When I made the decision to go fully remote, the first obvious step was to move out of the Bay Area. One of my hard requirements was property with a separate physical building for a home office. This requirement vastly reduced the set of viable homes to choose from, vastly constrained the neighborhood choice to more rural areas, and somewhat increased the cost. But after more than a year of working this way, I have to say it was well worth it. I wouldn't want to go back to work-from-spare-bedroom or work-from-closet. If you can manage it financially and you can culturally manage to live in a more rural area, you'll won't want to go back, either.
First, and obviously, it's quiet. No more kids playing in the house chaos. It's private, and can be locked separately, so I can work on my company's confidential stuff. Economical to heat and cool, since it is a very small space. You also get that intangible "separation" of your work life from your home life that your commute used to give you--hard to explain. A brief walk outside to and from the office allows me to reset into work-mode or home-mode. Highly recommended if you can swing it!
> You also get that intangible "separation" of your work life from your home life that your commute used to give you--hard to explain. A brief walk outside to and from the office allows me to reset into work-mode or home-mode.
A lifehack that I learned here on HN when I was working from home was to actually leave the door, then walk right back in and work. If I needed to do any housework, I would again leave through the door, and return "home".
This reduced all temptations to mix work and home life. It also made it clear to the other people in the house that daddy is now serious, and that even just a simple "hi, how are you" would require me to get up, leave, and return to answer. And then leave and return to go back to work. The social friction was important.
Not going to lie, as much as I agree with this idea - even just going down to my busy street store in the morning wakes me up somehow - this comment does also read like a great prompt for a comedy skit.
The adherence to this technique needs to be total and absolute, but the situation has to call for an ever-escalating frequency of interruptions from family, work, the government, neighbors, etc.
Right away it misses the comedic potential of handling the ringing of the door bell. That really should have involved her opening the door, stepping outside to switch contexts (with the person who rang the bell standing there), immediately stepping back inside, closing the door, immediately re-opening the door to answer the bell, etc, etc.
> It also made it clear to the other people in the house that daddy is now serious, and that even just a simple "hi, how are you" would require me to get up, leave, and return to answer. And then leave and return to go back to work. The social friction was important.
Suppose someone else went out the door, walked back in, and went to your work area. Were they then considered to be in the work area and so could talk with you without you having to leave and come back?
I would go along with it - this is my family after all and I encourage creativity. But depending on the interruption, they might hear an answer that rings closely with "that can wait until I get home" or "don't hit her back, but try to resolve it between yourselves".
You need two hats. A work hat and family hat. This is the only possible social cue that will work in the long term.
I would completely expect my family to get behind this. I've worked remotely for many years now so my kids were (in theory) well trained to not bother me while I'm working. However, that started to get more lax post-covid. I also used to specifically work late at night and in the morning while they were at school. As they get older and stay up later, it has gotten more difficult to keep that schedule.
I recently moved my office to our third floor space. I'm hoping the extra work required to go up a flight of stairs will limit spontaneous interruptions during the day. I'm hopeful, but don't expect it to work long term.
I feel like this only makes sense in the US. As a non-US person, I still find it weird when people show up on video calls wearing hats (e.g. caps) at home.
When I started working from home in earnest, I had to be really strict with the rest of the family about bursting into my office. They had to knock, then wait for permission to enter, and only then were they allowed to open the door. If they just barged in then they would be asked to leave. It took months to get them used to this idea.
It might sound unnecessarily pompous but really it’s just enforcing some basic courtesy.
If you walk out and in again to do housework, aren't you just pretending to not mix both? I tend to view this more as hypocrisy than anything.
I like the fact that because I work home, I have to mix work and home life actually. Breakfast, Laundry, cooking, lunch, doing groceries. I treat those as important "pauses" that forces me to move a bit my body, release the mind. The key is putting strong limit in the amount of those and planning them in advance so that you don't have unexpected and constant context switches. Like today I had set a reminder to clean up the nozzle of my printer at 12am. I definitely have to set alarms on my laptop because I tend to forget everything when focused. When you think of it, most people working at an office are also mixing work and personal if not home life, or even argue about things on hn.
As for kids, I send them to school so I tend to only have them home for 2 hours a day if I haven't finished work. The only issue is if they are fighting against each other because otherwise I tell them to do their homework. 2 hours of lower concentration out of 8 is not that big of a deal anyway. It is still better that 8 hours of lower concentration in an office.
Reminds me of a great book, the city & the city, where this concept is taken quite literally at the scale of an entire city. Complete with border checkpoints that can be used to exit one city and enter the other one.
While this works for mental transition, if you have a spouse and kids, they're going to pretty much ignore this boundary. You'll have kids knocking on your door within minutes.
This is either a lifehack for productivity or a lifehack to convince a roommate/partner/tax preparer that you need a dog that you can take on walks as a business expense.
Luckily, I convinced my wife to let me purchase her a pre-fabricated building for an office in February of 2020. We already had an existing concrete slab (12" x 12") where I had a 12" x 10" building put in. It took the work crew about 4 hours to build it. Later I had electrical installed and drywall an insulation put in. She really likes the space.
We are located in the SoCal Area. Since the building was under 12 x 12, no permitting was needed. The cost for the building itself was $5000. I had the electrician run power (1 20 Amp circuit) and install some lighting, that was $1600. To have the drywall installed was around $800. I believe we spent less than $100 to paint the interior.
Im not a real estate agent but i feel like that would more or less immediately pay for itself in resale value, if that makes sense. In looking at houses, if it has a space like that thats an immediate frontrunner for me.
I use a room in my house for my office, but often I'll take my dog for a short walk around the block on my way 'to' and 'from' work. Really does help with the intangibles you mention. An outbuilding would be even better, but just the walk helps. My dog certainly doesn't mind!
Back in the early 2000s, I spent several years working a remote job while living in a studio apartment. Maintaining the habit of leaving the "office" at the end of the work day, running an errand or just walking around the block, and then returning "home" again really made it clear which mode my brain should be in.
He leaves the house, gets in his vehicle, drives to get coffee and then to the office ... that happens to be home ... but goes into the office off the garage.
Indeed. Probably a lot of unnecessary wear and tear on the vehicle too.
For me, one great thing about working from home for about six years now is how little mileage we've put on our cars and how little money we've spent on fuel.
Back during the pandemic I made a couple of bicycle laps in my local park as a commute between my bedroom and my study before I started working, and a couple of bicycle laps the other way around when I finished working.
It was fantastic to have a mental break between work and not-work, and I didn't fall into the trap of working an extra hour because I have an hour fewer of commuting.
I live in a city and was happy to get a separate tiny apartment 10 min from my family house. It makes a great office and guest room. I hugely prefer it over having a bigger house with a home office. I also love that I can live in a safe city with 4 kids. And that there is a little separation from the chaos.
I think public policy experts sorely underestimate how many individuals have more than 1 apartment for themselves.
Here in Los Angeles, I know a handful of people that have apartments in radically different parts of the city, just for practicality and convenience. Just renting. Nothing anybody brags about given how awkward struggling people will make that, but if you got it like that there is no reason to experience LA, you can totally exempt yourself from the commutes and hellishness and have somewhere to decompress in whichever part of the city you are in. I've sublet for months this way too, while retaining a headquarters that I rent elsewhere.
I detest these types of arguments. People renting multiple apartments may be a part of the problem but surely the main cause is an undersupply of housing. Homelessness is not caused by this person renting multiple units.
It’s like when SF kept reminding that I needed to ask for a water refill because we need to conserve water while farms in the Central Valley are using the majority of it.
More housing needs to be built in your scenario. It is not on the shoulders of the demand side. More housing needs to be built and it needs to be built now. We should be guilting the communities that have prevented development from happening. Not John Doe who rents two apartments.
Part of my point was that renting two apartments can be a solution to a family not having a bigger single apartment. So many people move out of cities because they need more room. So I wanted to point out that there are ways to stay in a city with a family.
This is my plan: I live in a walk-able neighborhood of small Craftsman-style houses in an unremarkable, mid-size US city. It's great for kids because they can walk to the park and meet neighborhood kids roaming sidewalks, but it's terrible for getting work done with kids at home. Thankfully, there's available office space over old retail nearby, which rents for really reasonable prices and can fit a desk each for me and my wife.
