Pros and Cons of Working From Home

Be aware of the benefits and drawbacks of working from home when considering your ideal work environment.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home may have seemed like a perk that only freelancers got to do. Now, many more full-time employees have experienced working remotely or in a hybrid role.

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According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the pandemic has resulted in over one-third of companies across a wide range of industries increasing telework for some or all of their employees. The BLS also reports that around 60% of the organizations that expanded their telework options are planning to keep them indefinitely.

If you recently joined the ranks of virtual staff, your visions of the remote working life may have been dashed by reality. Working from home may sound like an ideal situation, if you've imagined simply rolling out of bed and arriving at your home office in moments, without the hassles of first making yourself presentable and then commuting to a workplace with a boss and colleagues who may drive you crazy .

In reality, though, just like working in an office, remote work comes with pros and cons. The following pros and cons list emerged after conducting informal interviews with more than 100 people with remote jobs. Read on for some positive aspects of telecommuting and the challenges that come with a work-from-home lifestyle.

Benefits of Working From Home

Pro: more flexibility to take care of appointments and errands. .

  • Pro: Fewer interruptions from meetings and chitchat.
  • Pro: No commute time or expense. 
  • Pro: More time spent with family.

Pro: You can often do your work when you're most productive.

Pro: you can get more done., pro: you can save money on your work wardrobe., pro: the ability to live where you want to..

One of the hardest things about committing to a 9-to-5 desk job is that it prevents you from being able to handle almost anything else that comes up in your life, whether attending a routine dentist appointment or picking a sick kid up from school. When you work from home, while you still have to meet your deadlines and be available when you say you will be, you generally have wider bandwidth to tend to other responsibilities without jeopardizing your job.

Pro: There are fewer interruptions from meetings and chitchat.

It's easier to get into a deep state of focused work when you're in your home office without colleagues dropping by and sitting down impromptu to talk about their weekends. Limiting unnecessary interruptions from your colleagues and boss is a big plus of working from home and is one reason many remote workers are often more productive than office-based workers. While you may need to dial in for specific meetings, you'll likely get a break from attending several others – many of which may be unnecessary to your role – that confront staff workers daily.

Pro: There is no commute time or expense. 

You can save a lot of money and avoid wasting hours spent getting to and from work when your office is right down the hall. Avoiding traffic battles tops the list of benefits for some of those who work from home. Many remote workers also mentioned saving money by eschewing a pricey professional wardrobe unless they meet with clients.

Pro: More time spent with family. 

Office workers must kiss their loved ones goodbye each morning when heading off to work; not so for virtual workers, who can work side by side with a work-from-home spouse or with kids who are learning in a digital classroom . By doing away with the commute time, there is more time to be spent with loved ones.

When you work in an office, your schedule is rarely your own. Between the aforementioned interruptions from colleagues and meetings, plus your boss hovering nearby with agenda items and to-dos, accomplishing your focus work may be a "catch as catch can" situation, grabbing time to think and compose important reports and communications between events that others have imposed.

It's still always essential when working from home to be mindful of your team's needs and be available to dial in for virtual meetings. But remote employees generally have greater latitude to select their time of peak productivity to do their most important work and – depending on who else is working at home with them – have more quiet time to hone in on tasks that require concentration.

A number of recent studies have confirmed the growing body of research that prove working from home can help you be more productive than you can in an office, with stats showing productivity increases of up to 77%. It makes sense when you consider the above points that you have fewer interruptions and can work when you’re at your best while working remotely.

In addition to saving drive time and gas expenses, the work-from-home crowd can generally save on clothing costs as well. While you may need to have professional garb at the ready for video calls (at least for your top half on camera), most who work from home have more freedom to wear what they want while they work.

While some employers have restrictions about where you can live as a remote employee and may change your pay according to the area you reside in, a huge perk of the remote life is the ability to choose your location without needing to worry about a daily commute. Even if you’re in a hybrid role or need to make occasional visits to the office for meetings, if you don’t need to drive in each day, you have a wider range of possible places to settle besides right near the office.

