Speaking as someone who goes from bed to couch to bed during this pandemic due to a lack of desk space in my crampt apartment, I would murder someone if it meant I could claim their chair and desk and have actual lumbar support again.
There are sit-up pillows[1] that can provide this support, if you're interested. Personally speaking, I think lumbar support from my sit-up pillow is better than that of my office chair at work. YMMV. You may want to look for one that's of a good size and firm. Not all are.
Lumbar support is a false friend. I used to rely on this until I learned proper posture and did exercises to strenghten and relearn to use skeletal musculature correctly. I need not rest my back on anything now and my general health couldn’t be better.
Unless you had a recent surgery and the body is weakened or you have a serious condition (torn discs, etc) I’d advise to try to ditch all these crutches which end up weakening us up in the long term. However, I admit they could be very useful and help with back pain. I used to not be able to concentrate because of backpain and lumbar support did help at the time.
I recently was shopping for a new chair for home, and realized that... I don't actually need anything special because I habitually sit on the front half of the chair and don't rest my back against the back. So I just got one of the low-tier Steelcase chairs we have at the office and it's great! It'll last, and it's just... fine.
I tried sitting on a yoga ball for a while, but realized that it's not doing anything more for my back (because of how I already sit), but it's difficult to turn between my three laptops because the ball sticks to the floor and my clothes. So I went back to the chair. <shrug>
Yes, the yoga ball helps somewhat but it is a training tool not a permanent solution as it is quite awkward to sit on. I've been there long time ago, it was recommended by a chiropractor. I used to have bad issues and was seeing a chiropractor 20 years ago but am doing really well now. As a matter of fact I'm in much better shape in my 40s than I was in my 20s and I don't work out like crazy. It was all about fixing sitting/standing and walking postures then the benefits became apparent.
You seem like you're on the right path or even are in good shape yourself. Leaning on the back of the chair or supporting on the armrests teaches us to sit wrong and while maybe comfortable at the time it will soon start to mess up with the sitting posture. And sitting on the front side of the chair is a good way to sit. Also I find that bringing the keyboard as close as possible to the lap and the body (desk or keyboard extender) promotes good posture. (elbows close to the torso and body straight, head above torso not sticking out front, adjusting the screen at eye level helps with that).
That's honestly pretty much how I sit, so it's good to hear. I've got a very particular setup that's comfortable to be at and work at for a while, and then I can raise the desk (standing position) because that makes me feel good too.
I do a fair bit of cycling and every-other-day core workouts that are kinda needed because cycling makes my hamstrings and lower back tight. It all happens to come together and I feel the same as you, much better shape in my 40s than my 20s.
I might dare to say I feel pretty darn good physically, most of the time. And can even push myself to pretty hard points (where things hurt, but not in an injury type of way) when I want. I hope I can keep this up, but sort of feel like a bunch of good practices that already are in place can lead to that.
Have you considered the floor? When I was young (late teens to early 30s) I found that laying on the carpeted floor on my stomach, with a pillow under my chest, and my head tilted back (think of Superman flying and you'll get the picture) with my computer in front of me worked great.
This probably wouldn't work out well nowadays with a desktop computer because desktop monitor sizes are usually way bigger than they were back then so you would have tilt your head too far, but it might still be fine with a laptop.
I did it on the rare snow day in Seattle a few times. I’m not one to be particular about my workspace, but what few things I am particular about went out the window in bed. It’s fun for an occasional break, but not for productive output. But TFA is rife with counterexamples, so what do I know versus Marcel Proust?
Every time I end up working from bed I'm angry within 30 minutes about typing experience - and that's assuming I remembered to grab trackball to not be angry at touchpad experience!
Personally I find that me staying in bed all day tends to be a sign that I am either very cold, very depressed, or both. Even if I manage to get shit done.
My back hurts just looking at the 4 images at the top of the article. Also the positions in the upper-left, upper-right, and image further down the page cause lots of elbow strain. I had several months of numbness in my hands from spending too much time resting on my elbows like these photos.
I'm 21 and enjoy working from bed. I did it for a week or two when I was at my parent's house for break once and it totally destroyed my back. These days I only do it when it's especially cold out.
I couldn’t bring myself to work from bed. More due to the mental separation of being “at work” vs at home. I find it’s beneficial for me to have an exclusive area otherwise I’ll mentally feel like I’m always working.
Ergonomically speaking, it can be, but that requires some tooling and experimentation. I have put together a setup that works pretty well, but I rarely use it because extricating myself from it takes too much work.
The pictures in the article do not demonstrate a viable way to work from bed for long periods (though shifting positions frequently enough can offset the postural problems quite a bit).
I have a dedicated room for an office in my house with everything I need for productivity. Yet sometimes I feel more productive with a laptop on the couch or bed. I wonder why.
2) My brain would not be engaged in a state of too much comfort. (i.e. I'd get sleepy). In fact, I even keep my work room in the house kinda cold (by not putting in a heater) so I can be more alert.
3) I'm a developer so I need a full keyboard and multiple screens.
4) Most importantly, I need a clear separation or line of delineation between work and rest. I don't want to mix the two together. The thought is as perverse to me as eating while taking a shit.
I'm the same. I've been WFH for a while and I need to get up, take a shower, get dressed, and go to my desk or I never really get going. Sometimes I'll do some work on a laptop on the couch, but it's the type of work where I'm more casually looking up information. Or I'll print out something I need to read and go to the couch. Otherwise, I'm so much more productive and engaged when I'm at my desk with keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
My wife is the polar opposite. We're lucky to be in a situation where we can both have dedicated home offices at this time. We already had a desk for her, but her work let her take home a good chair, and two monitors with a stand. We set up a really nice office for her, but I'd say that she works from bed or the couch 95% of the time. In fact, the only time she uses her office is when she has an important video call.
I don't know how she does it, and I still believe that she would be more productive/efficient at a desk. For me, just having the extra screen real estate and a keyboard and mouse are enough for me to want to be at my desk.
I've been WFH full time since 2011. I could not even finish this article.
Anyone who thinks that working from bed is good in any way, shape, or form, is deluding themselves. It's an ergonomic nightmare that is unsustainable. It's lack of separation between Life and Work. It's everything WFH should NOT be.
In a year, there will be another article that says "Working from Bed: Maybe not so much"
I think it must depend on what kind of work people do. I really have no idea what non-engineering jobs are like, but I feel like they probably require less screen real-estate and text entry, and so don't demand the same ergonomics that writing software (or doing CAD modeling, etc.) requires.
I can tell you that I personally hate being away from my desktop. I like the feeling of the office chair, I like my ergonomic keyboard, I like having a ton of monitors to organize my triple-wide Emacs window, some terminals, some browsers for documentation, Slack, Discord, a music player, etc. But... other people probably don't do as much I/O with their computer, and can probably lay in bed and get stuff done.
