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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

This article can be read the other way around. The article talks about 'interruptions' but what they describe are NECESSARY stuffs like having the plumber over, or going to the post office, or taking care of your child.

When you start working from home you realize that while you were in the office, none of the stuffs that actually matters to you (besides your career) get priority:

- send that mail to ask for a refund: it's been on the dining table for months.

- fix that sink: meh... the plumber would not come on Saturdays

- buy a new bbq to have friends over: I'll go next week.

- doing your taxes: I'll hire some accountant to do it.

- wanna buy an apt: I'll do the visits after 7pm please.

Yeah, doing all these stuffs is annoying, but going to the office just to get away from chores seem like a terrible advice to me.

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FYI: 'stuff' and 'advice' aren't countable nouns in English - you sometimes see a countable 'stuff' as part of a compound noun like 'dyestuff', but it's never countable in the common sense of "a collection of things".

Out of curiosity, are you a native speaker of German or a closely related language? I'm not intimately familiar with the language, but it seems like both these nouns' German equivalents are countable, and I'm wondering whether that is the origin of your unusual usage here.

(ObTopic: In prior positions, I avoided working from home, because there are many more distractions there. In my current role, it's about even, which is regrettable, and working from home is off the menu here in any case.)

thanks for the info. I knew about advice (despite my mistake!), but didn't know about stuff. I'm French, and yes, in French: stuff, advice and news are countable.

Another OT FYI - where you wrote "stuffs", a better word to use would be "things" (because I imagine "thing" is countable in English). It would make the sentence more fluid to most other English speakers.

/for what it's worth, your English is already better than my French, which is virtually non-existent! Also - it's already way better than a lot of adults here in the United States, which isn't saying much...

I was going to reply along the same lines. - Cooking food; you'd either do that before work, or go out to lunch - so you still have to take time out of your day. - Plumber; going to have to take a whole day off to wait for the plumber or if you can get a decent appointment, make sure to extend that an extra hour for the commute.

Plus the mistakes are very rookie mistakes that any WFH guide will tell you not to do. Almost all of them say have a dedicated work space so that your work mind can switch on and off.

The guy that tried being Mr Dad and WFH should have known better; kids require almost constant attention until they are in school. On the other hand, a few interruptions from family is no worse than those from your coworkers.

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