Cons of Working From Home

Con: no physical separation between work and leisure time. .

  • Con: Easy to misread cues via electronic communications. 

Con: You have to make the effort to get a change of scenery. 

  • Con: Less in-person contact with co-workers.

Con: You are not on-site for in-office perks.

Con: you have to be more self-motivated., con: some bosses may be biased against those who aren’t in the office..

Many who work from home lamented that they often find themselves working around the clock, since their labor has no definite start or end times; those lines can often be blurred. As a result, they sometimes feel as if they are always at work, making it difficult to shift to the post-work relaxation mode that many office workers take for granted.

The absence of an obvious division between the personal and professional realms means some remote workers get distracted by housework. Setting boundaries and sticking to them is important when you're working from home.

Con: It's easy to misread cues via electronic communications. 

While few who work from home expressed feeling "lonely," as is typically assumed, many did point to the difficulty of getting the tone right through digital communication systems, such as email, chat, social media and text. Without body language, facial expressions and other cues, remote employees have to put in extra effort to maintain positive communications.

What can be a blessing can also become a curse in the form of cabin fever. Some freelancers and others who work from home lamented that where they work during the day is the exact same place where they'll be sitting later that evening; getting involved in their work often translates to spending a huge portion of the day indoors. Pre-pandemic, many stressed the importance of scheduling lunches and other meetings to keep them in the mix and avoid the rut of never leaving the house.

Con: There is less in-person contact with co-workers.

While you may have more time with loved ones when working from a home office, the flipside is less opportunity for face time (minus a screen) with people at your company. If your co-workers drive you crazy, then reduced time on-site might be a perk for you. But if you enjoy office-based camaraderie and like to be able to socialize with your team in person, then the remote life might make you miserable.

You can't swing by the break room and grab a doughnut or hit the company gym if you're working from home. This may be more of a disadvantage for workers in industries such as tech, with impressive on-site offerings like game rooms and chef-made food among their company benefits. If there's a perk you like about being in the office, then working from home may make you miss it.

If you’re the type of person who procrastinates working unless a boss is breathing down your neck, then you might find yourself underperforming in a work-from-home role. Remote workers have to motivate themselves to get the job done, which puts more onus on people working from home to manage their time wisely to complete their projects, instead of having someone else setting the timelines and spurring them along.

A study by researchers at the University of California at Davis and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that “face time” – the amount of time that you’re seen at work either within normal business hours or outside of them – can affect how your boss and others perceive you at work. If you’re not in the office and others are, some managers may be either intentionally or unintentionally biased against you. You may find that your contributions aren’t noticed or appreciated as much by your team and may feel compelled to make extra efforts to keep on everyone’s radar screen.

Weighing the pros and cons of working from home has become even more important in the wake of the pandemic, since many companies are now giving their employees the option to not come back into the office. If you are given the choice to consider working from home permanently, be sure to think through each of the pros and cons of working from home to land on a solution that matches your priorities. Remote work has clear benefits, but no situation is perfect. Understanding the reasons to work from home – as well as the reasons not to – can go a long way in learning how to work from home successfully .

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Before jumping into something new, we often weigh the pros and cons. During the pandemic, many workers were forced to work from home and, unfortunately, didn’t get this luxury. But since then, the dust has settled, and many are considering making working from home (WFH) their primary way of working. If you are one of these workers, you're likely in the process of evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of this work style and what it does for you.

It's often helpful to hear from people with prior experience who have seen the benefits and challenges of working from home firsthand (outside of ourselves). To help, we reached out to the work-from-home, remote work, and digital nomad communities to get their perspectives on remote work and WFH. Plus, we included tips for combatting the most common challenges of working from home.