When I worked at Google I always saw people sitting on bouncy balls typing away on their laptops, and I guess they got stuff done doing that, so I just chalk it up as "I don't personally understand it". I like my desk, but I see no reason to require people to sit at desks all day if they'd prefer to be in bed. If it doesn't work for them, they'll probably stop doing it.
When my team was sent home because of COVID we were told to set up home offices and offered equipment if we needed it and told we had to have an office space, even if just a desk by our bed because the consultants had shown how bad it was for your physical and mental health to work from a bed.
I can't imagine anyone thinking being hunched over all day with your neck leaning forward could somehow magically be good for their back and neck alignment, or that lying down all day would be a positive of your cardio health. You'd think they'd be convinced when they went to look for any research backing their bizarre claims and couldn't find any.
I'm literally the person you are saying is deluding myself so I will continue to laugh at assertions like this one. Not be taken seriously at all, and should be discarded into the trash can
>Anyone who thinks that working from bed is good in any way, shape, or form, is deluding themselves
I work from my bed, I work at my desk, I work pretty much everywhere in my home and it's not at all a problem. I'm really annoyed by these overgeneralisations about what's right or wrong for individuals, and all these buzzwords about "separation of life and work", "work-life balance", I love my work and I sleep like a mule even if I work ten minutes before I go to sleep.
I don't at all get these neurotic optimisations that people make, and having random strangers tell them how to live in their own home. If you like to work from your bed work from your bed, if it doesn't work for you stop, but to tell people they're delusional is nuts.
It's not just about this particular topic, there seems to be an entire emerging industry of life-coaches, sleep and whatever else coaches who try to convince people of strange norms that they have to uphold in their workplace or home. It's like the Western version of Feng Shui or something, oh no you slept badly a week, bring in the sleep coach to rearrange your furniture and exorcise the bad software from your bedroom
I'd suggest people who need to compartmentalise their work from their life this much to ask if it isn't that they're unsatisfied with their job that makes them sleepless rather than doing work on a bed.
I concur! You’re not alone. I work from bed, I work from the kitchen counter, I work from the couch, I work from the desk, I work from the other bed... I haven’t really had any problems sleeping or feeling depressed or not working from those places myself.
I agree on the benefits of varied workspaces. I work in the backyard, while walking the dog, sitting in the living room or sitting at my desk. I have a low cost bike desk that lets me exercise while working also.
Since the pandemic, I started spending some afternoons working from my car at the beach. Find a beach where you can park overlooking the ocean while working on the laptop. For breaks, you can take walks on the beach. Large bodies of water are very soothing.
Working from varied, amazing places is a great idea! My objection is to working specifically from bed. It is poor for a persons health, both physical and mental.
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.
"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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Typically in Hong Kong, Bedrooms for those kind of apartments are roughly 40-50 square feet. You can put a bed and a night stand and that's it.
Also a lot of 700 sq ft apartment with 3-4 bedrooms have 2 bathrooms which further reduces the total available space. It's quite common for a family of 5-6 (2 kids, parents plus grand parents) + 1 live-in helper to live in such an apartment. The live-in helper usually gets a windowless closet for her room (so around 21 sq ft) that's next to the kitchen (I have a hard time with the kind of living conditions offered to helpers but I guess it's really a shitty situation in terms of space for everyone). This is the living situation of a middle class family able to afford a 4,500 usd/month apartment and a 700 usd/month live-in helper (there's no daycare available in hk which is why a lot end up getting a live-in helper after having kids).
With covid, schools have been closed and people had to work from home making things much harder.
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.
If the idea of "subsistence agriculturalist" is a US farmer, yes. Others are lucky to have a hut or some such structure.
In the developing world (and heck, in Southern Europe and the Balkans too, as recently as the 60s-70s) farmers used to live, whole family (extended one at that) in ~ 500 sq ft houses... One typical case was that brothers e.g. would often sleep in the same bed for 1 person, one with feet in one direction, the other in the opposite.
> If the idea of "subsistence agriculturalist" is a US farmer, yes. Others are lucky to have a hut or some such structure.
Not lucky, in fact it is the norm for them to have a dwelling. Adobe/mud or some other local construction technique.
> In the developing world (and heck, in Southern Europe and the Balkans too, as recently as the 60s-70s) farmers used to live, whole family (extended one at that) in ~ 500 sq ft houses... One typical case was that brothers e.g. would often sleep in the same bed for 1 person, one with feet in one direction, the other in the opposite.
Thats one example, in parts of Asia they have more room.
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.
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)
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This article kind of feels like people are working really hard to rationalize working from bed?
Personally I just find it extremely uncomfortable, and I just can't be productive that way. Plus you have to wonder what the long term effects are, it doesn't seem very ergonomic.
I've tried it once and it just didn't feel right. It didn't feel like I'm working, it felt more like staying in bed while sick. Also, my back started hurting after a few hours. I can't imagine someone doing it for more than a few days.
I never understood people who have no issue with typing on a laptop while sitting or laying in bed. Or outside on the grass. It just doesn't work for me.
I need a keyboard on a table and sit in a chair in front of it, or stand in front of it if it is height-adjustable.
I need space to put things nearby, like a glass of water, without having to care if it will fall and spill.
But I'm ok with having a tablet in bed to browse HN or Reddit or listen to something on YouTube until I fall asleep.
Idk how you can destroy your back working from your bed, unless you do some idiotic posture. Just lay down, face up, back to the bed, computer on top of your stomach.
Know a person with an actual destroyed back who can't even drive a car, but is able to work from bed.
I wish I could. I went to a physical therapist to learn it, and unfortunately I have no idea who else teaches these kinds of exercises.
Given the nature that they're physical, explaining them over text could lead to problems and I don't want to recommend something that could injure someone due to a misunderstanding.
As an overall concept, muscle building works by finding the sore muscles, holding them in spot where they are sore, but holding in spot in a soft way, not a tense way, and then counting slowly to 10. Then give 5 to 10 seconds of relax, then do again, 10 times at first. It only takes a few weeks doing exercises every other day for the muscle strength to build.
Headaches by definition are caused by tense / sore muscles, so learning the right exercises will remove headaches. However, sinus headaches, migraines, and cluster headaches are different. Also, if you have mattress or pillow problems, muscle building exercises are like walking up a high altitude mountain; it's not going to help as much as you're like. It may help to start with your mattress, if applicable, and then learn muscle building exercises.
Posture problems, like having your head too far forward, is caused by using the incorrect muscles which then strengthens the incorrect ones and weakens the correct ones. (Usually neck and upper back muscles.) By muscle building the weak ones, your posture will naturally fix itself.
