What if remote work didn’t mean working from home?

Some people fail to recognise the actual problem here. I, among many, live within &lt;5 minutes from my work. Distance is never, and was never the deciding factor in my decision to work from home full time. I&#x27;m incredibly lucky my employer sees the benefits of it.<p>The deciding factors were - that I didn&#x27;t have to leave the room for a personal call so that I didn&#x27;t disturb anyone. - that I didn&#x27;t need to have six seperate conversations in the morning before being able to sit down and begin my work. - that I didn&#x27;t need to sacrifice portions of my lunchtime to grab a coffee with others and look like a team player. - that from home I could now show affection to my partner that I would otherwise likely be ostracised for in an office environment.<p>Do I seem antisocial to you? Probably. But that&#x27;s how I&#x27;m wired and want to live. I have (easily) another 1 1&#x2F;2 productive hours in my work day now, and that&#x27;s without children or a long commute. I&#x27;m the happiest I&#x27;ve ever been.<p>When I&#x27;m feeling exceedingly social and want to connect with others, I will work that specific day from the office.

As long as I still have a quiet, private office and don&#x27;t spend an hour+ per day in traffic and am not expected to give up evenings for &quot;not mandatory but really you should show up to play politics&quot; office happy hours, I don&#x27;t care where I work.<p>Currently working from home gives me all of that and I haven&#x27;t been happier with a job ever.

This has been my life for years except without the “renting a place” part. I work in cafes. I work in parks. I work sitting on a bench taking shelter from the rain on my way to somewhere else. I work anywhere I have space to take my Wacom tablet out of my bag and plug it into my laptop, and the desire to spend more time working today.<p>I also work at home in my studio but getting away from the distractions of home is, as this article notes, important.<p>I thought “remote work” already meant this? I’ve been doing it for years, it’s one of the perks of being a freelance artist. Sometimes I’ve toyed with the idea of getting together with some friends and splitting the rent on a shared studio space but really I know I’d only show up a few days a month.

I&#x27;ve been working remote for 13 years now and I really wish I had rented an office outside of my house much earlier than I did. At 23 your threshold for pain and discomfort is I think much higher in many ways, but I definitely burnt myself out by having my workspace also be my living space (small apartment in NYC).<p>Once I started sharing a loft space with some friends to co-work out of things got a lot more enjoyable. My space was a 20 minute walk from my apartment, I could keep a more robust setup there, had space for an electronics&#x2F;soldering station, kept a library of CS and math books there, etc. And if I needed to just do some work on my laptop and stay at home, that was always an option too.<p>Highly recommend having a situation like that if it&#x27;s at all possible. I gave up my space in Brooklyn mid-way through the pandemic and definitely am going to go find a new one soon. (If anyone has got a hacker space in north brooklyn let me know!).

I actually have this arrangement with my employer. They&#x27;re paying $500&#x2F;mo. to rent a small one room office for me a few blocks away from my home because I am easily more than twice as productive when not at home. It&#x27;s a no-brainer comparing the cost to value.

I think we will soon see a dip in productivity.whenever assessing trends, you should never base conclusions on outlier events and we are basing too much of the wfh success on this past year. A year when you couldn&#x27;t go out and do things, when people feared for their jobs amid a global crisis and felt a call of duty to keep on working.

In the early 2000s, when I was sharing a really dumpy student apartment, and had no office, I often spent the day working around town, mostly from parks and cafes.<p>Cafes can be distracting, but they had power for charging old laptop batteries, for the cost of a coffee, and sometimes had free WiFi.<p>Probably most productive were park benches, and sitting under particular trees.<p>I carried a bag with a laptop, a high-power WiFi card, a camera, and (nod to Douglas Adams) a towel.<p>This was the first laptop for working all over town, and I learned tricks for conserving battery power, including keeping disk spun down, and using the LCD passively (non-backlit) at times. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;linux-thinkpad-560e&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;linux-thinkpad-560e&#x2F;</a><p>The towel had multiple purposes, including: (1) wrapping the laptop in towel inside shoulder bag, for impact padding, which once saved laptop; (2) for sitting upon grass when it&#x27;s wet or geese&#x2F;ducks go there; (3) extra cover for laptop when caught in rain.<p>Today would be even better, with better laptop batteries, and with fast Internet from my phone.<p>Now that I have my own place, I usually prefer WFH over WFNH, for immersive work. But there&#x27;s something to be said for &quot;fresh&quot; city air and sunlight, and speed-walking all over town for hours a day was good exercise.

At least in spirit, I feel like this idea was WeWork&#x27;s business model.

Remote work shouldn&#x27;t mean working from home. Not everyone can do that physically (having space) and mentally. At GitLab we pay for an office if you decide you want to work outside your home. Most people end up working from home but before the pandemic many opted to work a few months from an office to make the transition more gradual.

Working remote and not from home:<p>- Do you need to take a call, and don&#x27;t want to be that person with lots of background noise? Good luck, other than renting out a private office or meeting room. (Seriously, if you&#x27;re at a busy Starbucks at 9AM during your stand-up call, just type it in the chat...)<p>- Cell signal is finally getting fast and available enough that remote work can be done on top of a mountain, but you do need to be within reach of a decent cell tower.<p>- Is the sun out? Good luck reading your screen. Is it going to rain? Better go find a place indoors.<p>Offices are convenient for work. You really can get a lot done quickly by grabbing 3 people and working out something in person. You can find quiet space, you can have good lighting and a good desk and decent climate control, you can have coffee and a bathroom and security.<p>Flexibility is definitely great to have, but let&#x27;s not kid ourselves. Offices are there because they&#x27;re useful.

