How to work from home without going insane (purple monkey dishwasher)

I've also found that when working from home, I crave that social interaction. I'm in the creative business and some of the best ideas I've ever had have come through collaboration with coworkers.

I love the idea of working from home. I just don't know if it will ever work for me.

The points about planning are very well made; it's vital to keep yourself aware of what you're doing.

But you do need to work hard at not losing it. I've lost days to multiplayer 8 ball pool on miniclip (I'm like a sniper on that thing). Right now I've been wearing these clothes all week (but I did have a shower yesterday!). It's difficult when there are other people around - my wife used to get in from work at 5 and start chatting to me and I had to continually remind her that I don't finish till 5.30. I miss fresh air, and I miss talking to people, even though I'm something of a recluse.

It can be hugely fun though! You get a massive amount of control over your workflow, and you get as big a desk as you can fit in your room. Right now I have a shelf unit filled with toy robots in front of me! I voice-skype with my boss almost every day, and we chat on skype all the time. I don't have to worry about taking a few minutes off to pop to the post office or whatever. I save time by not having any traveling time, and I get to make the joke that I walk to work every day!

So in terms of the effects on you personally, yes it can be depressing, but it can also be fun, especially if you manage yourself.

In terms of how it affects your work, we have found that we miss the little 'pondering' conversations by the proverbial water cooler. If I have a problem I'm working on and it gets too much and I want to take a break, I sit at my desk, at home, either tweeting or just thinking to myself. If was at work I might wander over to my boss's desk and start chatting about that product idea we had last week, so it's worth trying to build in some mechanisms to replace those kind of chats between you and your co-workers.

This is a great question. I think the answer is: It depends on what you mean by focus.

Humans are certainly capable of long periods of concentration, of all sorts. Sitting in a tree waiting for the prey to come into range. Sitting under the tree patiently digging out edible roots. Sitting in a band jamming for twelve hours straight. Sitting facing the wall in Zen meditation.

But, in programming, the word focus has a specific and somewhat paradoxical meaning. When we are focused on programming it feels as if we are focused on something. And yet when you think about what you're actually doing in programming the word focus seems less and less appropriate.

Here's programming: You think about the feature you want to build, and then you think about the existing system that you want to attach it to, and then you think about the big picture, and then you think about an individual data structure. And then you sketch the module on a whiteboard, and then you write an empty module file, and then you use a C debugger to find and fix a bug in the module loader, and then you patiently write an editor macro to change a giant text file from XML to JSON, and then you write a unit test for the JSON parser. Then you write the parser. Then you stare at the parser and try to imagine explaining it to a junior PHP developer. And then you sigh and mentally kick yourself for overdesigning and quickly reimplement the parser, except without the tricky metaclass and the tail recursion and the nifty hack that reads like obfuscated Perl, and then you sigh again and get some coffee. And then you find the module loader is still broken after all and you do ten minutes of research into alternative module loaders, during which you realize that maybe you should have used an entirely different framework for this system and make a note to research the alternative framework for your next system.

And this is what programmers call "focus": Bouncing up and down among five or six layers of abstraction, hopefully doing no individual task for longer than five minutes at a time. (After all, this is programming: If you've got an hour of rote typing to do, why isn't there a macro that can do it for you?) But you're focused on something, because the hours are flying by and if someone interrupts you, you tend to want to throw things at them.

And perhaps this is why we programmers have such trouble with focus: The state we call "incredibly productive focus" is actually oddly difficult to distinguish from ADD. But it's focused ADD, and that's the secret.

For me the social piece was the hardest part. Luckily for me there are a couple of co-working places that I hit up once or twice a week. I try to schedule coffee or lunch as much as possible with people I know, and don't know. I also do the occasional coffee shop session, but I can't stay there too long b/c their chairs usually suck.

So I would recommend that people try to network more. Get out of the house. Go do some co-working. You will find that you are not alone on an island, and that really helps.