Ramblings of an aging IT geek
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personal

working from home, minus the linkedin gloss

A candid note on what two years of remote work actually feels like, past the productivity-blog tidiness.

Coffee and books on a desk

The honest version of working from home is that it is mostly very good and occasionally quietly corrosive, and the blogs only ever tell you about the first half. I have done it long enough now to stop pretending the trade is all upside.

The good is real. No commute, which has given me back the equivalent of a working day every week. Quiet when I need to think, which an open-plan office never once provided. Coffee made the way I like it, a desk arranged exactly to my taste, and the freedom to take a walk at 3pm when my brain has clearly clocked off and is just pretending.

The corrosive part is subtler. The day has no edges. Without a train to catch I will keep "just finishing one thing" until it is dark, and the boundary between work and home erodes a little more each week unless I defend it on purpose. The small social friction of an office, the corridor chat, the overheard context, turns out to have carried more weight than I gave it credit for. You miss things you did not know you were learning.

What works for me is artificial structure. A hard stop, a closed laptop lid that means closed, a short walk that stands in for the commute I no longer have. None of it is profound. It is just the scaffolding that an office used to provide for free, rebuilt by hand because the alternative is letting work quietly fill every hour you do not fence off.