Been 75% WFH since 2015 (100% since COVID).

There's a guy with a shop down the road with office space and he owes me money. Do I want an office?

My dogs do not want me to have an office.

Life tip - many dogs are self portable.

In 1995-1998 my mid 50s wife was in decline from what we eventually discovered was Alzheimer's Disease. My manager at Northrup Grumman gave me permission to "tele-commute" several days a week. Got a T1 line installed and logged into my office desktop when I worked from home.

Eventually two or three others in the department started "tele-commuting" after HR established some related policies.

I was tired, but not from "working from a home office" for which I was very grateful.

Skip,

_{Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance!}

Have been working from home on and off alot during COVID.

It's nice a day a week but I don't like doing it full time. Starts becoming hard to separate work life from home life

I get tired of not wasting 1.5 hours of my day in traffic and the money for a bi-weekly gas fill up. Not to mention the increased work efficiency and less time wasted by the water cooler creatures that insist I hear of the latest misadventures of their cats. Yes, working from home has been rough, but somehow I will manage. The only people I know of that don't like WFH are the micromanagers who are struggling to justify their existence, from lack of ability to slither between cubicles.

----------------------------------
Not making a decision is a decision in itself

Yeaaaaaah, um go ahead and get those TPS reports.

Skip,

_{Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance!}

Thanks for the feedback. To be clear, this is a private office. No one will be bothering me and talking the paint off of my walls. Or asking me to take the garbage out, what do you want for dinners this week, can you pick up milk, when are you closing the pool, can you help my parents move a table tomorrow, ....

It was hard while schools were close during COVID and I had to be a teacher and caretaker for 14 months or so. But now it is fun to work from home. Some people I work with said they missed their commute. i don't know what's wrong with them. no one stopped to from taking the car in the morning and drive in stop-and-go traffic for an hour and then come back home

Whatever floats your boat... just don't ruin it for the people who like to work remotely!

Quote (Some people I work with said they missed their commute. i don't know what's wrong with them. no one stopped to from taking the car in the morning and drive in stop-and-go traffic for an hour and then come back home)

With climate change, that scenario may be different. I'm just waiting for some of the effects to 'kick in'.

Rather than think climate change and the corona virus as science, think of it as the wrath of God. Feel any better?

-Dik

In the past I've worked from home bc an odd personal or professional event dictated it, but honestly cant say I had feelings for it one way or the other. Last spring I did the six weeks then went back to the office like most, and honestly couldn't wait. My niche often has me working solo long term on a parallel path to teamates but I definitely missed having others readily available to bounce questions off of as well as having access to paper research materials. It was also nice to have projects progressing at full speed again bc twiddling your thumbs waiting on others to call back or finish a task is the worst. WFH inefficiencies definitely reorganized a lot of companies and supply chains last summer, and given corporate PM responses, even solo practitioners having an office is probably in their best interest.

Commercial real estate prices and rents have taken a beating the last 18 months due to so many businesses closing. Enjoy the cheap rent while it lasts, I suspect they will rapidly rise after the next election.

WFH is draining because of the space limitations, but it beats out any of the commutes I've had to deal with over the years.

I found myself too distracted when working from home. For the first time in my life I found myself distracted by house cleaning. So I needed to go back to the office. Granted I have only a 15 minute commute, and at the time didn't have the space for a proper office.

My new house does have enough space, but my partner does WFH 100% of the time and so she gets that space.

I also prefer the ability to go by someone's desk and ask them what the hell they were thinking with this detail or that design, as opposed to a teams message.

I have very mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, I pay no rent, I have enough space, I get to see my wife and young kids a lot more than when I was driving to an office. So in a lot of ways - it's great!

On the other hand, I have to endure the hardly concealed look of disdain from potential 'big fish' clients when I tell them I work from home while standing in their million dollar architectural studio, my two year old doesn't quite understand what "leave daddy alone, he's working" means so as soon as my wife gets busy with something creeeeeak goes the hinges on my door as he tries to sneak into my office. It also becomes a little too easy to say "oh that's fine, I'll keep an eye on the kids for this or that" and I end up getting very little work done. So I'm suffering from a lot of the inefficiencies that people complain about.

I looked into co-working spaces, but they are pretty expensive here. They're nice, but for about a 100sf closet with a simple desk, simple chair, my name on the door, and a window with admittedly beautiful views of the city, it's about $750/month. It does come with free cookies on Wednesday and an in-house bar, but that's about it. For just a little less than that, I can get an empty space 6x the size (triple net, so I only have to add the internet bill) in a high rise a few blocks away. A comparable desk and chair would cost me about $200 at IKEA, so I'm not too worried about that piece.

