Hm... yeah, the perks are nice!
I work from home, have been doing so for a while, and even built my own shoffice (shed office) to work from.
https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2016/07/solar-shed-summary-my-off-grid-office.htmlIt's pretty sweet having an isolated space to work from - I don't have to deal with wife/kid interactions during the day, because my office is my workspace. And, I can configure it how I want, with no particular concerns about toddler-friendliness or such. Plus, because it's separate from the house, it's "work" - I learned, long ago, that if I share work and personal space, I cannot separate work from not-work. Life just becomes a blur of work, even when I should be spending time with people I live with. Learned that one the hard way. :/
Need to "prove" that one is actually working the whole time.
This depends on one's arrangements. In general, I've found that producing good output solves that. And, much as it pains me, answering emails a bit more frequently (within an hour or two) is useful from this perspective. I've set up IMs to make an awful lot of racket, in case someone wants to contact me quickly, but that's not a primary source of communication in my environment (I make sure of that).
It gets lonely.
Perk! Left alone to be with projects and dive in deeply. You can dive into some problem at 10AM and come up at 3PM without once having had a conversation about SportsBall or something!
When you break your work laptop.... you are completely SOL (what prompted me to start this thread, actually).
Mmhmm. Prepper motto: "Two is one, one is none." Applies there as well. :)
Walk outside sometimes, because you can.
I definitely take conference calls walking around my property. :)
...and the cat sleeps all day
Seriously. I don't get the phrase "catnap." I've successfully converted a "property cat" into a "property and office cat" - the cat, now that I've trained it not to jump on my desk, basically curls up in a box and sleeps. All day long. Wake up, stretch, pace around my shed one lap, go back to sleep. I try to kick it out every few hours so it'll go use the bathroom, but it's a seriously lazy critter.
Mostly family all up in my biz all the time. Even though I set clear boundaries kids don't care because daddy is home and my wife just forgets because she's dealing with a tornado of kids and dog all the time. I had to be quick with the mute button.
Do you have a good back yard? Could you build a shoffice? :D
Distractions were another battle. It's easy to get on facebook and waste time. I made sure to set my 'if you do nothing else' list, 3 or 4 goals that had to be done. Did them in the AM and coasted the rest of the time.
Just block that crap. It's useless, period... :p