Whoever says overall productivity increases, is probably talking about very disciplined individuals.
If I had a dollar for every person I've seen randomly browsing Facebook or similar at the office, I wouldn't need to work anymore.
Now I understand that not all people are the same towards work and motivation, and I particularly sympathize with the spouse thing. So I think the broader issue here is management attempting to impose a single One True Way for everybody, which doesn't seem to exist.
I also think that the spouse thing may be somewhat a question of habit. As in, after a while, the spouse may end up appreciating that your being at home doesn't mean you're free to do whatever. But you're still able to go start laundry when taking a five-minute break, which is still extremely valuable and couldn't be done from the office.
Roll in at 9:30 and complain about traffic. Spend until 10 easy getting settled in for the day: making coffee, slowly sifting email, recollecting the weekend with others, bathroom break, etc. Now its the first meeting, totally irrelevant to anything you do so you zone out. Suddenly its lunch time. Another hour goes by. It's 1pm now. Check email. Another meeting. Check instagram. 3:30pm. Let me fire off that one email. Wow look, 4:35pm, better leave now to beat traffic.
I've seen people make respectable careers out of this.
It’s much easier to schmooze in the office than at home but it’s possible at home if you have good relationships with your colleagues, so when you’re not in meetings, slacking or doing slack huddles to talk about your weekend are good for morale and so good for productivity.
Granted this can completely be abused but I think it’s an important distinction.
That's a very simplistic view of productivity. The kind of work most people here are doing cannot be measured in hours. I can be in an office for 10 hours, bash my keyboard, blabber away in meetings and not produce anything useful. Conversely, I could spend the whole day sitting in the garden and come up with an idea to solve a problem that has been plaguing the company for months.
If people are working an hour a day and still getting their job done then great. If they aren't getting anything done but it's not being noticed then that means they never had a job to do anyway. Being remote doesn't change anything.
I feel almost all dev work I do today is bashing my keyboard doing boilerplate garbage and transforming one thing to another and dealing with accidental complexity of the modern 'best practices'.
My work probably can be measured in hours. Good for you if you have something difficult enough to think about, but I am not sure most people have the luxury to work on interesting things.
I finally addressed this by blocking out the hours of 3-5 on my schedule for “personal time” and then working after that. It meant I could push personal chores and errands into that window no matter when requested.
Actually my schedule is so cross time zone that it wouldn’t matter so much but locking in the time helps manage it (I also have time blocked out for truly personal things like reading HN).