Yep, very same. Mine isn't technically a separate building anymore but it was built that way in the 1950s. The second owners combined them with a second garage stall.
The privacy implied by two locking doors between me and the tiny children is immensely valuable to me. The short walk to and from work helps me clear my head between contexts.
The space doubles as a guest space when we infrequently have them. It's great for guests to be able to just leave for the night without having to drive to a hotel and dealing with all that implies.
> A brief walk outside to and from the office allows me to reset into work-mode or home-mode.
Setting the distance between the home and the office to be something walkable, but not too close is a great hack to force yourself to move more. Mine is about 2km, so going to the work and back gives me a nice push toward those recommended 7000 steps a day, plus does wonders to my mind - especially in the sunny mornings when it's a pure joy.
The work shed variant of the he-shed/she-shed movement.
Also, a simple towable RV or a used RV can do this job quite well. It doesn't even need to be road-worthy, it just needs to have its battery/generator/AC/heat functional. Plop a starlink and a 30amp line on your switchbox and you're good to go.
It's not attractive though for neighbors or housing associations, unlike a decently made shed.
Fully agree on all points. When the pandemic hit, I turned the backyard shed (windows, 12x10 at least) into a backyard one room schoolhouse for all of the same reasons. Put a Woodstove in it, wired the property with ubiquiti wifi everywhere (for their zoom meetings). The physical walk to a place meant for learning made all of the difference in the world for the k and 2nd grader who loved the whole experience.
Now since school is back in action, it has become the quiet place to hangout if outside gets too warm in the summer, or a peaceful retreat during snowstorms in the winter. It's cozy as heck.
Slowly becoming the "radio shack" as it has a goes receiver setup in it now and a couple long pieces of wire strung through the trees for shortwave listening.
The physical individual separation, even if being across the yard, makes all the difference to our brains.
> One of my hard requirements was property with a separate physical building for a home office.
At one place I lived where there was no room I could dedicate to being an office, I ended up buying a standalone wooden 8x10' shed, insulated it, ran power and ethernet to it, and it served me very well for a couple of years.
Yea, that's another excellent choice! In fact, that was my first idea before deciding to move. I bought a set of plans[1] and lumber and built a 6'x12' shed in my backyard, planning to electrify it and run networking out there. Moving happened before I got around to it.
You could build or purchase a prefabricated shed-style office (with AC, power, etc) in your backyard without a permit (<120 sq. ft for CA) in most areas.
> If you can manage it financially and you can culturally manage to live in a more rural area, you'll won't want to go back, either.
I fully agree with this. I lived about six years and half, altogether, in a rural area and I loved every moment of it. Connection to nature is not a one-day trip during the week-end and it's certainly not a walk in a city park.
> I wouldn't want to go back to work-from-spare-bedroom or work-from-closet.
I don't mind the spare bedroom: I love it. Bathroom is nearby, coffee machine too. I mean, sure, I could duplicate this in a second home next to the first one but why bother?
I need a three bedrooms for that: parents, kiddo and office...
With that said, we've come full circle on this. One of the advantages of remote work is being able to live anywhere, yet you are essentially suggesting people live in very specific (albeit geographically large) areas. It is at least a bit funny.
Also also people: Haha, look at these silly people who can't figure out what they want. They're back where they started but now pay for their own office.
Also also also people: damn do I hate my commute. Guess there's no other way since remote work doesn't work. Oh well!
You're not just paying for an office though. You're paying for independence and quality of life. One office (the one you build in your yard) isn't the same as another office (30-180 minutes away, owned, maintained and wholly controlled by somebody else).
- in some countries, dedicated home office rooms and supplies can be deducted from taxable income or lead to other forms of tax reduction.
- you do not have to pay for the commute. Not only in terms of money (gasoline and car value loss, public transport ticket...), but also generalized cost (time lost, loss of flexibility...)
- some employers actively provide financial support for home office (e.g. by subsidising supplies).
I am personally happy to pay for my home office _and_ accept a lower salary if this means I can spend tine with my kids and wife every day, rather than waiting for the train in the rain.
> "best lighting is actual daylight in front of you ... Replacing the existing office lights with very warm toned lights"
So Daylight is good, yes. That's 5500k to 6500k, depending on how you measure it. It's NOT very warm-toned; in fact, it's cool white. The lights linked are 2700k. You can use them, but your camera is just going to try and compensate for the yellow hue. If you're going to buy something specifically for lighting video calls/recording, you should find something daylight with a higher CRI ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-CRI_LED_lighting ). You don't need to go crazy, but the difference between those $1 LED's and the $20 LED's you see at the store, is probably the CRI.
If you want GOOD lighting setup, go for 3 or 4 point lighting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-point_lighting -- You don't need a huge number of expensive lights, just lights set off to the side. Personally, I hate ring lights because they are designed for you to put the camera in the middle of them. If you have glasses, all you can see in the camera is the ring reflection. Even if you don't have glasses, you're now staring into the center of a giant blinding light. No thanks.
I recently bought a light for my plants since my office is in my garage and they get very little light there.
It’s a 40W COB LED and a 20W as well, both around 4000K. Both have fairly substantial peaks in the 200-300nm and 600-700nm ranges (suitable for photosynthesis), and their CRI is 97.
These lights are absolute game changers. I ordered a 150W with a CRI of 95 and a very similar photometric report which I plan to put further away from my desk and use as a sort of diffuse light to get more of this very natural feeling light into the space.
The ability to grow plants so well is a huge plus too. But I’ve never had a higher quality picture in meetings, I feel way happier at my desk, I get less eye fatigue, and other perks. Good light is worth every penny.
Initially I purchased from Soltech Solutions but now I’m looking at Yuji LEDs. I’m not sure of their quality, but the photometric reports look right and the prices aren’t so low as to be too good to be true.
Look for lights with photometric reports which show high values in the blue (400-500 nm) and red (600-700 nm) parts of the light spectrum. That's what plants crave. These can be all over the map in terms of price, but if you want it to be nice in living spaces, aim for something with a neutral-to-warm temperature and relatively high CRI. Your price point will increase, but these lights last a long, long time and make a substantial positive difference in my opinion.
Great tips! In my bedroom office, I have a west-facing window behind my monitor, with thermal curtains for night and honeycomb light filtering blinds for the afternoon when sun is bright. Also an overhead light. I think its pretty good lighting, though daylight is inconsistent as a lighting source, so that makes it hard to stitch together recordings made across a workday and have them look cohesive.
Yea. To the left of my desk is a southern facing window that in the morning is blindingly bright. It's also subject to fun weather effects like partly cloudy days where the light can vary wildly. If I'm doing something I need to care about, then I just close the shades as much as possible and rely entirely on my lighting setup. It's a little annoying to be blocking out the nice sunny day in favor of artificial lighting...but that's what it takes sometimes.
Then on my breaks I just make sure to go outside and enjoy said sun.
Huh, I've never heard of "three-point lighting", but accidentally stumbled into the practice.
My office is in a spare bedroom, where the East wall is my desk with 1500 lumens of bias lighting behind my monitor, the South wall is a TV with 2900 lumens of bias lighting and the North wall is a big window where I've put a 1600 lumen lightstrip on top of the holder of the shade, pointing upwards.
I run it all (Hue lights) at 6500K during the daytime while I'm working, find it to be plenty of light, and I can't see any of the actual bulbs as points of glare.
I’m not going to criticise the authors choices because each situation is unique. But if you’re both working from home then I do wonder if your money is better spent moving out of the Bay Area and thus somewhere you can have a 3 or 4 bedroom house. Rather than trying to suffer through an ineffective home office.
This is what I did. I had two young children (still young but not as young as when this anecdote happened) and we ended up moving to accommodate for working from home. Before we moved I was finding my home office space (a literal garage) was freezing during the winter and boiling during the summer. And like the author, it was affecting my ability to work. So my options were go back to the office, or buy something more suitable for working from home.
It also came with the bonus of a bigger garden for our kids to play in.
