In my previous job, I worked from home for about 5 years. It was nice.
- If you are allowed to use your own hardware, do so - having a really large monitor and a computer that goes several times faster than an old company notebook reduces frustrating compile times & test runs a lot. Not an issue so much with modern hardware, but still. (Trying to run VMs with EMC Documentum on an overheating Dell notebook with just 4GB RAM was a nightmare.)
- The company's time keeping system was essentially a CRUD app where I would enter the time spent on each project / day, down to 15 minute intervals. I kept a really close eye on those slices of time and differentiated my work/leisure time strictly: "9:00 - 9:15: working on $foo", "14:00-14:30: talking a walk, not working". Keeping exact time meant I had a good feeling that neither my life nor my boss would loose out on the WFH agreement.
- take breaks - the freedom to go for a run or a walk in the forest or just a prolonged siesta is great, even though it means you will have to make up for the time spend on non-works during the day.
- it's good to manage expected online time - no one will be glued to the keyboard in a WFH environment all the time. One colleague liked to sleep long and work late, so I did not expect him to answer mails before lunch. And when the online indicator of Skype (before it sucked) was "away/busy", we would usually not call / interrupt each other.
- If you are allowed to use your own hardware, do so - having a really large monitor and a computer that goes several times faster than an old company notebook reduces frustrating compile times & test runs a lot. Not an issue so much with modern hardware, but still. (Trying to run VMs with EMC Documentum on an overheating Dell notebook with just 4GB RAM was a nightmare.)
- The company's time keeping system was essentially a CRUD app where I would enter the time spent on each project / day, down to 15 minute intervals. I kept a really close eye on those slices of time and differentiated my work/leisure time strictly: "9:00 - 9:15: working on $foo", "14:00-14:30: talking a walk, not working". Keeping exact time meant I had a good feeling that neither my life nor my boss would loose out on the WFH agreement.
- take breaks - the freedom to go for a run or a walk in the forest or just a prolonged siesta is great, even though it means you will have to make up for the time spend on non-works during the day.
- it's good to manage expected online time - no one will be glued to the keyboard in a WFH environment all the time. One colleague liked to sleep long and work late, so I did not expect him to answer mails before lunch. And when the online indicator of Skype (before it sucked) was "away/busy", we would usually not call / interrupt each other.