Pros and cons of working from home

Pro: remote workers feel less stressed, con: working from home can be lonely, pro: no daily commute, con: communication + collaboration can be a challenge, pro: remote workers have flexibility in their schedules, con: it's challenging to build a remote company culture.

In 2023, remote workers reported being less stressed than their in-office and hybrid counterparts . This could be due to a number of factors, such as no commute time, less overall spending of money, more time to focus, etc. In fact, hybrid workers - who have the option to work both in-office and from home - say that working from home is best for tasks like working independently, focusing, thinking creatively, and balancing work and life.

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That being said, some workers thrive in a typical office environment. If you're new to WFH and struggling to focus, we have some productivity tips and music playlists to help you focus .

Pros: less stress, greater ability to do focused work, being there for my family, more time for pretty much everything that matters (fitness, creative pursuits) Cons: have to be far more intentional re: social engagement. It's easy to put systems in place to deal with other cons — Scott Dawson (@scottpdawson) January 7, 2020

When you work from home, you're likely flying solo most of the time - this may be why 20% of managers say their top workplace concern is employee loneliness . Being alone can create feelings of isolation and loneliness and can often hurt your health and productivity. It's important to build in time for social interaction, even if it isn't in-person.

To combat these feelings, schedule a virtual coffee with a coworker or join a Slack community to socialize with other people who share similar interests as you. If you need even more inspiration, check out these tips to combat the work-from-home loneliness you might be feeling.

If you work in a city, you've likely experienced the hassle of commuting. Whether you're taking public transportation or stuck in traffic, your mind might wander and think about all the other things you could be doing during your commute time. Studies have shown that commuting negatively impacts health and happiness - and in 2023, 33% of workers reported commuting 31-45 minutes (one way) every day . When you work from home, not only will you have more free time in your day, you're likely to see an improvement in your well-being too.

Pros, loca tion freedom, no commute, time to spend with my people, in community, enjoying hobbies. Personal experience, better Comms, more intentional focus on trust. Cons, isolation, career progression, stigma from those who don't understand remote "but do you really work?!" 🙈 — Rose Barrett 🌹🍀 (@RemoteRose) January 7, 2020

Effective communication and collaboration can be hard to achieve when you and your colleagues are distributed across different locations. This means that the tools and strategies you use to communicate need to be thought out and intentional.

Determine which asynchronous communication tools you'll use (e.g., Slack and email) and make sure you have a consistent schedule for face-to-face conversations via video conferencing . When everyone's clear on the methods of collaboration, miscommunication will become less frequent.

Synchronous tools are also important. If you are working from home, you will likely have telecommuting calls with others in the office. In-office employees need to ensure they have the right hardware in place to have collaborative discussions. Consider tools like a 360-camera to capture everyone in the room , along with a dedicated whiteboard camera for brainstorming sessions.

Love this! Landing a consistent style of collaboration and actively promoting inclusion are areas companies need to explore for a positive experience for remote workers. These are key challenges for “hybrid” companies (HQ-based office workers, periodic wfh, and compete remote). — Julie Carey (@jcarey2424) January 7, 2020

Raise your hand if you have responsibilities and obligations outside of your day-to-day job. I'm sure most (if not all) of us have our hands up. Depending on your organization's remote or hybrid work policy , you can schedule your day to accommodate aspects of your life outside of work.

Need to run to a doctor's appointment in the morning? Go for it! Have to hop offline for an hour to pick up your child from school? No problem! Remote work gives you the flexibility to manage all aspects of your life, whether they're directly related to your work or not.

My parents are in their 80's. I can travel to their home, spend time with them (and clean out the refrigerator) while working. The only con is they don't believe I'm working 😂 — Kitt Miller (@netbaby1997) January 9, 2020

If you have a remote team, there are certainly advantages and disadvantages of employees WFH. For one, company culture needs to be more intentional. The ways remote teams get to know one another and collaborate are different than they'd be if everyone worked together in the same office. Luckily, there are remote culture tools and resources that can be used when team members aren't able to get together in-person. Remote leaders and managers need to remember that transparency is key for employees to have the information they need to work independently and feel engaged with their work.