I think for many the decision to live in a HCOL metro area has never really been about proximity to work.
I moved to Los Angeles without a job simply because that’s where my partner and I wanted to live. We were both made remote, but that doesn’t change anything.
Some of us certainly do love city life. My current job is remote, and my family could live anywhere; we chose to give up our spacious house in a charming small town, with a lawn and a garden and separate home offices for me and my wife, and move back to the city, where we now live in a two-bedroom townhouse. No more home office - I visit a coworking space instead - but we're in a lovely walkable neighborhood near the heart of it all. We are much happier here and wouldn't go back.
I’m not being passive aggressive in the slightest. If anything, I have an appreciation for how hard their situation is because I’ve been there myself.
Let me rephrase my original point: I was in a similar situation and realised that hacking my house wasn’t going to cut it. But I also understand that my personal circumstances might have been different from the authors in ways that aren’t publicised.
What is disappointing is that you felt you needed to create a burner account to post your criticism.
I was in the same situation as the author and the purpose of my comment was to share my experiences. It’s hard working and raising kids. So I fully appreciate their position.
And that’s the last I’m going to say on the topic.
This comment makes a lot of sense if you're a time traveler from several decades ago, but a lot has changed since the 1960s. There are plenty of very diverse suburbs in any sense of the word and suburbs now also run the gamut across all levels of income and affordability from the top to the bottom. If you wish to live in a suburb in America, you can, regardless of income level and regardless of what you look like and whether you want to live around people who look like you.
If there is a particular area you're thinking of where this isn't the case, it's probably an outlier -- you'll want to explore the US a bit more. Houston, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Las Vegas etc are all examples of "second tier" cities (not the new yorks, LAs, SFs of the world) that while less attractive to the wealthy who can live anywhere, have plenty of room for regular working families of all sorts.
Then there's the third rate smaller cities and large towns, where you'll also find both plenty diverse places and plenty not so diverse, and you'll find even more affordability -- but possibly not as good a job market.
I think living in a "second rate" US metro area is the sweet spot for raising a family on working incomes -- jobs are available, unlike lesser areas, but housing is affordable, unlike fancier areas.
Black Americans primarily live in the southeast.
Oftentimes when you see online disparagement of the south as poor and uneducated, they’re describing predominantly black communities.
Florida and Texas are bastions of Hispanic culture, for obvious reasons.
California is certainly diverse with respect to kale options in the grocery store, though, I suspect.
Orlando is 32% Latino, 22% black. Miami is 70% Hispanic, 12% black.
Florida is a large state, and denying its huuuge cultural centers is misrepresenting it. If you can’t speak Spanish in major Florida cities, you’re not in for a good time.
I am white born and bred (with British parents) but I did actually originally move here to live with my brother who's a part of the LGBTQ community and was excited to be in an area with supportive folks.
Part of the reason I stay here is because I love to be around non-English languages, particularly Spanish and Portuguese. My kids first words have always been a mix of Spanish and English (thanks to our awesome spanish-speaking nannny), which I think is awesome. I hope they can continue to hear many accents and languages in their childhood.
That seems incredibly hyperbolic. You might want to consider broadening your news sources or travelling a bit.
For starters, the US as a whole is less than 60% white. And California, while big, only accounts for ~20% of the non-white population of the US. In other words, there's about 120M people that exist outside of your "99%" bubble.
What? There’s definitely wide sprawl in culture across the US, but it’s bonkers to suggest that the Bay Area is the only place for people who aren’t “white-born-and-bred”.
This was a hoot to read. Thanks for sharing it and popping into the comments.
I was laughing all throughout because you have so much space but are still stuck with a difficult optimization problem.
My partner and I are semi-Digital Nomads and over the years of working from “home” I’d guess we created makeshift office space in about 30 different temporary homes. We are usually somewhere between a 1br and a 3 br, so it always takes a ton of creativity to wrangle the desks, chairs, noise isolation and manage to keep out of the way of your living space. We’ve worked in kitchens, bedrooms, living room couches, closets, woodshops, unheated out buildings, cabins, chalets, hotel rooms (with the furniture against the windows during a hurricane), poolside, and basements during heat waves. Probably my favorite was a 14 person camp bunkhouse in a national forest that I had all to myself with a little space heater to get me through the fall chill before hiking over to the main house after work.
My biggest trick is to make sure at the end of the workday you can close a door, shut a curtain, or throw a big sheet over the desk so that you have some physical separation between work and home.
I spent ~2.5 years working out of a smallish walk in closet during and after COVID.
It was both kinda quiet as it was on the 2nd floor and the kids played in the basement during lockdown. Part of me misses it as the "snug" feeling helped with focus as there weren't really any visual distractions. I did worry about the CO2 later in the stretch of using the closet and still worry about it now that I'm in a basement office that has no windows (but there is a window in the larger basement).
Funny story about working out of a closet:
During COVID, I worked at a place that was famously a bit of "meat grinder" with long hours, short tenure etc. I realized about half way through that I was very good at giving at honest sales pitch about the pros and cons of working there to the point that Recruiting would have candidates on the fence talk to me to try to "close" them.
I would usually start each call with "Yes, this is my closet" and end with "Now, if you come work with us, you TOO might end up working in a closet".
I had a 100% close rate so I guess it wasn't that bad of a joke or I'm a better salesman than I thought.
This seems like a case of lots of small incremental changes being slower, more expensive, and ultimately worse than one big change that addresses the problem.
The office shown is extremely large and already big enough for two people, as was initially tried. The only real problem is the noise.
Instead of having a bunch of work done trying to change the nature of the closet, it seems like the best solution would be to have the contractor construct an entirely new wall dividing the office room in two. Rather than being in a small closet, they now have a large room, with a big window and door, etc. A real wall blocks the noise they're concerned about.
I suggested that to my partner! He was not a fan of having a whole wall installed, sadly. It also would have been a bit difficult as that office space had a high ceiling, skylight, and basement entrance exactly where walk would go. I still fantasize about it though.
Looking at the floor plan I'm curious if some of the storage area is up for grabs. If it's currently unfinished space then it's an opportunity to build in a lot of noise isolation (separated inner wall and a lot of insulation) with shelves on the outside to maximize the remaining storage area.
Yep, I suggested that as well, but I assume it'd be at least 10K, since the "storage room" still has its garage door from when it used to be part of the garage. So that whole wall would need to be re-built, and the room would need to get ducting, vents. Extra 5 or 10K for that conditioning?
Soo, it might happen one day, but I'm not ready to go all in on that yet.
You can run an in-wall unit for a space like that. They're very efficient now, and the nicer models are both way cheaper than routing central air, and very quiet.
The bigger thing is, if it's a garage, it's likely not insulated, which means you'd have to do so for noise/efficiency. Probably still way better than having a desk in your toddler's room though.
Ah, yes I would imagine cost to do the work in the Bay area would be pretty significant unless you can do much of it yourself. Being nonstructural it's not high risk to DIY but with small kids around that's a big project.
Did you at try to lower the noise near your partner? Looking at the picture, I think a carpet and curtains would help. (I do realize that the picture was taken by the realtor before selling to you.)
This might help to remove your partner's remaining voice from recordings at least in your current situation.
There are thermal curtains now. We could carpet that space, though carpets are a pain to wash, and that area also gets treated as a mud room, sooo yeah, probably would get too messy.
I might try hanging up the acoustic sound panel at the start of the curtain track in the bedroom to see if that helps. I suspect the sound waves will just ...wave around it? But I am clearly not an audio engineer. :)
What about just a divider? I got this wonderful free standing curtain rod that uses extendable floor to ceiling rods to keep it in place. It’s really good at breaking up rooms
A lot of sound can be absorbed by just introducing mass, e.g. a full bookshelf. Shelves need bracing for earthquakes, but if you think of "library quiet", a lot of that is created by how the space is filled, not because people actually behave differently in a library.
Ground vibration also needs mass to dampen, and it's harder to solve without expensive treatments since it ultimately depends on placement relative to loadbearing elements - jumping up and down on a structural beam will be overall less noisy than the flooring in between.
