So it really depends, I see a lot of responses below and it really depends on your ability to work and focus (everyone is different), but for me, personally, I have a KVM and I have different setups for different levels of concentration. Nobody is ever 100% productive, don't try to be. When I start work, I log in and put my work system on my main monitor and focus on my morning work routine. I triage things as needed (I support many different systems), then I take a break to grab a coffee and take care of my morning routine. I return and work on anything important first and depending on how things go may do another work task or 2 before lunch. After lunch, I triage anything new that's on my list, then shift work to be a secondary focus for a while (personal system as main monitor, work system off to the side). I do this for about an hour, after eating it takes time to regain full productivity. Then I shift back to my work system, on my main monitor, do some more work until people start leaving the office, once things are quiet, it becomes secondary until I log out for the day. This mimics real office life to some degree, it adds in time to de-stress and take it easy, but it allows you to maximize your productivity in bursts without getting burnt out. As for teamwork, I personally prefer group chats when there's an issue we're tackling, but I'm always a fan of a quick 1 to 1 phone call to discuss things, when needed. People always know if they send me an IM, I'll be there and willing to help. Biggest mistake I see people making - Feeling guilted into working until burnout. Put in your 40 hours, don't expect 100% productivity, but do your best and take the work seriously.