We love our remote workers! Pros: -Communication is more purposeful -Flexibility of time encourages diverse hires Cons (unless you're @GAPartners ): -Losing out on company culture -Collaboration can be a challenge #remoteworkers #digitalnomads #wfh — G&A Partners (@GAPartners) January 8, 2020

With most of the working world experiencing remote work during the pandemic, it is no surprise that many want to WFH full-time. If employers are to take away anything from our 2023 State of Hybrid Work Report , it’s that flexibility reigns supreme. If companies offer their employees the flexibility to work from home or the office - or a combination of both! - workers will be happier and more willing to go the extra mile. That said, it’s important to set employees up for success when they work remotely.   

If you’re trying to make the transition to remote work, check out our tips for asking your manager .

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The Realities of Remote Work

  • Laura Amico

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Work-life boundaries are blurring and managers worry about productivity. What can be done?

The Covid-19 pandemic sparked what economist Nicholas Bloom calls the “ working-from-home economy .” While some workers may have had flexibility to work remotely before the pandemic, this unprecedented shift to remote work looks like it could be here to stay in some form.

  • Laura Amico is a former senior editor at Harvard Business Review.

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Working From Home: The Pros and Cons

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You wake up at 8 a.m. with the sun streaming through the blinds. As you take a leisurely shower, you listen to the radio and hear rush-hour traffic’s a nightmare. Good thing you don’t have to jump in the car to head to the office. In fact, you don’t have to go to the office at all. Sure, you’ve got two deadlines to make by the end of the day, but that’s nine hours away.

At the moment, the more important question seems to be: coffee at home or a cappuccino from your favorite café down the street?

Does this sound like your typical morning? If so, you’re living the dream—the dream of working from home .

Key Takeaways

  • Working from home comes with the benefits of no commute, your own personal space, increased flexibility, and more money saved.
  • The downsides of working from home include social and professional isolation and lack of innovation from in-office interaction.
  • If you're self-motivated and introverted, working at home might be for you while if you enjoy being in the middle of the action, you might regret going remote.
  • After the Coronavirus pandemic, working from home has become more common and acceptable.
  • Recent studies show that employees are more productive when they work from home.

As the Internet has grown and allowed for faster connections, high-quality video calls, and the ability to send larger amounts of data, working from home has become as straightforward as working from the office.

Many employees consider working from home, at least one day out of the week, a work perk. Because an employee doesn't have to get up and get dressed or commute, it allows for more time to sleep, a less rushed morning, and money saved on not eating out during office hours.

For many employees, however, it's not an option. Kindergarten teachers, carpenters, and nurses, among many others, do not work remotely; however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, where individuals were encouraged to stay at home, working from home became more common for such jobs, such as teachers.

With the right digital equipment, software tools, and mobile devices, more jobs can be performed remotely from home. Before the pandemic , 4.1% of the U.S. employee workforce telecommuted either half of the time or more. At the peak of the pandemic, this rose to 69%, showing that working from home can be done if needed, encouraging a greater shift to working from home once lockdowns eased.

Years before the pandemic, according to a 2013 study by Stanford University in collaboration with Ctrip, a Chinese travel agency, home-based workers said they were more productive, happier , and less likely to quit. The flip side? Those working from home were half as likely to be promoted as their office-based colleagues. They were also more likely to feel lonely. In the end, 50% of the home-based workers in the study requested to return to the office.

In the years since, working from home has become a lot more acceptable, especially by employers, and after the pandemic, a necessity. The pandemic demonstrated that working from home was possible without a reduction in productivity and preferred by employees.

Employees particularly believed working from home was better, with 70% of employees stating virtual meetings were less stressful with 64% preferring hybrid meetings.