That said, you can lower the frequency by borrowing the techniques of weightlifting platforms: alternating layers of a dense rebond foam and wood.
It seems like work-from-home is going to be more of a thing over the next 30+ years than it was over the past 30 years (leaving the past 3 years as an exception to both). Work from home also seems to often involve multiple people in the same household working independently (both having two adults working at different jobs, as well as kids working on educational stuff).
This seems like it should change how houses are designed. A separate "writer's cottage" or "workshop" has a lot of value, but I've always just had N+1 bedrooms even when I lived alone so I could dedicate a bedroom as an office (and in my current place, the biggest bedroom is the office; the small bedroom is my actual bedroom).
Really enjoyed reading this! It’s very informative reading about the effectiveness of each measure you took. I’ve had a room dedicated as my office since moving into our house, but it’s on the main level of our home which means, ahem, a great deal of child noise. I’ve often wondered if a corner of a bedroom, unused as is the rest of upstairs during the day, wouldn’t offer a far more sound-isolated environment. Probably with solid core doors it would be a much better option.
It’s funny how most of us feel like we “need” a dedicated room, but really, a bedroom is in many ways an ideal space to give a second, daytime use to, unless you have a partner at home who takes naps or something.
> It’s funny how most of us feel like we “need” a dedicated room, but really, a bedroom is in many ways an ideal space to give a second, daytime use to
From many years of experimentation and experience, I can say with a high degree of confidence that I really do need a dedicated room. It's not an issue of practicality, it's an issue of mindset. I need a room that is used only for working and nothing else, so that when I'm in there, my brain is triggered to be in "work mode".
Also, if I'm sharing a workspace with other uses, that means I can't leave things sprawled out in between work sessions.
> for now I bought a WeWork subscription!
Ahh, this indicates that we have very different needs indeed! Hotdesking/shared workspaces -- WeWork or otherwise -- don't actually work for me at all.
First, I completely acknowledge the usefulness of putting yourself in a dedicated space for the task of work, helping you to train your mind to focus on work things at work time, and hopefully only at work time.
Don't get me wrong, coworking (without an expensive private office) has major downsides, I would love to not have to set up my workspace and tear it down (complete with portable monitor, and keyboard and mouse), and also to not have to lug all this heavy stuff with me daily, but my move was out of sheer necessity because of how loud and disruptive little kids are in the afternoon. The setup/teardown waste 5 minutes daily, but interruptions wasted hours.
What I've learned is just that we've each got to find a way to work within the options available to us. With an infinite budget I'd build a super nice 10x20 office in my backyard, but tbh the proximity to a well-meaning little kid who craves my attention would still limit the effectiveness of that plan.
> a bedroom is in many ways an ideal space to give a second, daytime use to, unless you have a partner at home who takes naps or something
Or, as is fairly common among tech workers, your partner's sleep schedule differs from yours (one of you needs to work late nights or early mornings due cross-timezone meetings, on-calls, deadlines, performing childcare during part of normal business hours, etc.)
Or, as is fairly common among parents with young children, the bedroom routinely sleeps 3+ people.
What is going on in this floor plan? A bedroom with no doors and which you must travel through to get from office to kitchen. But also: an office with a closet, and then a bonus "storage" room and actual closed door garage.
Lol, good question. The house is from the 1950s and originally had a detached two-door garage, without the office space. Then they turned the two-door garage into the office + storage room (which still has the door opener in it!), and added a single-door garage next to it.
I think the obvious thing to do is to replace the new temporary curtain track in my bedroom with an actual wall, so that we can walk to the office without going through bedroom, but we don't need to do that yet. It'd help with sound though, if I keep with my office in the bedroom.
I've been WFH for 5 or so years, I have the uncanny ability to be able to work anywhere, anytime, a sort of mind switch that flicks itself - or doesn't, and then I'm screwed - irrespective of location, and then the surrounding world fades out when I am in my mental space.
I never had an issue with my partner or otherwise people being in the same space... until I had a kid. That changed everything, when our child is home I just stopped being able to not pay attention, even when they are in another room, and now I definitely see the - previously moot - benefit I would get from a dedicated room with a door + soundproofing.
As for the bedroom solution, that just would not work for me. My bedroom is a sanctuary: work - and any other cause of concern or otherwise stress - needs to stay out of it or my ability to sleep soundly - or at all - suffers greatly.
Regarding lighting, I set up the whole house with smart bulbs and set up Adaptive Lighting with Home Assistant, which also helped a lot with sleep issues.
My first rented office was a single room that measured less than 50 square feet. I was able to get a desk and a chair in there but that was it. It had one of those old time doors, half frosted glass. I felt like a noir private eye.
Possibly unpopular opinion, but I wonder if one day we'll realize that having home offices is less efficient than having actual offices. The same goes for gyms. Sure, it's nice to have an exercise bike and some dumbbells at home, but a real gym is better equipped, easier to maintain (as in: I don't have to maintain it), and gets a lot more use out of it than my home gym ever would.
I don't want to work out of a closet. I hate working from my living room. I don't want to move to a bigger abode just so I can WFH more easily. A shitty open plan office is worse than my home office, but I miss having a nice office a short commute away.
I had an office, with a locking door and a north facing window wall, so I never fried in the sun. It was dead silent, walls were soundproofed. It was glorious, I could focus and rarely needed to move to a meeting room, my office had plenty of space and a whiteboard. They were on an extremely long-term lease and it was a marvellous anachronism. The commute was a damned nightmare. A soul destroying 30 minutes to one hour stop and go. The lease expired, offices demolished and we moved to what became my first open office layout. I made it a few months before resigning. Absolutely hated it and I struggled to get anything done. However, I could walk to work, which is always a great thing for a health and mind clearing after work.
I’m back to working from home again we have a nearby office that I visit occasionally for meetings. It’s a separate room north facing window (West and south aren’t great at all). For me, there are tax benefits to help cover the cost, and the savings on a commute, restaurants for lunch, and dry cleaning easily cover the rest. Time savings are great, but I recommend keeping the commute at the end of the day, take different walks around the neighbourhood. Find new businesses, meet neighbours. It’s much better than the same walk each day to work.
It's not that unpopular of an opinion, just maybe it's unpopular within the HN demographic.
I work remote. I rent an office about 3 miles from my home. If I continue to work remotely for 10 years, my total cost in rent (which includes heating/cooling/electric/etc) will still be less than my family expected to pay to put an office-sized addition onto our house. My office also has fiber internet now which I cannot get at my home.
But the biggest benefit is that when I'm at the office, it's a separate place from home, so I do office things at the office and home things at home. The separate physical places really help my brain to context switch. Plus, trying to do work at home when the kids are also home, before/after school or on school breaks, is very difficult for me.
Its interesting to see all the comments about work/family separation. I am definitely not a role model in terms of maintaining a good split but I’m also not sure how possible it is for me as a nursing mum. Back when I was pumping, I had to think about that constantly through the day. And now I’m done with that but still nurse in the afternoons. Maybe once I’m done with pregnancy and nursing and all that, I’ll be able to have a clean switch.
I feel like WeWork was, at its core, a good idea. If there were more small office parks near people’s neighborhoods, where desks could be leased long term for reasonable amounts, “remote” work would be a lot more comfortable than centralized office space.
And with all these office building real estate issues, I’m honestly shocked a replacement for WeWork hasn’t successfully made an impact in this space yet.
Some of my best and most rewarding long term adult friendships have come as the result of working with people in various office configurations. I'm astonished at the strong desire for physical isolation that so many people here are ever on about. But, not my business, you do you. One by one. Alone :) oh, and on top of that, there is a heavy overlap here with people who wish to flee any city, it's an interesting correlation. I love cities, for the daily variety they offer on so many dimensions. But this is not why I'm writing.
I just wanted to share a "home office arrangement" that I invented which I like quite a bit. It's probably more for a bachelor situation than couple, depends on your other, and not for the smallest of spaces, but it's a way to make a space like a living room do double duty. I've done it in several houses/apartments I've lived in and I won't go back.
