It seems false to assume that people work less when working remotely. That is far from obvious. I personally think it is false, and have not seen any justification of it.

I understand arguments about people not eating business lunch near the office. Although it looks like home delivery and extra home office snacks, coffee, etc. would also cause spend, just in different areas as before.

Additionally, in places where the state pays for healthcare, having less stressed workers, having less traffic accidents (I assume, since less commutes) might overall decrease the amount of money spent on health and save some money for the state too.

It is not an easy thing to model IMO.

I recently listened to a casual conversation between two women talking about their husbands WFH behaviour. The general undertone was: "Yes, he can now do this or that time-consuming hobby because he can claim WFH while actually driving from A to B". Just an anecdote, I know, but this is not the first time I overheard people cheering over the personal advantages of WFH.

Those gentlemen would probably also waste time in an office environment. You're just substituting wasting time at work with wasting time at work (from home).

In the office I work in, walking past anybody's desk you see procrastination window and tabs quickly disappear. Either that, or people don't even bother hiding it (except from management).

Remote or in-person work isn't the main argument I think. More-so it's the working hours. Working 9-5 (if you're lucky to work that) 5 days a week is insane, even for something you're passionate about (which most aren't).

>Those gentlemen would probably also waste time in an office environment. You're just substituting wasting time at work with wasting time at work (from home).

There's way more distractions at home and not everyone can handle it. It's just wild what people find appropriate to do during meetings that they're supposed to be paying attention to. In office yeah maybe someone would read emails but you wouldn't be fully immersed in doing something else like cooking a full meal.

It's hard to say how much my coworkers actually work. But I strongly suspect that it's much less than in office. Yeah people would pop over to Reddit or whatever. But that's far less engaging then going anywhere you want or doing anything you want. Feel like for most people if you're stuck in the office you might as well do some work.

> Feel like for most people if you're stuck in the office you might as well do some work.

The biggest distractions in the office are the coworkers. Random hallway conversations, loud talkers in neighboring cubes/offices, people walking up to your desk with a question that should've been an email/chat (but really they are too lazy to check the ticket system/wiki/doc store for the answer). The level of distraction varies with each type of job, but for many quiet focus time is important. Working from home provides that quiet focus time.

But that quiet focus time is all for naught if people use it to pursue their time consuming hobby instead of working. Which is the point that kicked off this thread.

The whole point of the office is the random hallway conversations, the conversations you should be in on that you know about only because you overhear it from the cube next to you, people walking up to your desk to ask a question.

20 years ago my boss ordered me to work from home one day when I had an urgent task to get done. Most of the time though I was better off in the office - while I couldn't get as much high concentration work done, I was doing more useful work because I was in sync with the office.

The above assumes that a significant number of people are in the office everyday. A pure work from home environment works because people figure out how to use other means to communicate important things. However communication is much harder, and thus takes more effort. As a shy person I would be much better off in the office all the time as I don't put enough effort into communication.

Wasting time at home, or finding excuses for doing so, is still easier to do, and it is harder to evaluate how much time you really spent working. And then there is the children effect. It seems magically OK if a WFH worker is not available for a few hours because "something with the child", an excuse they simply can not pull while in the office.

Also, I find it pretty aggressive that you call 9-5 5days a week "insane" and go to extra length to emphasis that you think people who do that have a mental illness. Its fine to have different viewpoint on a matter, but to call someone insane and unable to assertain their own situation just because you like a different way of spending your time, is pretty condescending.

For the record, I work 9-5 5days a week for 22 years now, and I still like it.

I hope you found a modus that makes you happy, so happy that you dont have to look down at other people and lecture them about what is best and what is insane.

People in the office constantly use the child effect. Leaving early, arriving late, popping out in the middle of the day because both parents work and the kid needs to go to the doctor/be picked up from school etc. I witness it all the time, and will probably also use the same opportunity when needed.

I'm not calling people insane who work those hours. I'm saying it's insane that this behaviour is considered normal.

You like your job, and that's good. And hopefully you will feel the same way in another 10/20/30/40 years.

Many, many people don't, yet because of the way our world works they have to keep plugging away at something they don't like, losing a phenomenal amount of their life, with a couple of gaps (holidays, weekends) thrown in as a treat. Not many of those gaps are really sufficient for pursuing anything of significant value. And the biggest gap, being at the end of life, when the bodys and minds best years are behind it.

People who work in under-stimulating jobs, and people who work with something they're interested in/passionate about or something they trained all of their life for, all feel this way at some point. Such a working schedule (which as I said is lucky, as many people work more than that) takes away so many other opportunities in life.

If you gave most people the choice to cut their working hours down, or to cease working entirely, I think they would take it (unless they needed money). I think most people would want to work to some degree (3/4 days a week), but if we started from scratch, nobody would choose to work 5 of 7 days a week, half of the daily waking hours (plus travel and the other bits, as well as the hours lost to rest and recuperate for the next day).

I can't see many people dropping work entirely, as it's a good way to have a sense of purpose. But it's hard to find a purpose in many jobs, increasingly so as everything gets automated. Remember, for every person that is lucky enough to work with something interesting, many more people are sat bored out of their mind waiting for the end of the day. There really isn't enough stimulating work to go round everybody.

You might be a good hard working person, but many people procrastinate simply because they don't enjoy their job. They'll procrastinate working from home, and they'll procrastinate at the office. The average office isn't a high surveillance environment. Many of your colleagues are probably browsing Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, news websites etc. right now.

And to add to that, the physical and mental health implications and other points I mentioned, as well as points others have made about environmental damage from car commuting / congestion.

None of this should be normal. If we started from a point in time of people working less, as opposed to almost all the time (in the Industrial Revolution), it would be considered crazy if somebody suddenly came up with the idea to get everybody in an office 5 days a week. But it's considered normal and acceptable because it's a step down from the insane working practices of the times that came before (Industrial Revolution, 6 days a week, kids working in factories).

Even if less work gets done (citation needed, I think there are reasons why remote can increase productivity), you also don't have at least one major negative externality: pollution from commuting. There are also likely economic benefits: remote workers can move to areas that would otherwise suffer an economic drain from mass migration to large cities. Imagine how many other cities would benefit if most of us didn't have to live in the same six cities (in America).

Save money, too. Yeah there is a productivity hit, but in exchange you don't have to pay for offices, tables, chairs, monitors, HVAC, window washing, etc.

Plus I can offer a High COL rate, Mid COL rate, and Low COL rate, and recruit talent from all over. Yeah my boy doing node.js in Des Moines or Nashville might not be as good as the shit-hot MIT grade in NYC, but I can pay him 60% less, and he's 80% as good as that MIT kid.

Problem is you gotta re-tool and be equipped for that kind of management, and the Boomer / old Gen-X crowd running the show isn't.