Some studies showed that working from home is more productive . Individuals who work from home, on average, are 10 minutes less productive in a day, work one more day per week, and are 47% more productive.

Though working from home has shown to be more productive, it still socially isolates individuals that may gain positive health benefits from in-person interaction in the office.

Before taking the plunge, talk to coworkers, friends, and the people in your network, especially people who work in similar industries . Among your acquaintances who have worked from home, what challenges have they faced? Have they seen a real improvement in their work-life balance and overall quality of life? What have they unexpectedly found they missed?

If possible, it helps to create a separate office space in your living area that can be used for work, thereby separating your work life and home life, allowing for more productivity and less burnout.

Here are a few pros and cons of working at home to consider, whether you work for a single employer, freelance, or run your own small business .

You'll Have Greater Flexibility

Want to take a month off for the whitewater kayaking season in Patagonia every year? By working from home, you just might be able to pull it off, either by working more hours the rest of the year or by working remotely from your holiday spot.

On a less ambitious scale, working at home allows you to adjust your schedule from day to day, taking a three-hour lunch and then making up the hours at night if you want to.

Of course, many appreciate the flexibility for more practical reasons: to provide childcare or eldercare or simply to be at home when the plumber shows up.

You'll Save Money

Commuting costs go away. Your professional wardrobe goes seriously downscale. Whether you're a business owner or an employee, there are incidental costs to showing up at work five days a week that disappear when you stay home.

You May Be More Productive

Are you an introvert who finds social interactions more draining than energy-giving? Then you might thrive in a work environment without other colleagues. If you feel more focused in a quiet environment with few distractions, working from home may give you the opportunity to be your most productive.

Working from home led to more people exercising due to more time available by not commuting, improving physical and mental health.

Your Commute Time Is Zero

In some cities and job sectors, more than two-thirds of workers say they would switch jobs if the change would ease the burden of their commutes. Think about what zero commuting hours a week would do for you.

It Is Isolating

You could be surprised by how much you miss the workplace camaraderie, not to mention the interpersonal drama, the office politics, and the ill-advised romances. And don’t discount the benefits of professional collaboration and social bonds forged in the workplace. They often lead to future opportunities.

Staying Motivated Isn't Easy

Are you an extrovert who thrives on collaborating with others on projects? Do you get energy and inspiration from the kind of impromptu socializing that occurs among colleagues? If so, the solitary nature of working from home might drain rather than augment your energy. It's all too easy to take a break that lasts for hours.

Working at home requires you to motivate yourself.

There Are Distractions

Your home circumstances might have built-in distractions. These might include family members or roommates around the house. They might be tasks that you think you have time for now that you're not going into the office. In any case, if you can't set aside time to devote to work and only work, you can't pull this off.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Working From Home?

The pros of working from home are no commute, more time available to sleep and rest, money saved by not commuting or buying lunch when at the office, greater flexibility, more independence, and no office distractions. The cons of working from home are isolation and loneliness, lack of motivation, at-home distractions, and unmonitored performance.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Working From Home From a Company’s Perspective?

From a company's perspective, the pros of having employees work from home include increased employee satisfaction, which leads to higher employee retention, the ability to hire from a larger pool of talent as opposed to the physical location of the office, increased employee productivity, and lower costs, in regards to rent, operations, and equipment. Some of the cons for employers include lack of team building, lack of team innovation, challenges with communication, and the inability to gauge performance in person.

What Are Some of the Best Work-From-Home Jobs?

Some of the best jobs to work from home include web developer, therapist, teacher, financial analyst, interpreter, computer specialist, writer, editor, social media professional, graphic designer, and computer engineer.

Though working from home comes with many benefits, such as more time, less stress, and more money, the negatives of isolation, at-home distractions, and motivating yourself can make heading to the office seem appealing. In general, employees have found that a mix of working from home and the office is a good solution.

