The world is rarely black and white. There's benefits and downsides to working from home. I believe working from home can cause [[Solitude deprivation]]. You could've had a bunch of good habits or rituals when working in the office that you're mostly oblivious to. It's risky to rug pull all of it at once. Like showering, brushing your teeth, walking to the train station and commuting. More people are noticing this.[^4] If you [[Habit stacking|stack]] all these activities together, you get a good portion of [[Solitude]] early in the day. I have a suspicion that this makes me think a lot better. Shower thoughts are great. They make you think about the [top idea in your mind](http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html). On rituals, Rafael Nadal says: "It’s a way of ordering my surroundings to the order I seek in my head".[^3] Do early morning [[Slack]] meetings give you this benefit? I think not. According to [[Digital minimalism]], the default mode of thinking is about your social life: > When given downtime, in other words, our brain defaults to thinking about our social life. Put another way, our brains adapted to automatically practice social thinking during any moments of cognitive downtime, and it’s this practice that helps us become really interested in our social world. This feels a bit wrong to me, based on personal experience, and [[Paul Graham]] seems to agree.[^1] Maybe there's differences in people. Maybe results vary depending on people's [[Myers–Briggs Type Indicator]]. **Update**: I have now noticed that I often default to social thinking. Anyways, say you previously had 1 hour of solitude. Now you have 10 minutes of solitude (or maybe even less) at the start of the day. You jump straight into other people's needs and thoughts. I don't think that's a good idea, to allow input from other minds to intrude. Starting the day by reading Slack messages or jumping straight into a video meeting cannot possibly be good. [Having asynchronous stand-up meetings in Slack with Geekbot](https://geekbot.com/) is also not a good way to start the day, if you ask me. Thus, to work remotely you should make adjustments to ensure [[Solitude]]. I like going to [[Deichman bibliotek]] where they have very high ceilings. There is a hypothesis that our brains love high ceilings. It's called the [[Cathedral effect]].[^2] It's also nice to be surrounded by ambitious and curious people. ![[deichman1.jpeg]] Unwind. ![[valldal_lions.jpeg]] Sense of distance is powerful. Do you see how those ideas link through these pictures? # See also - [[Disadvantages of working from home]] - [[Advantages of working from home]] - [[Tools for working from home]] - [[Equipment for working from home]] [^1]: [The Top Idea in Your Mind](http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html) [^2]: [The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing That People Use on JSTOR](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/519146) [^3]: [The Real Magic of Rituals - Nautilus](https://nautil.us/the-real-magic-of-rituals-238960/) [^4]: [Back in 2018 I moved from NYC, where my commute was 45m-1hr, to Florida, where I... | Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32881642)