From working remotely to out of an office. | Hacker News Reader

From working remotely to out of an office.

spencerfry.com

65 pointsmaxstoller16 comments

At Posterous we experienced a similar boost, but then over time it turned out that we spent enough time commuting and breaking up our days that it became a bother. It's important to have a central space where everyone can coordinate and plan, but beyond that, when you're about building product -- sometimes you just need quiet time alone to make things happen.

We switched to a 3-days-in-office, 2 days work from home schedule and that's turned out to be a big boon to productivity.

I always felt drained when I had to be in the office 4 or 5 days a week. I enjoyed the 1-2, maybe 3 days in the office and the other time at home.

At the moment I'm working for myself again and decided to go the co-working route and I'm loving it. Home, coffee shop or office depending on the day. I also like to work weird hours, so having 24 hr access to an office comes in handy when I want to work from 10pm to 7am on a Tuesday.

"The first week I was in our new office, I was more productive than the previous month altogether."

Good article but the author recently just started working from an office so everything is new and interesting. He should do a follow up after six months.

I think this article illustrates the importance of having a good routine while working at home. The author would just roll out of bed and get to work. It is important to do things in the morning that you would normally do if you were going to work. Also, it sounds like he just worked till nightfall and had no life. While working at home, I make sure to get out of the house in the evening and usually do social activities at least a few times a week. This helps as I don't like socialising at work when I am working in an office.

Anecdotally, this dovetails with another HN story "How to achieve greater productivity of teams (lostgarden.com)" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971708

He went from massive overtime (75-100 hours/week?) to a lot less (50 hours/week?) and got a substantial productivity improvement - same output at half the time spent.

A friend of mine did tech support for Amex from home for years. She would take her purse downstairs to her office everyday as part of her going to work ritual.

`Working out of x' to mean `working in x' is such a strange and potentially confusing idiom.

I felt the same way about "ordering off menu" and "ordering off the menu" (the former, you're asking the chef for something special; the later, you're making a choice from what's printed). It's even worse when people announce their availability with "out of office". The idiom seems to be based on intimate knowledge of how the person normally works, where they expect to be, and how much of the sentence is implied ("I'll be out..." vs "I'll be working..."). Idioms are funny that way.

As I just commented on over here[1]

Just before our exit, we ran our company from a condo. Here are some pictures under 'Environment'[2]. One major upside for us working in residential space was the cost. Electricity, rent/condo fees, parking, and internet fees are all less expensive than commercial rates. As well owning residential space is far less expensive than owning commercial space.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=972838 [2] http://www.igeejo.com/blog/default/photos

Dunno about this. My desk is in my bedroom, and I've worked from there for years. I worked a full-time job there, I wrote a book there, I write my open-source projects there, etc. I also get out of the house as much as I want to. (And I don't need to be "reminded" that the kitchen is where food is. If I'm hungry, I'll go find something to eat. Basic human instinct...)

I work at an office now, but I basically look at it as a time to socialize. For getting Real Work done, I still prefer my desk in my bedroom. (But actually, my desk in the office is quite nice too... when everyone else is working from home.)

From my experiences doing both, I've found that if you were to measure your efficiency in an O(n) sorta way, working in an office:

* makes the worst case performance improve

* makes the average a little bit better by virtue of that

* and does not impact (or even worsens) the best case.

The best way to avoid working long hours is to be passionate about something besides your work.

I understand what you're saying, and potentially agree with you, but why do you feel that that's the "best" way? Best with regards to what measure? What objective?

To the author: I'm new to NYC and would like a mentor to show me the ropes of the NY startup scene. What do ya say?

Certainly! Drop me an e-mail at email[at]spencerfry.com.

Always nice to see stuff like this happening here. +1 for both of you :)

thanks, totally emailed you, looking forward to getting in touch

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