When working on shoulder and upper back muscles I do muscle building exercises with my arms with 5 lb weights.
When it comes to headaches, I do a series of neck muscle building exercises.
Oh also, chiropractors are pseudo-science. If you feel like you need a chiropractor, what for 99% of the people out there actually need is muscle building exercises. The muscles hold up the spine, so even with a messed up spine muscle building exercises help more than just about anything else, often completely removing pain.
I've wanted to work full-time from home for as long as I can remember. It took about a month in lockdown for me to realize I hated it.
Turns out, my mental health is much better when I have an office to go to. 1h20 in commute (round-trip), no privacy, tons of distractions, and still I'm happier when I get to leave the house to go to work.
I suspect it's mostly just a matter of getting out of the house. Those 4 walls get pretty oppressive after a while.
I, too, found myself working from bed. It was not an improvement, and ended up being the last step towards a crippling depression that wouldn't let me get out of bed in the first place.
So, for me at least, working from bed is awful. Ergonomically, emotionally, spiritually just f---ing draining.
> Turns out, my mental health is much better when I have an office to go to. 1h20 in commute (round-trip), no privacy, tons of distractions, and still I'm happier when I get to leave the house to go to work.
This is very important to me. It helps me forget about work when heading home and vice versa. I also like talking to people in person at the office more than relying on Zoom watercooler rooms.
That commute turns out to be one of my favourite parts of the day.
In the mornings, I leave early to workout at the company gym. (Not true at the moment, because all gyms are closed in my area right now.) That commute gives me time to wake up and get into the gym mindset.
After work, it gives me time to unwind, let go of the stress for the day, and get into my dad-of-4 mindset.
Without it, everything blends together. My work days would never really start and never really end.
What's your commute like? The common thread I'm finding in the people that don't mind their commute is generally that... their commute isn't terrible.
Mine's 45m-1h to work, and 1h-2h home in a city with notoriously awful traffic design and flow. It's basically just 5 miles of gridlock. In the heavy urban traffic I find it actually _adds_ a lot of stress to my day--it definitely feels like a mad max style survival adventure more than anything.
I used to commute 45 minutes each way on a nice dual line divided highway with very light traffic. Barring the odd blizzard, I found it like you describe... A great chance to let my mind switch states between home/work. And it was nice to have an hour and a half every day where I _couldn't_ beat up on myself for not being productive and could actually just truly sit and enjoy listening to a podcast or something.
Mine was 22-24 minutes each way on the subway — just enough time to read a few HN posts on the phone, listen to a quick podcast episode, or blast through an offline Spotify playlist.
I think the best part of my commute was that it provided a 'clean break' between working at the office and my home life.
I didn't consider that I was endorsing commuting. Point well taken.
If I had a nice weather-protected path to walk to work (like the underground networks in some major cities), walking would be far preferable to driving.
My argument, nay, my observation, is that some type of transition between work and home appears to be vital to my well-being. I suspect that the time component for that transition is just as important.
For example: What if I built an office in my garage? That would give me a physically different space, but I'd be deprived of that transition time to switch mindsets.
What I don't know is how much time is needed for the same effect. Would a 5 minute walk suffice? Could it be even better? Who knows?
Many people have had the same experience over the past year. There's three things that are usually suggested which might help you, that you've touched upon.
First, you should have a dedicated work space. A room is preferable, but you can make do by erecting sight barriers to your desk for example. The main idea is to make it easy to leave your work 'at work' and not be reminded of it in your free time.
Second, clothing. If you feel your day lacks structure make sure you're not lounging about in a tracksuit all day. Put on clothes you would wear to the office before work, and take them off at the end of your day. Wear shoes.
Third, take a walk before starting work and afterwards. A 20 minute walk will allow you to plan the day ahead and get in work mode, and will let you unpack the day and unwind after work. Ignore the rain.
So basically, make going to work a ritual (as foolish or unlikely to work as it may sound). You should also minimise distractions and control impulses to do non-work related things while 'at work'. If you can, consider getting out of the house for lunch or eat at your desk and not at the dinner table. Lastly, take part or try to instigate remote water cooler chats with colleagues to keep sane.
Good tips. I'm lucky enough to have a great room available for an office.
I curtained the doorway off, to remind the rest of the family (and myself) that when it is closed, I'm at work. Put a standing desk in, to help maintain my health.
I still shower and show up 'at work' around the same times I did before. At first I was there around the same time I'd leave for work, but I found I was not able to concentrate productively for 12-13 hours a day, so I've cut it closer to an 8-6 schedule, with some breaks to eat with family or drop kids off where they may need to go.
Take advantage of the greater flexibility- take the good with the bad. Was listening to Phish on the surround sound speakers connected to my receiver via bluetooth to my Mac Mini the other day, while working on my desktop I'd brought home attached to a nice big bright 4k monitor that I have at home, and connected via SD-WAN to the corporate network. Was a pretty productive and glorious way to get a lot of work done.
Yeah working from home full time for me is like cheating on a diet. It sounds great at first, and for a few weeks you eat whatever you want and you don't notice much change.
Then all your clothes stop fitting.
Working from bed is like eating ice cream for breakfast. Sounds great, nice maybe once as a treat, then becomes horrible.
I need structure, routine, and not having to go into work makes enforcing that routine so much harder.
I think you have to make a routine, rather than hoping one is provided for you. I am not a routine person, but for me showering, opening up Slack, and switching Chrome profiles is how I transition from "home" to "work". I don't do "home" things during work hours, and I don't do "work" things during "home" hours. Even though I'm at the same desk. For me, it works as well as commuting did, without 30 minutes of being frustrated at the subway.
(I admit that I do do some "home" things at work, like laundry. That mostly involves turning on the machine and tending to it in an hour, so not a big time commitment but nice to get done during the day.)
I think this is definitely exacerbated by the general lockdown situation on top of just working from home.
Previously I worked from home a couple of days per week. I augmented those days by walking to a nearby coffee place in the morning to get out of the house and get some movement in.
I'd also try to meet someone for lunch when schedules worked out.
This year many of us combined working from home with a restriction on all of those "safety valves" and in-person socialization in general.
Personally I think I was happiest with the part-time flexible work from home setup, but I think I could make full time work if I moved to an area with more walking-distance amenities.
> Previously I worked from home a couple of days per week.
That's very different from working from home every day. If it was an option, I'd love to work from home twice a week and from the office the other 3. That would be a nice balance.
> This year many of us combined working from home with a restriction on all of those "safety valves" and in-person socialization in general.
Definitely an interesting question. Would I have enjoyed working from home if I could still go out and socialize every day? Impossible to say but I'd love to find out some day.
> I think this is definitely exacerbated by the general lockdown situation on top of just working from home.