The trick is this: if your couch has its back to a wall, move the couch out from the wall, and hide a desk and chair behind it, facing in the same direction as the couch. You can still use your living room as a living room, and if you're pounding a keyboard all day, a living room is a nice place to sit; I don not like staring at walls, I like depth. moderate clutter will remain mostly hidden, and you can also see the TV if you want to watch youtubes while you're on your keyboard.
I love cities, never want to move out of my very downtown apartment, and also never want to work in an office again. People (especially city people) who equate a preference for remote work with a "strong desire for physical isolation" must live very different lives than I do.
The fact I work remotely means I have more flexibility and social energy at the end of the day to spend socializing with friends or at after-work sports leagues. When my best friend's mom died it let me spend TONS of time at their apartment so they would not be alone. It let me housesit for my partner's mother. Before we moved in together it let me work from their place and see more of them. I can, and often do, have lunch with friends who live nearby. Working remotely and isolation are just not on the same axis for me. It helps that my company has a very strong remote culture, but the job I had during early COVID did not and I still felt quite satisfied when we went remote.
100% agreed on the depth thing though. Nothing worse than staring at a wall while working-I like that from my desk I can see my entire living room, my front door, my bookshelves, etc.
As a child of two architects, I have to know... How did this house end up designed such that half the house is only accessible from the other half by passing through someone's bedroom?
It's almost a shotgun house, which is weirdly common in some places despite being THE WORST architectural style for homes. I lived in one once, and having to walk through the bedroom to get from one side to the other is just as bad as it sounds. Bad for couples, even worse for roommates.
Great writeup! I did recently get honeycomb light filtering blinds for my bedroom office window, as afternoon sun gets way too bright, but thermal curtains make it too dark. So now its:
- morning: no curtains
- afternoon: honeycomb blinds
- night: thermal
Ah, I'm having sun problems in my new office too. I just draped a blanket over the window, but a two tier system like you describe might give me the best of both worlds
Has anyone had any success using an office-pod[1]? They don't seem cheap, but do seem less expensive than converting an otherwise unfinished space (like a basement or garage).
We have them at our office, and they suffer from many of the problems in the blog post. The lighting is atrocious, and they can get stuffy after a while. At least for the small ones, you also have very little room.
A point in their favor, though, is that they are very soundproof, at least the ones that we have.
One of my previous offices had one. It was cool, but very small and uncomfortable. In terms of mobility and spaciousness, it's sort of like working out of a coach airplane seat.
Not quite the same but when we were rebuilding during COVID we knew we wanted two good WFH spaces but really only had room for one (tiny) office - as our second we built a shelf in our bedroom wardrobe that lifts up to reveal a work surface and a 32" monitor - inspired by this guy's work on ikeahackers:
Works really well and given the cost of space for a second desk it was a very cost effective solution - only minimally affects the utility of the wardrobe as a wardrobe. (We didn't build the laptop holder this guy describes, the laptop just gets sat on top of the clothes in the drawer below that shelf with attention to make sure we're not blocking a fan intake. We had a powerpoint and a ethernet port put into the back of the wardrobe but actually we just end up using Wi-Fi mostly.)
Nice! I think we’re going to turn the closet office back into a closet, add built in shelves, but make sure one of the shelves is at desk level and that others are removable. That way we still have a backup desk.
I built a small corner of my garage into a work space. I have a portable AC and space heater for temp control, the walls are lined with soundproof acoustic panels (denser than the foam in this article's pictures). the space is enclosed using some 2x4s and plywood panels (all of which can be broken down quickly and reassembled, there's nothing permanent). I built a sliding barn door.
I didn't put a huge amount of effort into the sound isolation, the acoustic panels mainly reduce echos but do nothing for low vibrations (people walking around the house, cars idling outside, airplanes). I have total control over the lighting (I don't want to see any daylight when I'm working). It can get a little stuffy if I don't turn on the AC/fan.
Personally I love working in a little space with my back to a wall. Because of the acoustic tile, many people think I'm just in a work office. I find the limited view (basically I'm looking at a monitor with a wall right behind it) keeps me from getting distracted.
it's a combination of finding it challenging to look at a screen when it's really bright around (contrast loss) as well as I find the view distracting. I've already had multiple million-dollar views of the Golden Gate Bridge, etc, now I just want to concentrate on my screen.
If the drawing is to scale, and the office was created in the area
called storage it does not look that small to me.
I was expecting a walk-in closet.
If I spent most of my time streaming and recording, I would not want
any sunlight. The sun changes position, there are clouds and rain,
all of which create different lighting conditions, and makes it difficult
to create a consistent palette of colors.
Most noticeable if you are recording (as she does) and you do
one session from morning til lunch, one session in the evening and
the last session tomorrow morning.
The colors would be changing.
(As a guy who spent years as a pro photographer these things scare me.)
She may use the righlight to overpower the sun that would mostly work
but it would look harsh.
I think she should look into microphones.
I am not sure what she uses, but you can get microphones
+ limiter/compressor that would make it fairly easy to
not pick up stray sounds. (up to a point).
I used to have a full blown desk, and a library with lots of books behind me, but I replaced all of it with a "temporary" hack: an Ikea closet [1].
I say"temporary" because I haven't changed it since the start. It's also very convenient: when I open up the door, the closet lights automatically turn on, and when I close the whole thing, it's like the office isn't even there...
I'm still working on convincing my wife to put a baby grand in the reclaimed space however, which seems to be a bigger task.
Ah well, first class world problems I guess... Move along people!
I very much feel the pain, my house is too small and we really could use two more bedrooms.
Alas, that's not in the cards, so my office is the garage. I installed a mini split and it does a great job keeping it cool in the summer, and an ok job keeping it warm in the winter.
It's actually an excellent room for me - I use it as an office, my workout stuff is out there, and I play music out there too. The only disadvantages are the fact that it can't be solely dedicated to work, that I have to dedicate a good amount of the space to bikes, toys, mower, etc, and of course the minor quibble that there's no room for the cars in the garage.
(But honestly, when your house is just over 1000sqft, what kind of madman would give up an extra 400 in the garage just for cars?!)
Sounds like you need a cancelling microphone. At my university we had to make a lot of videos for distance learning, and after quite a bit of experimenting we used Poly Blackwire 5200 headsets [1]. Not only do these headsets cancel out office noise, they cancel out traffic, planes right overhead, weedeaters right outside, etc. Any noise from more than a few metres away, except for loud sharp cracks (e.g. door slamming), seems to just disappear.
I have fantastic noise cancelling headphones from Bose, but that doesn't reduce the sound for folks listening to my microphone or for recorded audio in my videos. I do also have a pretty decent microphone (Elgato Wave 3) with a pop filter and arm, which definitely helps, but you can still hear my partner in recordings.
Cancelling microphone, not cancelling headphones. The mic boom has two microphones, one pointing at your mouth, and one pointing out, and by combining the two external noise can be cancelled.
Ahh, sorry, I misread! Thanks for the recs. There have been a few other mic recommendations in the thread, so I'll have to figure out what my next upgrade will be.
Seems like there are a lot of rooms to try out. I suspect the living room or sun room would offer enough distance so that noise is not a distraction. Use a temporary table if this is not aesthetically pleasing when guests come for example.
Fair point! I have a 4 yr old and 1 yr old that sometimes must be home in the living room and sun room (which we use as the stroller room), so I really want to be able to have a door between my office and their areas.
Last year we had an exchange student and an au pair, both of whom required their own room - so I got moved out of my office and into the space where our washer and dryer were. Aside from getting pretty warm in the summer, it was fine. My work reimbursed me for a nice pair of noise canceling headphones and that was the biggest issue.
I have since been relocated back into a bedroom after the student and Au Pair left. In some ways. The only downside really has been that the table next to me stayed in the room and my wife adopted it as her workspace…
The year is 2036. With the office gone, your whole identity is only known through your online persona, the effectiveness of which is gauged by your audio and video quality. In the days of yore, a crisp suit and power tie would send a message. Now, it’s your AV. Tacky? Yes, but so was the suit.
This summer, Audio Feedback Loop is proud to release “Can You See My Screen”, the thrilling sci-fi event of the year that has critics dropping praise like “we can’t hear you” and “for the love of god, figure out how desktop audio works”.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the improved noise cancelling on tools like Zoom and even Teams, a dog can explode nearby or a child start bawling and nobody can hear it.
