The two most productive members of my development team were located offsite, likely for the reasons you stated above: less distractions, more productivity. It’s not a coincidence that they were the best communicators, heavily utilizing project management tools like Jira, being available online at regular hours, and always asking for a conference call meet-up on a regular basis.

If you work outside of the office, you have to make sure you can communicate with others you work with. That was the biggest problem I saw managing an in-house team alongside remote developers. I sometimes wouldn’t hear from off-site developers for days, and that’s not productive when three other people are waiting on your code and have no idea when it might drop. It takes some set-up time to get a communication rhythm going, and may even feel like a “grind” at first, but if your teammates don’t know what you’re doing off-site, it will cause problems and hurt the overall project’s productivity, even if individually you feel more productive.

Very well said. Part of my last job was writing (presentations, newsletters, webinar scripts, etc.) and it is nearly impossible in cubeland! I would need to either jump into an empty office or simply do it from home. Or get in early before the madness began.

And because I was so much more productive from home, it made them suspicious.

Thanks for the link and the comment. You know I’m a Joe Cascio fan. Now I am also a Jason Fried fan!

Offices are an anachronism for much work today. Anyone who is a knowledge worker, especially a creative knowledge worker like a programmer, designer or writer needs time to get in their zone, where they’re immersed in the problem and have all the many bits of relevant data and relationships pulled into their operating brain.

It takes time to get yourself into that zone, and if your day is constantly broken up with with phone calls, questions and the bane of every office worker’s life, meetings, then your productivity will be very low. Many people end up taking work home because it’s the only place they can really get things done.

I would highly suggest this post: http://is.gd/9KgNb in Inc. magazine. I’m not ashamed to say Fried is my hero. He says what I’ve known in my gut the whole 35+ years I worked in offices. For example:

“I hate it when businesses treat their employees like children. They block Facebook or YouTube because they want their employees to work eight hours a day. But instead of getting more productivity, you’re getting frustration. What’s the point? As long as the work gets done, I don’t care what people do all day.”