Yeah, people need to realize, this is not normal. Even I, as a highly distractable/sensitive introvert have had trouble coping. And I won't lie, the bicycle commute to work was great for waking me up and energizing me.
That said, I would prefer 100% WFH for the remainder of my career, no contest. There's just no getting around the level of control I have over everything from noise, to light, temperature, etc. It helps that I live alone and have a dedicated separate home office. And I can always go for a run, walk, or bicycle ride in place of the commute.
I have noticed that most people that say this tend to just have shitty homes. Not every home is suitable for working from, you really need all sorts of amenities and plenty of space to walk around and refocus, and a good outdoor area. If you literally just have 600 sqft of bedroom, living room and kitchen then yea I can see why going to the office would be better.
I mean, that's a bit disparaging. I've seen some beautiful 600 sqft apartments.
But to your general point, I agree. I just don't think a space needs to be shitty in order to be inappropriate for daily work. If its small or the area lacks food outdoor amenities, it's easy to get cabin fever.
I think in context that could be read as "shitty for the purpose of also being an office", not a general disparagement of their living situation in general.
Another thing I've noticed is that the people who are anti-wfh seem to do better with externally-imposed structure rather than internally-imposed. I can't relate at all to people who say their sleep schedule is ruined, their work and personal life blends together, etc. I wfh lately and my work day is a hard 9 to 5 unless something out of the ordinary's going on, I get 8 hours, work out most days, stick to my diet, etc. The less external constraints I have, the more I can create a routine that's perfectly suited to myself.
I disagree on this point. Most of my colleagues at work tend to agree that the shift to WFH has been very negative, regardless of type/size of home.
Presence or non-presence of kids in said home definitely is a factor, but I have heard unhappiness expressed by both parents and non-parents.
The biggest factor is that the lack of an office simply reduces the effectiveness of social communication. People still talk, but the talking is simply not as effective nor, importantly as fulfilling as the in-person chatter is in the office environment.
And I've found the opposite. I'm genuinely not being antagonistic - I just think it's important to get a diversity of voices out there on this topic lest people feel that there's only one "truth".
100%. If I have a central point it's that no one way of working is right for everyone.
Case in point: My partner works from home, has for years, and has no interest in working from an office. It's worth noting, however, that she also prefers it when I leave every day. (Read into that what you will.)
Well, you aren't just WFH full time, but WFH full time in a pandemic. WFH is much different when you can set up lunches with friends, work from cafes/restaurants/parks from time to time, and actually have face-to-face connections with people easily.
Everybody's different. I've been wfh since the pandemic started, and it's been one of the best times of my life. Even in school I didn't have the bliss of never having to leave my home. My health, exercise routine, diet, sleep routine, work productivity, social life, personal productivity, quality of life in pretty much every aspect have basically all been perfect. Even outside, people keep a little more distance. Aside from the coronavirus danger itself, the past 10-ish months have been a dream for me.
Unfortunately there is no compromise that can please everyone if things return to how they were before, just finding an employer that caters to one's personal preference.
>Unfortunately there is no compromise that can please everyone
We have started working Thursdays and Fridays in the office and the rest at home. Its nice to get out and do something different and still have all the time savings and time to think at home most of the week. It does still require you to live close to the office though.
Yup - I've mostly worked from home since my son was born (he's nearly 30 now) - there's some tricks to making it work - get out of your bathrobe by noon, leave the house every day (harder during lock down of course).
Here in NZ we went thru a heavy lockdown for 6 weeks, I hardly noticed it
I moved to a Midwestern city and wake up at around 11am, just in time for my 9am (SF time) meeting lol. I chat w colleagues constantly on zoom and get off after 5 hrs.
Of course I got my SO to keep company so it’s never boring. I suspect all the mental health issues we’ve been seeing in the pandemic have been from single or more extraverted folks
But for introverts who are already in stable relationship, I love the “isolation”!
Careful assuming introverts don't need socializing. There's a huge difference between just wanting left alone and being stuck home for months on end. I'm not exactly a social butterfly, but deeply miss casual hall conversations or getting coffee.
It definitely takes getting used to. I've been exclusively WFH for 8 years now and it's hard to imagine going back at this point, but it took a while to develop that groove.
My first job out of college, my boss actually told me "Don't miss meetings, don't miss deadlines and I don't care when you're here." About 3 weeks in I was dying to go to the office and just stayed there all the time.
In order to make WFH work for me now a few things had to fall into place:
1. My wife got so busy with her business that she has no free time to deal with anything at the house during the day, so any random person that needs to come by (contractors, cable repair, etc) I'm already here for. Additionally, most days I can use my lunch break for any errands that need to be run without it interfering with my after work hours.
2. I have 2 dogs that keep me company.
3. I've found other friends of mine who work from home or are up for grabbing lunch in the area. I tend to meet somebody out for lunch at least once a week.
4. I keep a TV on in the background, out of sight (usually the weather channel). I don't know why, but it makes the house feel less empty all day.
5. Facebook and some relevant community message boards (Clemson sports, local programmers Slack). Just need some type of social outlet.
>I keep a TV on in the background, out of sight (usually the weather channel). I don't know why, but it makes the house feel less empty all day.
I think the world is split into people who really need a background soundtrack of some sort and those who hate it.
Back when I sometimes had a roommate on group (non-work) trips, one of the things that drove me craziest was someone who just had to turn on the TV as soon as they walked into a room.
The funny thing is that I'm pretty much fine with ambient people sound. I just don't like background TV and, for the most part, I don't even turn on music when I'm working.
The key for me is noise that I'm not trying to listen to. The weather channel can be on and I have no need to try to focus on it.
If I put music on, it needs to be pretty consistent tempo with no words so that it's "there" but I'm not listening to it. The original Ironman soundtrack was my goto for this for years.
Yeah, for something like sleeping on a plane, I'll usually put something like new age-y instrumentals on. I just can't really ignore something even as uninteresting as The Weather Channel. It's like fingernails on a blackboard to me.
I dream that one day I’ll be able to turn my ears on and off at will. Earplugs work alright, but complete silence would be fantastic (personal safety be damned)
All noise cancellation is much better at canceling low frequency noise (like the engine on a plane) than voices, for example, which it mostly just muffles. For example, I have music playing in my house right now. If I put in my AirPod Pros and turn them on, the music gets quieter but I can still clearly hear it.
I find that on my over ear headphones, the physical barrier of the headphones blocks out a lot of higher sounds to some amount and the anc kills the low sounds. I can still hear stuff while I'm not playing sound but when I turn on music I can't hear anything around me.
Yes. Closed back over ears are definitely the most effective way to block external noise. And I've heard of people wearing over the ear protection over noise canceling that works even better. For me, basically the only time I really care (or want to be that isolated) is on planes though and I travel really light so over the ear headphones is a non-starter.