It’s relatively common, and the smaller the dog the louder the explosion apparently.
I have a theory based on inverse volume and volume combined with relative importance of the call I’m on. If I’m muted on a boring call it seems to defuse all known dogs.
There were some great ideas in the article that would also improve the working conditions in corporate offices. I especially like the curtain behind the chair in order to make sure that no one crosses the video stream accidentally. This is something that happens a lot in corporate open floor settings.
Apart from that monitoring the air quality is also something that usually is not done in the corporate environment.
How is the seal around the bedroom door? Weatherproofing foam strips might help.
For the bottom of the door, there's strips of flexible plastic/rubber/etc usually used on garage doors as a "garage door seal" or "draft stopper". It comes in a roll or a pack of precut strips. I put a strip on both sides of the bottom of the door, flush with the floor.
I'm in Chicago - I pay for a personal office at a coworking space ($500 / mon)
To justify doing that I live in a dorm-type situation where I have shared bathroom and kitchen and only my large bedroom is private. ($800 / mon)
It's in Chinatown and because Chinese people generally keep to themselves, and I work 80 hour weeks (40 dayjob, 40 startup), it works out. When I was paying $1600 for a studio, I'd get annoyed when neighbors were regularly smoking weed. That's not a problem in Chinatown. No one smokes weed.
It's probably not for everyone - but doing both my dayjob and business from home wasn't working out. For a lot of people there's a mental switch if you have to travel and go to an office to do work. I'm one of those people. I just get more work done this way.
Speaking only for myself, I'm a bit "spectrumish," so I am actually claustrophilic. The closet would probably do fine for me.
As it is, I have a 48" standing desk, in the corner of my living room, and that works fine, but I also don't have the same needs as the author. I do occasional Zoom calls, and Bose QC45 headphones, and the Zoom backgrounds, work fine. I do have a portable green screen, that I can set up, if I really need it.
I do spend the majority of every day at the desk (I'm at it, right now).
I have a cat that doesn't like my desk, so I only occasionally get demands for head-scratching, and he leaves me alone, otherwise.
I did try having a separate room for the office, but found I didn't like being separated from the household. My wife is very quiet, and is glad to leave me alone, and pursue her own interests (and I leave her alone).
I actually did like the closet in terms of feeling all cozy! But I can't deal with the feeling of overheating. I actually get something like hot flashes these days, so the feeling of heat can be particularly uncomfortable. If it was well conditioned and ventilated, I would have happily stayed.
But I'm also okay with my little space in the bedroom now :)
Bose headphones are great, one of the best investments I've made, but they don't reduce the noise in recordings, so I had to find other forms of sound reduction.
Really appreciate some of the advice for sound proofing as well as mention of air quality... All good points.
But it seems that the author's situation is one where an office workspace might be the right choice at least for one of them.
There is clearly too much interference with each other and video recording has a very high bar that is not easy to achieve at home - which are built for living not for professional recording.
I personally have few meetings and working from home is great. Background noise cancelation is fairly decent these days too and 99% of meetings are internal, so a crying child or a partner who is also in a meeting in the room next door isn't an issue.
After three years of working from home, I was going stir-crazy. I was lucky enough to have a decent office... but still, stir-crazy.
I set up a second workstation in the living room. This was not super cheap - a "nice" chair/desk/monitor with decent ergonomics with passes partner acceptability testing is going to be tough to do for much less than $1-$2K.
Then my wife started working from home. The living room was no longer a viable place to work.
So this year I started turning the garage into a third office.... siiigh.
Still, if you earn a decent living from working from home, investing a few % of that salary back into your home office setup is generally one of the best investments you can make.
It felt like the foam did improve audio quality but I think the only thing that measurably reduced noise from outside was solid core door. Pricey though!
Agreed that a good microphone is a huge help. I currently use Elgato Wave:3 which is not as fancy as one can go.
Thanks for that post, quite the journey! If you're looking for a new mic, I can recommend the Rode Procaster, it's a a dynamic mic which hardly does pick up any ambient noise whatsoever. I am very happy with it, it should be quite close to your mouth though (not everyone likes that), and I had to get a pre-amplifier (CloudLifter) for some extra gain. Without it, volume was a bit low. Here's a write-up of my set-up touching on the mic and some other stuff: https://www.morling.dev/blog/whats-on-my-desk/.
Thanks for the recs! It's so hard to decide when/whether to upgrade my mic. Would Rode Procaster be better than the Elgato Wave:3 (what I have now)? They seem to cost similarly.
I have never used the Elgato, so I can't speak to its qualities. When I was on the market for a mic though, I've found the Procaster to be on a completely different level than any USB mic I had tried (the Procaster connects via XLR, i.e. an audio interface is needed). It just gives you this nice soothing "professional audio" sound. No affiliations with the vendor btw, just really happy with the mic :)
Noise cancelling headsets only help isolate yourself from the outside world and won't help to cancel noise for your audience. Good microphones are built to pick up every tiny sound around them including all the background noise - that's what they're meant for. And buying a crappy "noise cancelling" microphone is just going to ruin the good quality sound that you're looking for from a standalone mic - you might as well just add a noise gate (which also sounds a bit jarring and isn't ideal). One option is to instead buy a shotgun mic but that's also not an ideal option for a live stream where your head is probably not going to be in one location for long periods of time.
Basically, no amount of hardware or software can fix a bad sound environment.
Hence the boom microphone. Preferably with acoustic cancelling.
The boom places the microphone close to your mouth so it's gain is very low. Having two mics on the boom setup to constructively add only the speaker's voice does extra cancelling.
This is how call centers work
EDIT: by boom mic I mean headsets with a boom attached. High end ones are specifically designed to eliminate ambient noise.
Noise-cancelling boom mics are great in my experience. Even loud external noise just disappears. I did experiments with office noise, planes, trucks, weedeaters, doors slamming, etc., and only the door slams got picked up.
I disagree because the context here is that they're a streamer. It sounds like there were two goals with the acoustic treatment: (1) to improve sound quality from within the closet which I take to mean echos and reverb and (2) to avoid picking up their partner's voice during meetings. I think it especially makes sense given the closet is in the office where their partner is taking meetings.
Your suggestion of noise canceling head-set only helps prevent her from hearing her partner, not the stream's audience.
Although I have a comfortable home office, I still rent a small office within walking distance. It has a conference room and desks for both myself and my business partner. I've found I'm more focused and productive working from there, as it helps me mentally separate work from my personal life. There's a daily ritual of 'going to work' and then coming home, which allows me to switch modes between 'work' and 'family.' This was especially helpful during the COVID lockdown.
Everyone is different. I've been mostly/fully remote for a couple of decades now. My primary machine is a 14" MBP (sometimes a 16" MBP for clients). I use "multiple desktops" religiously on MacOS. This pattern works for me and I can work from my couch, bed, kitchen table the same way. When traveling, this pattern works as well.
Is it optimal? No. I prefer mechanical keyboards and have multiple servers in my house. But a consistent work solution is more important.
I used a walk-in closet for an office. It was great. I had a small glass-topped table in a 6’ x 8’ closet. However there were clothing closet bars on two walls, an extra bureau of draws, and piles of junk, too. Now this was in Florida. Besides paying bills, I had to prepare a large document in support of a $50k damage claim due to a hurricane. My report was so convincing they paid every cent. I therefore have fond memories of that closet office.
I've often thought about renting a private office "downtown." Think along the lines of Sam Spade or such film noir where there are small private offices along a central hallway (complete with frosted door glass and my name stenciled on the glass.
A least one Japanese railway company has set up business https://www.stationwork.jp with closets for rent in stations. I've never used one, but perhaps they have the formula for a closet office that might be useful. Looking around the non-closet options they have I'm not sure I like the idea of "workation" at a resort.
The garage, storage, office and bedroom are all a single "room" with no corridor, leaving you with no way to close of any of these spaces (for privacy) without blocking off other parts of the house to the rest of the occupants?
