I've been remote for 5 years. I know about all the benefits, but I'm always curious how others are dealing with the drawbacks. I've written about it a few times here on HN:

- Social isolation

How do you ensure that your social brain is exercised? If I don't make a conscious & deliberate point of it, I can go an entire day without leaving the house, sometimes multiple days.

Working from home can mean 8 solid hours of programming, but that can be difficult to sustain even if you have the environment for it. Natural social breaks are missing in this environment, it's just you and the code.

I do it by breaking up my work into chunks. Being remote allows me the leverage that isolation to give myself blocks of 100% productivity; I intersperse that with going out and doing things.

I often work outdoors in the warmer months. I've got an office at home, but I've also got a handful of places where I can park my Jeep and either hang my hammock or pull out the back seat and work in the shade, with the background noise of nature and/or traffic depending on my mood. I'll do that for 2-4 hours, then go grab a coffee or go to the park with my kids (we homeschool). After a couple of hours of that, I usually go back to one of my spots and do it again. Other days I'll work at night after my wife and kids are in bed.

My plan is to use after-work activities to make up for the social isolation. Though I'm more on the introverted side to begin with, I figure I'll find more people I enjoy spending time with by doing activities with people who like to do those same activities than I would by socializing with my co-workers. Plus even remote it's not like you can't socialize with co-workers over video and chat.

> How do you ensure that your social brain is exercised?

I go play with my friends and family after work, sometimes also at lunchtime.

I have a similar setup, but I also live 2 time zones from my employer. to make things easier, I work 6am-3pm. I often go run errands after work before traffic start getting bad, but sometimes, I end up caught in 'rush hour' traffic and I just feel sorry for all of them. (and I live in a small town of 150k people)

> I live in a small town of 150k people

Even to the US's outsized standards, 150k is a mid-size city, not a small town.