Apple is working on fixing that. There is a setting on ios 14 that can alert you when it hears things like a fire alarm, dogs barking, people yelling, etc.
I've been working from home on and off for going on 15 years now and he lockdown has been terrible for WFH. No popping out to a cafe for a couple hours. Or my local coworking space etc. The monotony of it is draining.
That mirrors my experience. Before shelter in place I'd go to a café about 2-3 hours every other day in the morning. Technically, I'd rotate between a café and a breakfast place close by that was always abandoned and they had an espresso machine. It was my own secret café.
> I suspect it's mostly just a matter of getting out of the house. Those 4 walls get pretty oppressive after a while.
They can be.
I'm fortunate to have enough space in my house that I can silo the different areas of the house. I have a few places I'm happy to work in, but I also have a basement that I never do work in.
Hey pal, if your mental health is struggling, my email is in my profile. Feel free to reach out - I'm no picture of perfect mental health so can't judge and besides, I don't know you from a hole in the ground! You can tell me just about anything and who cares??? :)
If you're doing better great, if not, strangers can be a tremendous help.
This is deliciously tone deaf on the part of NYT. People are dying all over the place, the meager wealth and incomes of working class people are being destroyed, even unemployment benefits are completely dysfunctional in many states. Maybe it's not the best time to talk about how great it is to be able to maintain your income without even having to leave bed.
Article goes on to say that anecdotal evidence from people that work in bed since COVID-19 pandemic are doing fine.
What I can say myself about this is that since I've started working full-time from home in 2018, there were many "great" things I started doing during work. It was a bit like finally having the chance to be "free" and working how I wanted - and not my employer.
Three years later I'm now convinced that there's reasons why people go to offices and why there's certain rules in those.
Anyways, technically speaking "I'm not working from home anymore". I rented out an office space. It's as comfy as home (still, there's no bed). But having a dedicated space to work and face challenges is great, because afterwise I can drive home - and when I'm exhausted, fall into my bed.
Working from bed is great? What? Who at the NYT thought this was worth publishing?
This is a great way to increase mental health issues, decrease physical health and hygiene and generally make everything worse.
Maybe in the future when morbidly obese humans float around in hover beds and purchase things only from Buy-N-Large this will be "great" - but this reeks of a strange "pro COVID lockdown" narrative I've been seeing lately.
> but this reeks of a strange "pro COVID lockdown" narrative I've been seeing lately.
Along with phrases like "the new normal" and such. There does seem to be a push to keep people from wanting and expecting to go back to the real normal anytime soon.
Though who stands to gain from this alternate reality? It would seem the liberal left wants to normalize it (even post-vaccine), but I don't understand why.
Agreed - it's certainly a left-leaning narrative. I don't understand the "why" of any of it anymore.
The far-left folks are pro lockdown but also want to help the underprivileged. No one is hurt worse by lockdowns. They want to defund the police, and yet by now even the hardened ideologue can admit that less police is maybe not a great plan. The left is anti-authoritarian but engages in almost textbook authoritarian behavior. (Cancel culture, democratic governors having emergency powers for 9+ months now etc etc) They hate capitalism but enjoy the byproducts (my most socialist friends can't get enough of Amazon prime - the irony is completely lost on them).
There is just no way to reconcile the platform. It is completely incoherent.
I’ve thought some more about this, and I think their platform is coherent if you assume their goal is power.
Economic trouble and poverty help the left by making them the savior upon whom everyone is dependent. After all, it was the Great Depression that gave FDR’s New Deal a free pass in the first place — and that really was the beginning of the modern Democratic Party’s economic platform.
They want people to be poor. That’s how they get the majority of their votes.
"pro-lockdown" and "why the fuck are we giving people so little money" tend to go together, in my experience. Lock down for a month or two, give everyone more than enough money to cover rent/food/utilities and some entertainment (to keep from going insane), and greatly reduce the spread of this virus. But here we are in the US with a paltry $600 coming after the entire duration of this stupid, stupid pandemic.
As to "defunding police", I like to rephrase it as "fund people, not police" - use those budgets to give people help before they get to the point where the police get involved, rather than having next to no safety net and a bunch of cops itching to use all the military hardware they've got.
Stop that. This thread is for inferring people's intentions and then coming up with appropriately cartoonish motivations.
I personally think the author of this article is trying to give people clinical depression. But I'm having trouble figuring out how that fits into their leftist agenda. Maybe it's because leftists are themselves lazy and unmotivated, and they want to feel better about themselves by sabotaging others? But wouldn't they see that it's unfair to hurt other people just because of their own inadequacies?
I don't know, what do you think? I can't figure it out.
One of the only reasons I don't work from my bed is that it would destroy my back. If I had purchased one of those beds where you can electrically raise the back I would have worked so many more hours - and been more comfortable.
There's an ever-growing cult of people who are so obsessed with the idea that everyone needs to be shopping for a therapist and popping mind-altering drugs, and anyone that suggests that there are basic bad habits you could put some work in to fix like exercising or not laying in bed all day is anti-"science"
The last paragraph basically claims "it's not working from bed that's bad, it's the stigma against working from bed that's bad!"
The writer is Taylor Lorenz - most of her stuff is pretty awful.
Earlier this year she attacked the Away CEO Steph Korey, she then spun Balaji's tweet that used Taylor's own words with a misleading crop to play victim:
She defends Tiktok and the CCP out of ignorance because she prefers writing everything as anti-facebook, anti-US tech (this was a similar twitter thing a couple months ago, but there's no quora summary).
Recently she was tweeting NIMBY style things about new housing ruining the character of the neighborhood and blaming tech for wanting more housing.
Everything she writes starts with a massive anti-tech motivated reasoning bias and then crafts a story around it. I think she also defended recode here, but I'm not 100% sure (I've since blocked her on Twitter): https://medium.com/@balajis/citations-for-the-recode-handsha...
I wouldn't put much thought into her articles, she's the main person that comes to mind when I think of the decline of the NYT.
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Unless you had a recent surgery and the body is weakened or you have a serious condition (torn discs, etc) I’d advise to try to ditch all these crutches which end up weakening us up in the long term. However, I admit they could be very useful and help with back pain. I used to not be able to concentrate because of backpain and lumbar support did help at the time.
I tried sitting on a yoga ball for a while, but realized that it's not doing anything more for my back (because of how I already sit), but it's difficult to turn between my three laptops because the ball sticks to the floor and my clothes. So I went back to the chair. <shrug>
I do a fair bit of cycling and every-other-day core workouts that are kinda needed because cycling makes my hamstrings and lower back tight. It all happens to come together and I feel the same as you, much better shape in my 40s than my 20s.
