How remote work changed my life

Great review&#x2F;post.<p>Remote work is the way of the future. A recent study from of IBM employees showed that if employees have a modest commute then they only need to work 38 hours&#x2F;week before they start to have work&#x2F;life balance issues.<p>If employees work for a company that allows them to telecommute, they can work almost 60 hours per week before running in to work&#x2F;life balance issues. That&#x27;s a big deal.<p>(That&#x27;s not to say you should put in 60 hour weeks if you can help it, but it highlights the negative effects a commute has on people and their happiness in life.)

5 years ago I had an opportunity to work from home for 6 months and it drove me nuts! I guess I&#x27;m built in a way that I thrive on human-to-human interaction. Limiting myself to just digital communication actually made me sad.<p>Company should optimize for happiness. So for people like me, have an office. For people who thrive on working remotely, it should do everything it can to make them comfortable. I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a right or wrong approach. Just optimize for your workforce.

I don&#x27;t really relate to the &quot;soul sucking&quot; idea of a commute.<p>I work about a little over an hour away from my office and work from home several days a week. It&#x27;s a nice trade-off between being in the office, where interaction happens, and being remote, where remote interaction happens, but also where I can hit substantially higher levels of productivity.<p>While I could do without my evening commute, I generally ENJOY the morning commute. I have Spotify to dig into albums and discover new music, audiobooks, a lot of podcasts I like, organize my day and think through problems at work. Even on the return home when I want to decompress and NOT think about work, I still have stuff I can listen to and enjoy.<p>I don&#x27;t think commuting is any sort of great way to spend time, but &quot;soul-sucking&quot;, even in horrible traffic when you&#x27;re having a bad day and just want to be at home, is a bit dramatic. Inconvenience != soul sucking and such statements remind me of the Louis C.K. bits on American whining.

I&#x27;ve started working remotely and I&#x27;ve never achieved so much work as in the past two months. Being ahead of schedule also opened up some hours to work on personal projects, which is great.<p>Previously, I would endure on a 4-hour daily commute by bus&#x2F;metro, work on a noisy office, and for a lower pay to boot. No way I go back to that life.

Question about incomes and San Francisco start ups that offer full-time remote work:<p>If X programmer would make 100k&#x2F;yr working at your location in San Francisco, does X programmer make 100k&#x2F;yr if they are full-time remote in another city?

nice post. Having worked remotely, I definitely prefer that to office even if there is a short commute but this took some time. When I initially started working remotely, I was hard to stay on track. But having a separate &quot;work&quot; place did wonders.