My commute is also a bit of a different story. It's a 10 minute drive just to the nearest Wal-Mart. 25 minutes to the CBD if there's no traffic. On a Monday morning, it's 45 minutes. If the bridge is up, you might as well go home. If there were an affordable co-working space with a dedicated office and a full scale gym 5 minutes down the road....I'd probably do it.

I don't, though. So even if I get a business partner and started to grow the operation, I'd probably still stick with remote.

My vote is definitely for a real office. I get way more work done having a dedicated space. It's partly a mindset thing - work is work, home is home. It's partly a presentation to the world and to myself thing - when I do Zoom calls I have a real office in the background. Its partly a staff thing - communication with my guys is WAY better in person. But I would still want an office even if I was a one man shop.

I guess it depends. I have a dedicated space to work from home and at the end of the work day I don't need to be in that space so there is clear "separation" from work. I've been working from home for almost 2 years now, but am now required to go into the office 2 days a week which I absolutely loath. I get much more done at home. Days in the office are unproductive for me. I'm sure everyone is different, but if given the choice I would never report to an office again.

Some of us WFHs have it differently. I have my own room that is my office. All of my stuff is in it and I have enough room. Some, have a bedroom with a desk in the corner and their books and other misc items scattered throughout the house. The "scattered ones" need a separate office or to rent one. The "self-contained" ones tend to not need a rental space. Depends on which one you are and if you have clients over. I have very few clients ever come to see me. We work over the internet mostly.

A gym membership would not even be in my things to evaluate. I may evaluate printer access but with pdfs, I rarely print anything anyway.

One big consideration is having an office but still taking some work home to finish. If you work out of 2 places, the cost increases and so does the aggravation.

While I do have a separate home office section of the house (even with a bathroom), it has no door and I get no peace. It's either the dog barking, wife walking in, kids with questions, or the landscaper. Plus I work with a bunch of small contractors in town, and having them stop by the house to pick up prints is getting too weird, and meeting with architects at the hood of my car is getting old. I already sprang for the office/gym plan, take occupancy January 1st. At least there I can plot prints and leave them with the common receptionist (who will also handle and route calls for me). Looking forward to it after 20 years of looking at the same 4 walls. And the rent is a miniscule price to pay (less than 4% of monthly revenue).

Quote (geotechguy1)

Have been working from home on and off alot during COVID.

It's nice a day a week but I don't like doing it full time. Starts becoming hard to separate work life from home life

That sounds like my experience.

There's a certain rigidity and reliability that comes with the traditional office environment. When I go from traditional to home, that momentum carries forward for a while, but then it gets eroded and I spend more and more time and energy fending off distractions.

Quote (StrucPatholgst)

meeting with architects at the hood of my car is getting old

Umm, what do you do when it rains? If this happens a lot, you need a space.

I can tell that a lot of the answers depend on the layout of peoples' homes, and whether they can get a private room to use as an office or are stuck on the kitchen table. I'm surprised how much I like working from home. I have a little spare bedroom that was easily converted into an office. Without that space, my opinion could be different.

I've done a mixture over the years.

When I moved to a small consultancy they said to create an office as often there was only 1 or no pothers in the office so there was little point in commuting. So set up an office at the bottom of the garden and hence still "went to work". All the reading up I did said that was a vital part of making it work.

I was already set up with a home office in a spare bedroom to do work for different people than my "main" client where they wanted office attendance.

The Covid restrictions over the last 2 years though have been a massive game changer. There is still reason to have meetings and an office culture, especially when new people join or new projects start, but the day to day stuff - nicer at home.

So for a one or two man band? Up to you. There are advantages to both and certainly if you see clients and need meeting space - it's much easier in a shared office block with access to other services. but don't mix and match.

A more recent working space for me involved a small office of eventually 4-6 people in a rented multi company office space and if I had my chance I would have gone in 2-3 days/week max.

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

If I were someone with customer interfacing, I'd have issues with meeting clients in my home; there's an issue of boundaries.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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I have worked at home since 1997. I feel I am super productive and can take a break and work on garage projects when needed. I rarely see clients so having a nice office does not matter to me.

I have been on my own 20 years and in that time have had outside office's off and on. The best setup I had was an office within walking distance of my house. It gave some separation of home/work but no need to drive. If your 5 minutes is walking that sounds good but if you have to get in the car and drive every time I would pass if it were me.

Wearing my fuzzy robe and slippers to an office seems to have a different impact on clients than wearing them at home. I think paying rent makes people more fashion conscious.