I might dare to say I feel pretty darn good physically, most of the time. And can even push myself to pretty hard points (where things hurt, but not in an injury type of way) when I want. I hope I can keep this up, but sort of feel like a bunch of good practices that already are in place can lead to that.
This probably wouldn't work out well nowadays with a desktop computer because desktop monitor sizes are usually way bigger than they were back then so you would have tilt your head too far, but it might still be fine with a laptop.
Seriously, f*ck bed work :|
This will destroy your back after even a short amount of time.
The pictures in the article do not demonstrate a viable way to work from bed for long periods (though shifting positions frequently enough can offset the postural problems quite a bit).
1) My back would hurt after a half hour of this.
2) My brain would not be engaged in a state of too much comfort. (i.e. I'd get sleepy). In fact, I even keep my work room in the house kinda cold (by not putting in a heater) so I can be more alert.
3) I'm a developer so I need a full keyboard and multiple screens.
4) Most importantly, I need a clear separation or line of delineation between work and rest. I don't want to mix the two together. The thought is as perverse to me as eating while taking a shit.
My wife is the polar opposite. We're lucky to be in a situation where we can both have dedicated home offices at this time. We already had a desk for her, but her work let her take home a good chair, and two monitors with a stand. We set up a really nice office for her, but I'd say that she works from bed or the couch 95% of the time. In fact, the only time she uses her office is when she has an important video call.
I don't know how she does it, and I still believe that she would be more productive/efficient at a desk. For me, just having the extra screen real estate and a keyboard and mouse are enough for me to want to be at my desk.
Anyone who thinks that working from bed is good in any way, shape, or form, is deluding themselves. It's an ergonomic nightmare that is unsustainable. It's lack of separation between Life and Work. It's everything WFH should NOT be.
In a year, there will be another article that says "Working from Bed: Maybe not so much"
I do love being told I'm deluded.
I can tell you that I personally hate being away from my desktop. I like the feeling of the office chair, I like my ergonomic keyboard, I like having a ton of monitors to organize my triple-wide Emacs window, some terminals, some browsers for documentation, Slack, Discord, a music player, etc. But... other people probably don't do as much I/O with their computer, and can probably lay in bed and get stuff done.
When I worked at Google I always saw people sitting on bouncy balls typing away on their laptops, and I guess they got stuff done doing that, so I just chalk it up as "I don't personally understand it". I like my desk, but I see no reason to require people to sit at desks all day if they'd prefer to be in bed. If it doesn't work for them, they'll probably stop doing it.
I can't imagine anyone thinking being hunched over all day with your neck leaning forward could somehow magically be good for their back and neck alignment, or that lying down all day would be a positive of your cardio health. You'd think they'd be convinced when they went to look for any research backing their bizarre claims and couldn't find any.
I work from my bed, I work at my desk, I work pretty much everywhere in my home and it's not at all a problem. I'm really annoyed by these overgeneralisations about what's right or wrong for individuals, and all these buzzwords about "separation of life and work", "work-life balance", I love my work and I sleep like a mule even if I work ten minutes before I go to sleep.
I don't at all get these neurotic optimisations that people make, and having random strangers tell them how to live in their own home. If you like to work from your bed work from your bed, if it doesn't work for you stop, but to tell people they're delusional is nuts.
It's not just about this particular topic, there seems to be an entire emerging industry of life-coaches, sleep and whatever else coaches who try to convince people of strange norms that they have to uphold in their workplace or home. It's like the Western version of Feng Shui or something, oh no you slept badly a week, bring in the sleep coach to rearrange your furniture and exorcise the bad software from your bedroom
I'd suggest people who need to compartmentalise their work from their life this much to ask if it isn't that they're unsatisfied with their job that makes them sleepless rather than doing work on a bed.
Since the pandemic, I started spending some afternoons working from my car at the beach. Find a beach where you can park overlooking the ocean while working on the laptop. For breaks, you can take walks on the beach. Large bodies of water are very soothing.
"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/
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.
By being lower in the gravity well, you get less sleep than if your clock had run faster.
(Ok it's valid for those.. but I'm still feeling a bit salty.)
Of course, I understand the need for such measures. Hopefully I’ll manage to continue consulting through this without losing a customer.
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.
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.
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.
So, like the average "family with 2 kids" size of house in most of the world :-)
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.
Also a lot of 700 sq ft apartment with 3-4 bedrooms have 2 bathrooms which further reduces the total available space. It's quite common for a family of 5-6 (2 kids, parents plus grand parents) + 1 live-in helper to live in such an apartment. The live-in helper usually gets a windowless closet for her room (so around 21 sq ft) that's next to the kitchen (I have a hard time with the kind of living conditions offered to helpers but I guess it's really a shitty situation in terms of space for everyone). This is the living situation of a middle class family able to afford a 4,500 usd/month apartment and a 700 usd/month live-in helper (there's no daycare available in hk which is why a lot end up getting a live-in helper after having kids).
With covid, schools have been closed and people had to work from home making things much harder.
In the developing world (and heck, in Southern Europe and the Balkans too, as recently as the 60s-70s) farmers used to live, whole family (extended one at that) in ~ 500 sq ft houses... One typical case was that brothers e.g. would often sleep in the same bed for 1 person, one with feet in one direction, the other in the opposite.
Not lucky, in fact it is the norm for them to have a dwelling. Adobe/mud or some other local construction technique.
> In the developing world (and heck, in Southern Europe and the Balkans too, as recently as the 60s-70s) farmers used to live, whole family (extended one at that) in ~ 500 sq ft houses... One typical case was that brothers e.g. would often sleep in the same bed for 1 person, one with feet in one direction, the other in the opposite.
Thats one example, in parts of Asia they have more room.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
Not all of us, especially those living in endless lockdowns, have the privilege of having an SO lol
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.
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.
> 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.
Personally I just find it extremely uncomfortable, and I just can't be productive that way. Plus you have to wonder what the long term effects are, it doesn't seem very ergonomic.
I need a keyboard on a table and sit in a chair in front of it, or stand in front of it if it is height-adjustable.
I need space to put things nearby, like a glass of water, without having to care if it will fall and spill.
But I'm ok with having a tablet in bed to browse HN or Reddit or listen to something on YouTube until I fall asleep.
- Removed the sanctity of bed. The bed is a great place to train yourself to decompress and unwind.
- Absolutely destroyed my back. I'd build pillow forts around myself to compensate for increasing weak muscles.
- Hindered the ability to notice shifts in my mood/difficulties in my routine. Eg: I struggle to get out of bed these days.
Know a person with an actual destroyed back who can't even drive a car, but is able to work from bed.
Yep. I had to learn muscle building exercises to get out of that situation. It's totally worth it.
Given the nature that they're physical, explaining them over text could lead to problems and I don't want to recommend something that could injure someone due to a misunderstanding.
