Comments on: Does working from home make you more productive? Yes (with data)!

By: Why Do Indians Work Long Hours? | ankur Warikoo

Why Do Indians Work Long Hours? | ankur Warikoo — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:49:51 +0000

[...] Naturally…the west is the opposite…and amazingly…working from home is turning out to be as productive as office, as this interesting piece suggests! [...]

By: Frank

Frank — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:03:39 +0000

Definitely sending this one over to my boss

By: Carter Cole

Carter Cole — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:05:20 +0000

ill have to show this to mi boss

By: Jesse T

Jesse T — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:27:12 +0000

I’m the manager at Citizen Space (a co working space in San Francisco) and we have a group of web developers that work out of our space once a week instead of their usual 1 hr commute to Mountain View. They’ve liked coworking because it has the camaraderie of being around people, but w/o the time sink of being surrounded by their usual office crowd, meetings, etc. I’d definitely suggest looking at coworking spaces as a productive hybrid option (sociability and productivity).

By: Gorm Casper

Gorm Casper — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:50:07 +0000

I work in a (somewhat) hybrid environment, which basically means I can ask to work from home when I feel like it (and so far hasn’t got a “no”).

This is obviously just my personal experience, but when I work from home, the quality of my work is superior to when I sit at the office. I write more code, and my designs are far more solid – worked through and thought through.

As far as I can tell, there are three main reasons:
1) I am *only* valued on my work when I work from home. If I sit at the office I can safely say “I’m working on it…” and not commit any code or designs for an entire day. This is not so when I work from home. Results count then.
2) I feel I “earned” a work-from-home day (even though I could probably get as many as I wanted), and feel like I must work harder so they also consider it a good idea.
3) I actually have 2 hours each way to work. So I feel I spend a LOT less time on work when working from home, and thus simply work more hours.

By: Jonathan Frei

Jonathan Frei — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:34:52 +0000

I may get more done in total…but less of that total will be actual work…

By: Dee

Dee — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:00:21 +0000

I used to do a hybrid each week, working from home 3 days and in the office 2 days. Office time was spent on meetings and the “face time” thing with colleagues/management. When I worked from home, I gained productive time by not having to spend 1-2 hours each day commuting (I live in NYC) and avoiding the time wasting cubicle “drop bys” that are invariably done by super chatty people who don’t know when to wrap it up. I also often worked with colleagues in vastly different time zones (domestic and global) so having flexibility in my day (for instance, working from 9-12, doing personal stuff like work out, errands, etc til 3, then back to work from 3-7 or 8) was amazing and so much better for work/life balance. I also have a separate room for an office so it was easy to just force myself to quit at a certain time and stick to it.

I think the hybrid thing is really the ideal situation for increasing productivity while maintaining a superior work/life balance.

By: Tony Wright

Tony Wright — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:35:12 +0000

Yeah, exercise is a bit deal for me too. The plus with the WFH angle is that I can hop on the exercise bike when I start to flounder at work and my shower is 20 feet away. A lot of folks who need exercise probably go to the gym, which can be a bit of a logistical time sink… Overall, tho– I think it’s a VERY personal thing. Clearly some people (and maybe some job types?) are more productive at work than at home.

By: Tony Wright

Tony Wright — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:32:34 +0000

That caught my eye too. When I dug into it, the difference was largely because two team members were experimenting with the Google Chrome Beta for the Mac. Because it’s a beta, we haven’t yet started tracking sites in it (though we do for for Chrome for Windows). So instead of being able to differentiate good browsing (gmail, bug tracking app) and distracting browsing (news sites, digg), we just got a lump of Chrome time. In reality, that browser time is probably split between productive and distracting stuff.

By: Tony Wright

Tony Wright — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:29:55 +0000

We’re actually asking our users a bit more information like this so we can get some broader data than our (admittedly unscientific) experiment. Of course, we aren’t asking about coworking! At some point down the road (once enough folks have answered the questions), we’ll be able to look at aggregate data from tens or hundreds of thousands of knowledge workers rather than our little team of 5!