Office is an external discipline forced on you while WFH is an internal discipline no one watching over your shoulders, that's the difference.

For an undisciplined person anything can be distracting: birds chirping, picking up a delivery, cooking, a friend dropping by, daily chores like washing, organizing things, etc... it's an endless list really.

> no one watching over your shoulders

That alone is distracting enough for me. I hate the "look busy" vs. actually being busy game people play in offices.

I have severe ADHD and I don't even know what discipline feels like. That's precisely why I can't work in offices. In fact, other people are more productive when I am not in an office with them as well.

I'm cursed with the fact that a lot of my hyperactivity manifests as talking. It's actually problematic enough that I have been reprimanded for talking excessively at points in my past. I am quite charismatic too, so people end up getting locked in these hour+ long conversations with me lol.

At home, there is no one talk to but my significant other who often works during the same time. So, WFH skyrocketed my productivity. I go in the office two days a week, and I basically lose two days of work a week now.

The trick is getting those two days of being in the office and talking and interacting to sum up to be things you can put on your perf packet. those two days aren't "lost". they can be a different kind of work, which culminates into leading teams and mentoring people. work comes in many forms.

I WFH, even work on weekends. I notice that after working weekends I feel tired on Mondays, so I decided to spend Mondays on less technical stuff, e.g. customer meetings, interviews, lead generation etc

It is not easy to say that I'm not a very "internally disciplined" person. I once spent half a year procrastinating instead of working on a personal project. But when you're working for someone (regardless of place), they are paying you for it, and you would like to continue receiving the money, how is this not externally enforced discipline?

I've been WFH since 2016 and I never had an issue with focus when doing paid work. I do want to get paid.

> I've been WFH since 2016 and I never had an issue with focus when doing paid work. I do want to get paid.

YMMV. When I was freelancing, I charged by the hour. Working for 2-3 hours per day was just enough to keep me and the family afloat with some extra money to spare. I haven't saved a penny in 5+ years and haven't had any money for a downpayment on the apartment we were supposed to buy.

Unfortunately, switching to per-project payments would be terrible for me. The deadline would be too far into the future for me to feel the danger of failing the project.

Undisciplined people distract themselves in the office and they happen to distract all other workers around them too.

If you can't tell whether your staff are working that seems quite orthogonal to WFH.

I don't have too much of a problem with it but there are some obstacles depending on your home life.

My wife is hybrid, and on the days she's working from home I have to be firm about boundaries or I'll get significantly less done than on the days where it's just me. If you have kids, or live with your parents, I imagine it presents similar challenges. My sister moved back in with my father in 2020 due to the pandemic, and he was bizarrely disruptive to her work despite _also_ being remote. I'm not saying offices don't have this problem too (many such stories of loud and obnoxious coworkers), but it can be harder to have these conversations with loved ones.

Lots of people live in distracting, annoying places. If I open my window, I will hear some idiot gun it off the line in their straight-piped car from the stoplight near my apartment, several times an hour. There is a constant din of tire noise from the nearby freeway. The firemen at the station down the block do their thing every now and then. If I close my window, it regularly reaches 78F+ in my apartment. I have been battling property management to fix my A/C for months now, and every HVAC technician they send does nothing to fix the problem. My old neighbors used to play shitty music during the day.

Especially in HCOL places with mega-offices where these RTO mandates often stem from, sometimes it really is just easier to work in an air-conditioned office where you can get free coffee, snacks, and maybe some quiet if you're lucky or can slink away to an unused meeting room.

I 100% agree with you though that, at least for me, the discipline of getting up early in the morning, being well groomed and presentable, and battling traffic both ways is greater for me than taking steps to make myself comfortable and productive at home.

During COVID, like everyone else, our company went to WFH. Conversely, when we had a round of redundancies some of the people that were perceived to be important or productive in the office, turned out to be nothing of the sort, and were surprisingly let go.

They talked. A lot. They worked... very little.

The discipline in the office is to do the work, not go to the 'water cooler' and chat to anyone that was there or organise frivolous meetings.

The 16 pings a minute. The 6 hours of meetings a day because people aren't getting the information they need organically each day. The "hey, can I call?"'s during what I thought would be my free half hour in the afternoon. This is definitely not what it was like in the office.

Unfortunately, I recognize this doesn't change unless an org goes 100% back onsite.

> The "hey, can I call?"'s during what I thought would be my free half hour in the afternoon.

This happens in the office more. Someone just coming to you with whatever they need in the moment.

> The 6 hours of meetings a day because people aren't getting the information they need organically each day.

That is excessive amount of meetings. But also, that organic getting information was still a meeting, you just did not considered it one.

Why wouldn't it work with 2 or 3 unified days onsite and 2 or 3 days wfh, with a no-meetings, minimal-interruptions directive on wfh days? I think this structure, if well managed, would work even better than the old 5-days-in-office.

I agree that this would work, and be ideal. I think it only scales to a certain size organization though. At my company, I'd guess we have over a thousand developers across hundreds of teams, and more supporting staff. There's no possibility of getting everyone in at once.

I have discipline problems but when I am on site, my days are more filled with bullshit, e.g. random conversation over projects that lead nowhere, background conversations on unrelated topics, explaining stuff that aren't worth it, coffee breaks etc.

So while I believe it helps in term of team cohesion and for this purpose, on site is better, in term of productiveness it's a net negative.