Working from Home Discussion

There is a lengthy discussion on working from home at Joel on Software forum. It looks like to me that many people has issues on working from home. They mention couple of problems:

• Lack of motivation
• Lack of human interactions
• Lack of concentration
• Lack of separation between work and personal life
• Odd work hours

With those possible issues for working from home, do you want to avoid this option? No, because there are ways to help. For instance, Roby suggests:

- fixed schedule for my days: start job at 9, eat at 13, go out for an hour to take a coffee and talk with friends, start job at 14, stop at 18 for an hour of sport, then eat, relax, start working again at 21 until 2 am.
- even if I stay at home I wear just like when I go out consulting (well, casual dress…)
- don’t have food like cakes or similar at home.. I keep a bottle of water near me so if I feel I need something I drink some water
- eat regularly and at regularly hours, don’t take food near the pc…
- fixed hours for internet.. I have a list of links and I visit only those sites.. so no waste of time googling here and there :-) 20 minutes in the morning for “work” links, 20 minutes in the afternoon for other non-working interests.
- dont watch tv … NEVER.. (well, I’m lucky I hate tv :-) TV is a EVIL, you can burn entire afternoons thinking it’s only ten minutes you have started watching it!! Radio and/or music not only is ok, but it’s a MUST! Cannot work without..

Good suggestions – especially on the fixed schedule – it can set a better condition to separate between work and personal time.

Working from home… – [Joel on Software forum]