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Notes -
Most people are much less productive from home. Home has more distractions; you can play with your dog, hang out with your partner and/or children, watch TV, play video games, do chores, do online shopping without the risk of your boss who sits behind you noticing that you do so for four hours a day, can go for random naps. If you trick yourself into thinking you don’t really need to do this project today you can stop working at 3pm and treat the rest of the day like a weekend, take a two-hour lunch to see a friend etc.
In the office, you can either do your job, procrastinate at your desk (as above, riskier and more boring than doing so at home) or spend time talking or coworkers, which bosses look upon more fondly than other kinds of socialization since they think it helps ‘team cohesion’ or leads to ‘water cooler moments’. You also don’t want to be the guy who always leaves two hours before everyone else, whereas people mostly don’t notice the person who goes afk from their wfh teams chat early.
It’s trivially true in my experience working with otherwise motivated and ambitious people that employees cannot be trusted to work from home. Humans are a social species and our obligations to each other break down - even against our own will! - when we don’t see the people to whom we owe them.
In my current role I dont know which way causality works. I am less productive on remote days, but we also get less work incoming on remote days. This also means my long term projects and backlogs get done more often on remote days, but I dont have an exceeding amount of those, and often they are in backlog because I sent something out for review, or requested something that hasn't been sent to me.
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I suspect this is very true in the modal case. I've known a couple of exceptions that are self-motivated enough to make remote work effective. And I'd buy that it can be better for very deep work requiring intense concentration and few distractions for those that can manage it in those circumstances. But I will also admit that I feel at least a bit less productive on those times when I do get to work from home.
But I also know people that are being forced back into the office to hot-desk and work with distributed teams, so they aren't really getting the benefit of in-person discussions, which IMO have a much higher bandwidth than video chats.
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