I wouldn&#x27;t have a problem, but I do feel there&#x27;s an undercurrent of these kind of &quot;You can&#x27;t be productive actually at home&quot; articles I&#x27;m reading. I wonder if WeWork are pushing these :)

I already find it distracting enough listening to conversations from other departments that have nothing to do with me, now I&#x27;d have to deal with discussions from other companies instead. Open plan needs to die already.

I&#x27;ve been renting an office right down the street from my house for the past few months and it has made my time remote working so much better. I can highly recommend it to anyone living in an area cheap enough to have affordable offices for rent.

If work still has to be conducted by videocall they may as well just be at home it&#x27;s just an inefficient either way and you still lose the ability to have creative ideation discussion that just doesn&#x27;t work over videocall because of the time delay and forced one at a time speaking.<p>I do think WFH is here to stay but I also see an uncomfortable divide is going to form both in the types of work given to the two sides and the promotion and salary opportunities.

Works out best if &quot;near home&quot; = &quot;the actual office of my company&quot;.

&quot;Here’s my proposal: organizations that allow remote work should not only encourage these employees to find professional spaces near (but distinct from) their homes—they should also directly subsidize these cognitive escapes. The cost need not be prohibitive. If we turn back to our author examples, we see that a workspace doesn’t need to be aesthetically pleasing, or well-equipped, or air-conditioned (or even have walls or a roof!)&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not sure I agree with the specific proposal put forward here. Those examples probably won&#x27;t work for most people. BUT I think many of us would agree with the general idea of having a place near home to do some work in some fashion. That&#x27;s the point of remote work places like WeWork and all the many local places out there, isn&#x27;t it?

I’m hoping all of these pent up “forced” WFH complainers can go back into an office, personally.<p>One of the biggest stressors in my working life is that all of that time spent in an office with coworkers is time NOT spent with my “actual” family that I live and breathe for. All the time wasted commuting, all the energy Ive lost trying to fit into extroverted work cultures only to return to my family drained and unable to appreciate them - Ive regained that by being enabled to work from home.<p>Once people who cleary dont appreciate WFH can go back into their physical office spaces and get back to socializing as a first priority, there will be more opportunities for people lile me who genuinely appreciate WFH to be had.

In nice weather, I just grab my laptop and go sit on a bench in a nearest park. Best work environment that I&#x27;ve ever had in my entire life.

I do this exactly. I rented a small apartment very near (fifty meters) from home, declared it my “studio” and set up my workplace. I can work there with my older daughter (studying at home) and my younger daughter (a toddler) is safely separated and home is not a work place. Literally, I don’t have a “computer” at home; only my iPad and a 25 year old Nintendo. 10&#x2F;10, strongly recommend.

I&#x27;ve worked like this since way before Covid. Unfortunately the lockdowns have pushed me more at home than at my usual haunt of cafes and bars (or occasionally the beach). I&#x27;m completely incapable of getting anything productive done at home. I work for myself so an office is kind of a waste. A bustling cafe or a bar gives me the best ambiance in which to focus distraction-free.

I get the remote work as &quot;get out of the house&quot; thing. Changing your workspace away from home changes your frame of mind. It can be a discipline thing. You start work at x and finish at y, theres a place to do it, you go there and your return at end of the day. Here is not there, and work happens there and home happens here.<p>That said, the WFH &#x2F; remote work has shown a lot of people that in-office isn’t so much about productivity but instead more about <i>other matters</i>. But they&#x27;re now wondering exactly what those other matters are and whether they&#x27;re important. I think its not actually clear what the fallout will be but a lot of the pushback around Wfh is from lobby groups and office space owners, property developers and everything else around office life. All those vested interests with a complete ecosystem they&#x27;ve set up and are now a lot less stable about.<p>The other aspect is that in person face-to-face is still great. Well... as long as no one sneezes.

This only works when quiet time to think and work is respected. Cowork spaces are usually terrible at it.

I live and work in a 700 square foot apartment (of which too large of a percentage is closet space for my liking). I just discovered that there are two coworking spaces within walking distance; I&#x27;m going to see if I can get a reasonable daily rate and shell out a hundred or two a month to go in once or twice a week.

This was my life even before the pandemic (Since 2005 I&#x27;ve worked in coffeshops, parks, in my car and in beaches nearby) with the only difference that coffeshops are closed at the moment and I&#x27;ll have to make do with what is left. Leaving home while working from home is very important.

&gt; organizations that allow remote work should not only encourage these employees to find professional spaces near (but distinct from) their homes—they should also directly subsidize these cognitive escapes<p>Well I can think of one location a lot of businesses could allow an employee to work from - the office.

Not quite the same, but at my previous job one of the seven people in the same room as I actually worked on a different product for a sister company. We were around a hundred people at that office and I think he was the only one with that arrangement.

Yes. I&#x27;ve done this for the past 4 years and it&#x27;s the best of both worlds. Right now I rent a private office that&#x27;s ~10 minutes walking from home. Close enough that there&#x27;s no traffic; far enough that I have a routine. Love it.

My shed that I can easily convert to an office is not home but close to home so...

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It never did.<p>I work remote for 7 years now and the first year I worked mostly from libraries and coffeeshops.

Yes, please.

This doesn&#x27;t help those who have to work from home because of a disability. Finding excuses to discriminate against the disabled is toxic behavior. So I&#x27;m going to go ahead and label this article as &quot;toxic&quot; since it recommends a &quot;solution&quot; without mentioning that it&#x27;s completely inappropriate for some people.