Three years ago working from home was an emergency arrangement. Now it is just how I work, and the novelty has worn off enough that I can be honest about it. The honest version is not the productivity-blog version. It is better in some ways I expected and worse in ways I did not, and the worse ones are sneaky.
The good is real, so let me say it plainly. No commute means two hours of my life handed back to me every day, and I will not be giving those back. I can put a wash on between meetings. I am there when a parcel arrives instead of negotiating with a depot. When I need ninety minutes of deep, uninterrupted focus, I can actually get it, which in an open-plan office was a thing of myth. On a good day the work is calmer and the output is higher, and I would not go back to five days in an office for anything.
The bad is harder to name because it does not announce itself. The big one is that the edges of the day dissolve. There is no commute to mark "work is over now", so the laptop stays open and a quick check of Slack at half eight turns into an hour. I have had to build the boundaries by hand: a hard stop, the laptop physically shut and moved, a walk that stands in for the commute I no longer have. Without those deliberate edges the job quietly expands to fill the whole house and the whole evening, and you do not notice until you are tired in a way that sleep does not fix.
The other thing nobody warns you about is the low-grade loneliness. Not dramatic, not depression, just the absence of the small human texture of an office: the corridor chat, the lunch that was not booked, the colleague who notices you are having a rough one and quietly makes you a tea. Video calls do the work but not the warmth. I have learned I have to manufacture the social contact that used to be free, and on the weeks I forget, I feel it.
So: genuinely better, with caveats I take seriously. The trick, for me, has been to stop treating working from home as a perk I am lucky to have and start treating it as a setup I am responsible for getting right. The commute, the office, the colleagues, those used to impose structure on me for free. Now I have to build it myself. When I do, it is the best way I have ever worked. When I let it slide, it is a slow leak. The arrangement is not the answer. What you do with it is.