I know I’m digressing here, but I’m curious: Are you not concerned with putting the layout and details/photos of the inside of your home on the internet? (Yes, I know there are other ways to retrieve layouts.)
I figure that property owners are public record already, and those plans are already on the public real estate website, so I feel I’m not technically revealing more than what can already be discovered. Maybe I’m wrong though!
By that logic though, most things the average person considers personal or sensitive can be discovered yet it’s generally considered good practice to not actively expose intimate aspects of our lives to the world. E.g., it’s relatively easy to find most folks’ home addresses yet most folks wouldn’t feel comfortable posting their home address on the internet, and if someone else does it, it’s considered doxxing.
Anyway, I was just curious. Thank you for answering.
The closet idea was a good one but you need intake and exhaust fans to circulate the air for CO2 and good temperature control. Something like the airframe system would work fine.
I feel like I must be missing out on something or be very adaptable relative to the HN crowd. I’ve worked in my cloffice - barely big enough to stand in, ventless, and windowless - for nearly four years now. It’s not my daily workspace, as I occasionally work on the porch, at the dining table, by our bay windows, etc etc.
I’d say 60% of working full time at home is spent in the cloffice that, based on these comments, might be depriving my body of oxygen in a harmful way I must not be noticing. Am I oblivious?
I'm surprised to see the desk with her computer and stuff right next to the bed where toddler sleeps. I guess she packs it all away or somehow makes it toddler proof each evening.
It is a standing desk, so sometimes I raise it, if the little ones are messing with stuff. They usually have more fun destroying the rest of the house, however. :)
pro tip: if you're dwelling in apartments and can't spare a bedroom or closet, use a "grow tent" ($150-$250 on Amazon) to isolate your workspace from toddlers and spouses
- big enough for standing desks
- most noise isolation headphones will clean up your audio for meetings
- add whatever solid color backdrop or virtual backgrounds to clean up your video
- built-in air circulation to/from windows
Only tangentially related to your comment, but I've always found that people who live in dense environments complain about their neighbors less than those who have more space. People who have an acre or five of land see to ALWAYS be annoyed at whatever their neighbors are doing!
I couldn’t disagree more. I’d be interested in any sort of evidence, or something, to expand on your claim. I have lived in various areas that fit that description my entire life, never experienced annoyed neighbors or heard 3rd party complaints, etc.
That storage room is half of an old 2-door garage. It still has the garage door instead of a wall, floors are concrete, single outlet and light, and has no heating or air conditioning. So it would require similar upgrades but in a much larger space, so fairly costly. Might do it in the future though!
Yep, maybe a bit scratched up. Also some black mold from when we first used a floor mattress without a frame under it. Never put mattresses directly on hardwood! Lesson learned.
I havent read the source yet just wanted to point out to make sure the closet is well ventilated, get a co2 sensor just to stay safe if using a windowless room is really a must.
I work in a closet, it's in a London converted Victorian terrace house, a flat. The closet is 1.3m wide, 1.8m long... it is small, but it works.
There is background noise, from my partner, and occasionally neighbours and building work in their homes which can be as close as 2-3m from my window, but it works.
I attribute this working to several things:
1. buy a great microphone such as a Shure SM7B with a tight polar pattern focused on the person speaking as this will prevent the pickup of virtually all noise outside of that. this mic needs to be an inch or two from your mouth so you need a decent mic arm. any near-field studio monitor speakers are adequate, your mic will _not_ pick up the sound due to the polar pattern.
2. buy decent lighting, there's a lot online but you can default to Elgato Key Lights and these can do daylight temperatures as well as evening / night temperatures. you want two of these positioned around 45-40' angle offset in front of you on either side and just above the camera (you will not be staring into a blinding light), and one to light up the space behind you. alternatively a single key light with an umbrella / dome, and then 2 lights doing the environmental. this is a useful YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpEeYwrkBPU
3. if you happen to wear glasses and you have a DSLR as a webcam then consider getting a circular polarizing filter, as then you can remove screen reflections from your glasses trivially.
I do not use sound dampening / conditioning in the room, I have some books on a shelf which helps to reduce / prevent echoes, but otherwise I've done nothing despite it being a box closet / room.
I do agree 100% with Pamela that air quality is the biggest issue... everything else can be changed easily. Any CO2 meter, i.e. the Aranet 4 or equivalent, will tell you when to open the window a little, if the CO2 level goes above 700 I open the window.
The office is tiny, there's a lot of equipment in here... and so I never need to heat this room even when it's below freezing outside. In the Summer I need to aircon it, I use a portable aircon... and despite it being noisy for me, the Shure SM7B is basically miraculous and the sound of the portable aircon is extremely low and all of the noise reduction software works perfectly against it (I use Nvidia Broadcast noise reduction only during the Summer when I run the aircon).
Thanks for the recs, especially given your familiarity with Elgato. What OS do you use Shure with? I’ve had suggestions for AV before that ended up working poorly with my Mac M1 so I’d love to know if you’re using Shure with Mac.
A windows laptop, a mac laptop, and also a Linux one.
I've got everything connected to a CalDigit TS4 dock, and a single thunderbolt cable connects any of my laptops to it, that cable also charges the laptop at the same time as connecting the AV and monitor.
I'd probably say I'm mostly Mac and windows, but I've in a while it's Linux... So a 45/45/10 split.
I do prefer the windows laptop if I'm running Aircon in the same room and not using online video conferencing, as then I need Nvidia broadcast for noise cancelling on recordings. But this is entirely due to the portable Aircon and nothing to do with anything else.
It's fascinating to me that "work from home" for many really means, "work from anywhere but the same place your coworkers are."
Comments about "separate buildings" and "renting office space" kind of underscores the real value wfh provides; less human interaction. The only problem with that is human interaction actually ends up making much work easier, not harder.
Separate building on the same property is still very much "from home"—you have no commute, can eat lunch with your family, could invite the dog in if you want, can do laundry during breaks, etc.
Renting office space less so, but it still provides another key benefit to remote work: you can live anywhere. Office space doesn't have to be in a high rise, it can be unused commercial space in a suburb or even in a small town.
If you don't like remote work that's fine, but there's not much point in posting your caricatures of remote work on a thread filled with people who enjoy working remotely.
It's hardly a caricature, when you realize that by working remotely, you're asking someone else to pay the costs of you not being in the room. Maybe for some it's fine, and that's what your manager can do for you, but if you're WFH and your whole team isn't, the cost is shifted to someone else.
But for workplaces that presume WFH is cost-free and all benefits, someone there is suffering on behalf of the people who WFH.
There’s plenty of costs the work in office crowd are shifting as well. Look at the hit the economy took from people not being prepared to work from home during a pandemic. Look at how offices inflate the prices of everything surrounding them and artificially force densification. Look at the environmental catastrophe office culture has caused through commuting.
The work in office crowd also forcibly shifts costs onto their coworkers by forcing them into the office under threat of firing, but the inverse never happens. I have a disability and had a legal entitlement to WFH for years which was routinely denied as a result of fraud where HR departments would claim undue hardship regardless of legitimacy. Since COVID this no longer flies as there is abundant proof that employers can in fact perform such accommodations trivially in many cases.
Work in office cost shifting was enforced through force and crime, so I have little sympathy for complaints of the costs of the work from home crowd voluntarily doing what they prefer to do.
"Work from office" is just "work". That's the default; you go somewhere, provide value in exchange for money, and go home. There was no "shifting" unless you mean pre-capitalistic agrarian societies where "work" meant doing literally everything yourself.
That's not how the history of work actually happened.
Specialization predates dedicated work spaces by millennia—the ancient Egyptians didn't "do literally everything themselves", they had quite sophisticated division of labor, with craftsmen regularly operating out of their homes. Even after people started receiving wages, work continued to be routinely done at home. It was less efficient to maintain a second space large enough for all your laborers than it was to just send them home with the materials they needed to get the job done, then have them come back with the finished product.
The industrial revolution changed that because now there were very expensive machines that were doing mostly actual work, and the people needed to be where those machines were. Once people were primarily interacting with ideas centralization still continued to be preferable because communication technology was limited.