As an overall concept, muscle building works by finding the sore muscles, holding them in spot where they are sore, but holding in spot in a soft way, not a tense way, and then counting slowly to 10. Then give 5 to 10 seconds of relax, then do again, 10 times at first. It only takes a few weeks doing exercises every other day for the muscle strength to build.
Headaches by definition are caused by tense / sore muscles, so learning the right exercises will remove headaches. However, sinus headaches, migraines, and cluster headaches are different. Also, if you have mattress or pillow problems, muscle building exercises are like walking up a high altitude mountain; it's not going to help as much as you're like. It may help to start with your mattress, if applicable, and then learn muscle building exercises.
Posture problems, like having your head too far forward, is caused by using the incorrect muscles which then strengthens the incorrect ones and weakens the correct ones. (Usually neck and upper back muscles.) By muscle building the weak ones, your posture will naturally fix itself.
When working on shoulder and upper back muscles I do muscle building exercises with my arms with 5 lb weights.
When it comes to headaches, I do a series of neck muscle building exercises.
Oh also, chiropractors are pseudo-science. If you feel like you need a chiropractor, what for 99% of the people out there actually need is muscle building exercises. The muscles hold up the spine, so even with a messed up spine muscle building exercises help more than just about anything else, often completely removing pain.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck
Strong physical separation between distinct aspects of life is critical for me to get anything done. Covid has disrupted things enough as it is.
Turns out, my mental health is much better when I have an office to go to. 1h20 in commute (round-trip), no privacy, tons of distractions, and still I'm happier when I get to leave the house to go to work.
I suspect it's mostly just a matter of getting out of the house. Those 4 walls get pretty oppressive after a while.
I, too, found myself working from bed. It was not an improvement, and ended up being the last step towards a crippling depression that wouldn't let me get out of bed in the first place.
So, for me at least, working from bed is awful. Ergonomically, emotionally, spiritually just f---ing draining.
This is very important to me. It helps me forget about work when heading home and vice versa. I also like talking to people in person at the office more than relying on Zoom watercooler rooms.
In the mornings, I leave early to workout at the company gym. (Not true at the moment, because all gyms are closed in my area right now.) That commute gives me time to wake up and get into the gym mindset.
After work, it gives me time to unwind, let go of the stress for the day, and get into my dad-of-4 mindset.
Without it, everything blends together. My work days would never really start and never really end.
Mine's 45m-1h to work, and 1h-2h home in a city with notoriously awful traffic design and flow. It's basically just 5 miles of gridlock. In the heavy urban traffic I find it actually _adds_ a lot of stress to my day--it definitely feels like a mad max style survival adventure more than anything.
I used to commute 45 minutes each way on a nice dual line divided highway with very light traffic. Barring the odd blizzard, I found it like you describe... A great chance to let my mind switch states between home/work. And it was nice to have an hour and a half every day where I _couldn't_ beat up on myself for not being productive and could actually just truly sit and enjoy listening to a podcast or something.
If I had a nice weather-protected path to walk to work (like the underground networks in some major cities), walking would be far preferable to driving.
My argument, nay, my observation, is that some type of transition between work and home appears to be vital to my well-being. I suspect that the time component for that transition is just as important.
For example: What if I built an office in my garage? That would give me a physically different space, but I'd be deprived of that transition time to switch mindsets.
What I don't know is how much time is needed for the same effect. Would a 5 minute walk suffice? Could it be even better? Who knows?
First, you should have a dedicated work space. A room is preferable, but you can make do by erecting sight barriers to your desk for example. The main idea is to make it easy to leave your work 'at work' and not be reminded of it in your free time.
Second, clothing. If you feel your day lacks structure make sure you're not lounging about in a tracksuit all day. Put on clothes you would wear to the office before work, and take them off at the end of your day. Wear shoes.
Third, take a walk before starting work and afterwards. A 20 minute walk will allow you to plan the day ahead and get in work mode, and will let you unpack the day and unwind after work. Ignore the rain.
So basically, make going to work a ritual (as foolish or unlikely to work as it may sound). You should also minimise distractions and control impulses to do non-work related things while 'at work'. If you can, consider getting out of the house for lunch or eat at your desk and not at the dinner table. Lastly, take part or try to instigate remote water cooler chats with colleagues to keep sane.
I curtained the doorway off, to remind the rest of the family (and myself) that when it is closed, I'm at work. Put a standing desk in, to help maintain my health.
I still shower and show up 'at work' around the same times I did before. At first I was there around the same time I'd leave for work, but I found I was not able to concentrate productively for 12-13 hours a day, so I've cut it closer to an 8-6 schedule, with some breaks to eat with family or drop kids off where they may need to go.
Take advantage of the greater flexibility- take the good with the bad. Was listening to Phish on the surround sound speakers connected to my receiver via bluetooth to my Mac Mini the other day, while working on my desktop I'd brought home attached to a nice big bright 4k monitor that I have at home, and connected via SD-WAN to the corporate network. Was a pretty productive and glorious way to get a lot of work done.
Then all your clothes stop fitting.
Working from bed is like eating ice cream for breakfast. Sounds great, nice maybe once as a treat, then becomes horrible.
I need structure, routine, and not having to go into work makes enforcing that routine so much harder.
(I admit that I do do some "home" things at work, like laundry. That mostly involves turning on the machine and tending to it in an hour, so not a big time commitment but nice to get done during the day.)
Previously I worked from home a couple of days per week. I augmented those days by walking to a nearby coffee place in the morning to get out of the house and get some movement in.
I'd also try to meet someone for lunch when schedules worked out.
This year many of us combined working from home with a restriction on all of those "safety valves" and in-person socialization in general.
Personally I think I was happiest with the part-time flexible work from home setup, but I think I could make full time work if I moved to an area with more walking-distance amenities.
That's very different from working from home every day. If it was an option, I'd love to work from home twice a week and from the office the other 3. That would be a nice balance.
> This year many of us combined working from home with a restriction on all of those "safety valves" and in-person socialization in general.
Definitely an interesting question. Would I have enjoyed working from home if I could still go out and socialize every day? Impossible to say but I'd love to find out some day.
Yeah, people need to realize, this is not normal. Even I, as a highly distractable/sensitive introvert have had trouble coping. And I won't lie, the bicycle commute to work was great for waking me up and energizing me.
That said, I would prefer 100% WFH for the remainder of my career, no contest. There's just no getting around the level of control I have over everything from noise, to light, temperature, etc. It helps that I live alone and have a dedicated separate home office. And I can always go for a run, walk, or bicycle ride in place of the commute.
I mean, that's a bit disparaging. I've seen some beautiful 600 sqft apartments.
But to your general point, I agree. I just don't think a space needs to be shitty in order to be inappropriate for daily work. If its small or the area lacks food outdoor amenities, it's easy to get cabin fever.
