I managed mixed in-office and WFH teams before the pandemic.

There was a stark productivity drop every summer when kids were out on summer break. This includes parents with dedicated home offices who had been WFH for many years.

The effect was so predictable that we planned for lower velocity during summer months. It was also common practice for WFH employees to spend more time in the office for more focus during summer months if they lived close enough.

That’s not to say that kids are the biggest WFH productivity killer. IMO the people who struggled most were the young people who thought they could travel around and work remotely because it doesn’t matter where they’re working from. It turns out it’s plainly obvious that they don’t get much work done when they’re away from home. But that’s another story.

Traveling and even just being new to a town is a huge time suck. Every errand takes twice as long because you don't just have to do it. You have to choose a place, find it, etc. I won't try to visit somewhere and work for less than three months.

There are two ways to make it work I just thought of. One is to have your errands taken care of. Maybe this is because you're visiting family and the groceries are already there. Or, you're rich enough (in that place at least) to pay for someone to do everything. The other big option is to be on tour. Travel in a big group where the work and the travel blend together and there's an efficiency in numbers.

I worked in offices for over 15 years. Every summer, Fridays were a veritable ghost town. Coordination ground to a halt because of misaligned vacations. More time was lost due to company barbecues and picnics than during the winter months.

WFH isn’t the cause. It’s literally just summer itself.

Oddly enough in my locale, we plan for lower velocity during deer hunting season, and pretty much for the rest of the year after that, because people put off their vacations in case they get sick, and have to use up their vacation time at the end of the year.

My wife works for <large defense contractor>. Every December is this hilarious ritual of “when deferred projects contractually committed for the calendar year meets mandatory vacation time meets overtime caps”.

It is pandemonium.

It's also summer, hotter and this lowers your productivity. I always noticed a big drop while at the office during the summer and people take vacations.

> It turns out it’s plainly obvious that they don’t get much work done when they’re away from home. But that’s another story.

That's really interesting - I primarily work from a home office, but if I'm struggling to buckle down and get some documentation done, sometimes I'll head out to a random coffee shop and set up there for a while. It's easier to stay focused when the internet's just that bit slower...

I think the comment was more about globetrotting than visiting the local cafe.

Thats actually interesting, I'm young and decided to go for my first "work from anywhere" and it's been almost two years now and I'm living currently in forest, my internet is slow and not stable... previously was living on small island in a wooden garage next to the beach with unstable GSM connection and no AC and right before it in a fantastic apartament in big city centre with stuning view and best internet connection I ever had.

Based on my experience it doesn't really matter from where but how frequent you change the location as it demands re-organisation from scratch every time.

Big factor in productivity is how satisfied you are from your life in general. When you feel cool and happy then even spending less time will bring more "wise" results than just being "ok" in a own fantastic apartament while hiting a wall for entire day trying to attack a problem.

To add one more thing, I was most productive living in this garage, working maybe 4h per day while rest of my time spending on bicycle, hiking, diving or talking with locals.

At this time my team mates were miserable and while declaring as they working the 8h, effects were not satisfying.

This is because even when I was doing other non-technical activities my brain was de-stressing but slowely building solutions for problems which I was executing later on in code and generally speaking I was livng a dream life as a "traveler".

> This tells you all you need to know about the study.

Your comment only tells me you wanted a different study than the one they did.

Asking what happened in the real world, including in a range of work situations, is a very interesting question to ask.

Looking for/at the delta between optimal work-at-home and the office would also be interesting, for different reasons.

A study of unprepared people being locked at home without childcare or schooling, without time to setup an office and in companies in dissarray is about as representative of home working as people falling overboard the titanic are representatice of health benefits of swimming.

Similarly if a group of tourists gets lost in the jungle we don't call that a study of prehistoric tribal life.

This is the funniest comment Ive read all week.

Then call it what it is, "Working from home while homeschooling during a pandemic, compared with normal office work: Evidence from the trenches."

> Your comment only tells me you wanted a different study than the one they did.

Of course, don't we all? It would be much more useful to have data on what remote work will be like in the future (i.e., when kids are in school/daycare).

There is something interesting about knowing the pros/cons of what happened during the pandemic, but most of the time research is done so that the conclusions can inform future decisions. Here, the future decisions about WFH would benefit from disentangling the WFH aspect from the COVID-induced remote school aspect.

One way to accomplish this is to assume that all workers who have kids (and lost productivity as a result) would have had the same productivity gains of people without kids. There are probably smarter/more nuanced ways to determine the global pros/cons of WFH in the future.