COVID proved that the centralization is no longer necessary—our communication tech is sufficient to run an effective team distributed across the world, and very few jobs have the kind of large, expensive shared machinery that started the centralization process. There may still be preferences towards shared spaces, but those are personal preferences, they're no longer just the reality of work.
There was a 200 year window where centralization was a necessary feature of industrialization and knowledge work, but that era has come to an end, and it certainly wasn't long enough to become some sort of evolutionary fact of life!
Sorry but ancient Egyptians absolutely had dedicated workspaces separate from their homes. Obviously these places were more proximate to their homes insofar as their transportation methods limited the reasonable distances their workplaces could be, and a lack of zoning laws meant the intermingling of habitation spaces alongside these artisanal craftsmen you're referring to.
Further, this doesn't even disagree with my claim; what you've said here doesn't in any way support the claim that the "default" way of working was at home, and only "recently" did work centralize. Quite the opposite; work has always been "remote" in some sense. Even just practically, few people literally had the luxury to live exactly in the place where they worked, down to the room, as a great deal of work actually took place outside of any "room".
Additionally, COVID did not prove anything except that we can temporarily mitigate losses by working apart. Since, it's become very clear that such work styles create undue burdens on the folks who don't work remotely in order to support those who do, unless a company is entirely dedicated to remote work, which nearly none are.
I do go somewhere - I go to my home office. I have an entire formal written agreement which stipulates that I am to work from this location, and not other locations. If I’m stuck in a different city - tough luck - I need to haul ass back home.
This is a location where I have expended great effort in creating a productive and specialized workspace engineered to deal with personal medical issues largely using money out of my own pocket. I went to this expense, not just to benefit myself, but out of a sincere desire to be as productive as possible at my job.
Oh well if it's formal, that suddenly makes it totally okay and therefore nobody is paying for you to do that in extra effort...
My point is that in situations like yours, there's always a loser, and they often don't get a choice. You're benefitting, but the people you have an agreement with have passed the cost of keeping you in the loop and productive onto someone else, and that someone else can't decide to end remote work for you if the burden it too high.
Of course, SOMEBODY needs to at the very least needs to lay fiber-optics and rack networking gear to make remote work, work. I was one of those people for year. I was at one point the only person in a building full of servers. When I say the ONLY person, in a building of hundreds of people, I mean across departments, and I was paid a pittance extra for my service. The janitors would wish me good night and I would activate the alarm on my way out the door.
You can sure bet I worked my ass off to reduce that companies need for an on-site presence. It was also because one of my backups was disabled and I didn’t want to push that cost onto them. Another went for into a car accident and went on disability and it was bad enough that their personality changed when they came back. Shit fucking enraged me, I just did math in my head about how many employees my employer killed or maimed on the highways yearly with its forced office attendance policy and it was a decent number.
Of course, I respect the sacrifices of anybody doing such work and staying in the office so people can stay home.
Yet what we saw with on-premise work wasn’t that. What we saw was managers misappropriating company resources to have employees keep them company and make them feel important and follow them around to flex on their contemporaries. Who threw tantrums and threatened peoples livelihoods and broke disability accommodation laws to get their way. There are people who need to “come in to work” but it’s a LOT less than who was actually coming into work.
It's more like the constant coordination of disparate people, keeping those people motivated and aligned, making sure they're getting full access to all of the resources that would be otherwise trivial to provide to people collectively in an office.
And there's zero reason to believe that driving to work killed anyone. That's like saying being born killed people. The causes of people's car accidents are what killed them, not the reason they were driving.
Of course meeting in person can be a good way to deal with such concerns, but it doesn’t need to happen five times a week. Sometimes solving such problems just means sending an email.
There are also a significant number of companies that are remote only and successful and totally reject the need for this at all but of course - this won’t work for all workplaces or all workers. Just saying.
Are you one of those managers who insist on talking to me twice every day: "What are you doing right now?". Maybe treat people like grownups, not toddlers at least sometimes.
I'm in school full time, so no. The problem isn't that managers need to be able to check on employees, it's that everyone needs to be able to interact with one another face-to-face to optimally work, and when they can't, it's the people who manage them that actively suffer.
Maybe the tech will catch up to that, but it currently doesn't.
In a lot of cases in densely populated cities, commute each way is half an hour and people are paying tons for rent or mortgages in part because they want to be near their jobs.
Let's say your employee works 9-5, but really they start their commute at 8:30 and get home at 5:30 so it takes 9 hours. Imagine how much better some employees would perform with an extra hour of rest a day instead of essentially forcing them to drive because face to face interaction is awesome.
Some employees are literally not going to go to one meeting the entire day. They will drive. Sit at a desk. Talk to nobody. Then go home. It's a strange thing.
Also, just as there are people on tech who really thrive off the face to face interaction, there's a whole lot of people who got into technology BECAUSE they aren't good at face to face interactions.
People who got into tech because they're bad at human interaction will find no refuge working professionally. You're a burden to your company and your coworkers if you're in a role that requires coordination and you refuse to coordinate.
For roles that require little/no team coordination, it's acceptable to not work in the office most days. That isn't what a software developer job is, however, nor is it the vast majority of white-collar jobs generally.
Yes, you must commute. Yes, it takes time. But that's what the money is for. You wouldn't do this for free, so they compensate you for the inconvenience. The hour lost in a commute is infinitely made up for in the human interfacing that happens in person.
You sound like you think of yourself as a loser to remote work, but I assure you that in most cases there are not losers. My company is fully remote and we all choose to be here. No one is bearing any burden of the rest of us being remote because we all are remote and we structure our work accordingly.
I'm sorry your job sucks, but I suggest again: get another job. Wasting time telling other people in a completely different work environment how much your job sucks isn't going to persuade them that they're in the wrong.
This has nothing to do with my situation; I'm currently a full time student.
My observation is in general, not about any specific situation. Remote work has costs, and your leaders have decided those costs are better than the in-person costs. That's fine, and in a fully-remote environment it can work, but pretending like it's strictly "better" is unjustified.
We have NO IDEA how we’re going to maintain our current levels of energy usage even 100 years from now. We’ll run out of gas, run facefirst into global warming, and electrification with renewables will require a monumental amount of scarce resources and work.
We have a great solution to part of this problem. Move electrons, not people. Even if office culture really was all that and you’re right about everything, at the end of the day it doesn’t even matter because it’s unsustainable. We can’t move to solutions like electric self-driving cars fast enough, the electric co-worker MUST be part of the solution.
So I argue it doesn’t matter if remote is better. The costs of offices are increasing more and more and more and something had to give. It’s not if in office be remote work is better, the question is what benefits most form our limited abilities to work out of an office? Right now office culture is STILL running on borrowed time by having the commuters not pay for the externalities of their emissions. Of course on-site is important but that 5 day in the office culture was ALWAYS going to die.
Electrons can't yet sufficiently replicate the full experience of being in person for teams that still intend on having both, and what the electrons can't cover will be covered by someone, and that tends to be on someone who has no say about their newly added burden.
You talk as though most people who work from home are doing so as an exception to the rule— maybe that's how it is in your organization, but by now most companies have established official policies for WFH. Mine decided to go fully remote, others demanded a returned to the office, and others set up a hybrid system.
If your company landed somewhere on that spectrum that you're unhappy with, that sucks, but that suggests it's time to get a new job, not bitterly caricature your co-workers as only wanting to work remotely in order to avoid interacting with you.
For me, it's the commute that's unbearable. When I was younger, I'd move so that I could walk to work. Now I'm married, and own a house full of things, so that isn't really practical any longer. I'd still happily physically work anywhere that's within a short walk of my house.
"Work from home" is an unfortunately inaccurate label for "work from anywhere the f you want".
As for the whole muh'productivity, I feel like we've beaten this horse to death many times over the past few years. The only reasonable answer is: YMMV.
First, and obviously, it's quiet. No more kids playing in the house chaos. It's private, and can be locked separately, so I can work on my company's confidential stuff. Economical to heat and cool, since it is a very small space. You also get that intangible "separation" of your work life from your home life that your commute used to give you--hard to explain. A brief walk outside to and from the office allows me to reset into work-mode or home-mode. Highly recommended if you can swing it!