Presence or non-presence of kids in said home definitely is a factor, but I have heard unhappiness expressed by both parents and non-parents.
The biggest factor is that the lack of an office simply reduces the effectiveness of social communication. People still talk, but the talking is simply not as effective nor, importantly as fulfilling as the in-person chatter is in the office environment.
Case in point: My partner works from home, has for years, and has no interest in working from an office. It's worth noting, however, that she also prefers it when I leave every day. (Read into that what you will.)
Unfortunately there is no compromise that can please everyone if things return to how they were before, just finding an employer that caters to one's personal preference.
We have started working Thursdays and Fridays in the office and the rest at home. Its nice to get out and do something different and still have all the time savings and time to think at home most of the week. It does still require you to live close to the office though.
Here in NZ we went thru a heavy lockdown for 6 weeks, I hardly noticed it
I moved to a Midwestern city and wake up at around 11am, just in time for my 9am (SF time) meeting lol. I chat w colleagues constantly on zoom and get off after 5 hrs.
Of course I got my SO to keep company so it’s never boring. I suspect all the mental health issues we’ve been seeing in the pandemic have been from single or more extraverted folks
But for introverts who are already in stable relationship, I love the “isolation”!
My first job out of college, my boss actually told me "Don't miss meetings, don't miss deadlines and I don't care when you're here." About 3 weeks in I was dying to go to the office and just stayed there all the time.
In order to make WFH work for me now a few things had to fall into place:
1. My wife got so busy with her business that she has no free time to deal with anything at the house during the day, so any random person that needs to come by (contractors, cable repair, etc) I'm already here for. Additionally, most days I can use my lunch break for any errands that need to be run without it interfering with my after work hours.
2. I have 2 dogs that keep me company.
3. I've found other friends of mine who work from home or are up for grabbing lunch in the area. I tend to meet somebody out for lunch at least once a week.
4. I keep a TV on in the background, out of sight (usually the weather channel). I don't know why, but it makes the house feel less empty all day.
5. Facebook and some relevant community message boards (Clemson sports, local programmers Slack). Just need some type of social outlet.
I think the world is split into people who really need a background soundtrack of some sort and those who hate it.
Back when I sometimes had a roommate on group (non-work) trips, one of the things that drove me craziest was someone who just had to turn on the TV as soon as they walked into a room.
The funny thing is that I'm pretty much fine with ambient people sound. I just don't like background TV and, for the most part, I don't even turn on music when I'm working.
If I put music on, it needs to be pretty consistent tempo with no words so that it's "there" but I'm not listening to it. The original Ironman soundtrack was my goto for this for years.
Any chance anyone knows how successful these are at noise cancellation (without the use of music to drown out said noise)?
You hear a lot more that's going on in your head/body, and regret not wearing earplugs to those gigs you went to years ago.
Apple is working on fixing that. There is a setting on ios 14 that can alert you when it hears things like a fire alarm, dogs barking, people yelling, etc.
I’d encourage you to avoid conflating the two as the experience is vastly different.
They can be.
I'm fortunate to have enough space in my house that I can silo the different areas of the house. I have a few places I'm happy to work in, but I also have a basement that I never do work in.
If you're doing better great, if not, strangers can be a tremendous help.
Article goes on to say that anecdotal evidence from people that work in bed since COVID-19 pandemic are doing fine.
What I can say myself about this is that since I've started working full-time from home in 2018, there were many "great" things I started doing during work. It was a bit like finally having the chance to be "free" and working how I wanted - and not my employer.
Three years later I'm now convinced that there's reasons why people go to offices and why there's certain rules in those.
Anyways, technically speaking "I'm not working from home anymore". I rented out an office space. It's as comfy as home (still, there's no bed). But having a dedicated space to work and face challenges is great, because afterwise I can drive home - and when I'm exhausted, fall into my bed.
This is a great way to increase mental health issues, decrease physical health and hygiene and generally make everything worse.
Maybe in the future when morbidly obese humans float around in hover beds and purchase things only from Buy-N-Large this will be "great" - but this reeks of a strange "pro COVID lockdown" narrative I've been seeing lately.
Along with phrases like "the new normal" and such. There does seem to be a push to keep people from wanting and expecting to go back to the real normal anytime soon.
Though who stands to gain from this alternate reality? It would seem the liberal left wants to normalize it (even post-vaccine), but I don't understand why.
The far-left folks are pro lockdown but also want to help the underprivileged. No one is hurt worse by lockdowns. They want to defund the police, and yet by now even the hardened ideologue can admit that less police is maybe not a great plan. The left is anti-authoritarian but engages in almost textbook authoritarian behavior. (Cancel culture, democratic governors having emergency powers for 9+ months now etc etc) They hate capitalism but enjoy the byproducts (my most socialist friends can't get enough of Amazon prime - the irony is completely lost on them).
There is just no way to reconcile the platform. It is completely incoherent.
Economic trouble and poverty help the left by making them the savior upon whom everyone is dependent. After all, it was the Great Depression that gave FDR’s New Deal a free pass in the first place — and that really was the beginning of the modern Democratic Party’s economic platform.
They want people to be poor. That’s how they get the majority of their votes.
As to "defunding police", I like to rephrase it as "fund people, not police" - use those budgets to give people help before they get to the point where the police get involved, rather than having next to no safety net and a bunch of cops itching to use all the military hardware they've got.
There you go, some coherence. Have a nice day.
I personally think the author of this article is trying to give people clinical depression. But I'm having trouble figuring out how that fits into their leftist agenda. Maybe it's because leftists are themselves lazy and unmotivated, and they want to feel better about themselves by sabotaging others? But wouldn't they see that it's unfair to hurt other people just because of their own inadequacies?
I don't know, what do you think? I can't figure it out.
To be precise, they are in the top four panels, not the bottom five.
The last paragraph basically claims "it's not working from bed that's bad, it's the stigma against working from bed that's bad!"
Earlier this year she attacked the Away CEO Steph Korey, she then spun Balaji's tweet that used Taylor's own words with a misleading crop to play victim:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-July-2020-Twitter-spat-bet...
She defends Tiktok and the CCP out of ignorance because she prefers writing everything as anti-facebook, anti-US tech (this was a similar twitter thing a couple months ago, but there's no quora summary).
Recently she was tweeting NIMBY style things about new housing ruining the character of the neighborhood and blaming tech for wanting more housing.
Everything she writes starts with a massive anti-tech motivated reasoning bias and then crafts a story around it. I think she also defended recode here, but I'm not 100% sure (I've since blocked her on Twitter): https://medium.com/@balajis/citations-for-the-recode-handsha...
I wouldn't put much thought into her articles, she's the main person that comes to mind when I think of the decline of the NYT.