Global Workplace Analytics. " Latest Work-at-Home/Telecommuting/Mobile Work/Remote Work Statistics ."

Bloom, Nicholas and et al. " Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment ." The Quarterly Journal of Economics , vol. 130, no. 1, February 2015, pp. 9. Download PDF.

Owl Labs. " State of Remote Work 2021 ," Page 24.

Airtasker. " The Benefits of Working From Home ."

BusinessWire. " Prodoscore Research from March/April 2020: Productivity Has Increased, Led By Remote Workers ."

Mass Biotechnology Council. " MassBio’s 2019 Transportation Survey Finds 60% of Respondents Would Change Jobs for a Better Commute ."

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Pros and Cons of Working From Home: Is It Better for You and Your Wallet?

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  • Published Jul 26, 2021 - [Updated Jun 30, 2022]
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Remote work became the new normal for many employees given the COVID-19 pandemic, but as many slowly return to the office, you may be considering whether or not working from home is best for your future. There are seemingly endless reasons to work from home, like the lack of a commute to decreased spending on childcare. However, remote work has its costs too, whether money comes out of your salary for a new ergonomic desk setup or you’re shouldering a more expensive utility bill.

We surveyed 1,006 workers to see their opinions on whether employers should cover remote work costs and found that approximately 70 percent agreed that employers should cover some or all of the costs associated with working from home. See the breakdown of results below:

  • 37.5% agreed employers should cover all remote work expenses
  • 32.8% believed a partial budget should be provided for remote work expenses
  • 29.7% said that employers shouldn’t pay for remote work expenses

Regardless of what your work model looks like, there are several pros and cons to working from home. Read on to evaluate whether the benefits outweigh the costs for you and your career or jump to our infographic .

Does Working From Home Save You Money?

Working from home allows you to pocket the money you would spend on transportation, child or pet care, and work expenses like wardrobe or parking. Transportation is one of the most expensive parts of in-person work — Americans can spend up to $5,000 on transportation each year.

Another opportunity to save money with remote work is that you’re less inclined to spend money on coffee, lunch, and other food-related expenses with coworkers. Commuting can also impact how willing you are to cook since more of your energy will be expended via transportation.

The Pros of Working From Home

As we briefly mentioned above, there are several benefits to remote work that can save you money and increase your productivity. So much so that many remote employees want to keep it that way; in fact, 65 percent of remote workers surveyed said they wanted to remain remote. Luckily, the pandemic has increased the amount of work-from-home remote jobs on the market. Below, we listed some of the benefits of working from home and why it’s definitely worth considering.

1. Save Gas Money

One of the most common costs when it comes to transportation is gasoline since commuters can travel from far and wide to get to work. The average commuter can travel between 5 and 13 miles each way to get to work, which requires frequent trips to the gas station.

Working from home allows you to save money on gas by reducing the amount of trips to the gas station and ultimately saving you hundreds of dollars in the process.

  • Pro tip : If you live in a metropolitan area, chances are you can use a rideshare app or a short-term rental car service to get from place to place. This is another great way to save money instead of constantly refilling your gas tank.

2. Tax Break Eligibility

Remote employees, freelancers , and self-employed individuals are more likely to be eligible for tax breaks like a home office deduction or a depreciation of equipment deduction.

  • Pro tip : Taxes can be complicated, so make sure you meet the criteria outlined by the IRS to avoid unnecessary fees or penalties.

3. Eating at Home

Working in an office can increase your likelihood of eating at restaurants or stopping by coffee shops around town. Over time, this can amount to thousands of dollars.

As we mentioned before, commuting can deplete energy levels to the point where commuters don’t have the energy to cook and, consequently, order out instead. Not only is eating at home cheaper, but it’s generally better for your overall health.

  • Pro tip : Meal order programs like HelloFresh ship your ingredients and recipes right to your door so you don’t have to worry about grocery shopping and finding what to eat.

4. Save on Clothing

In-person work often requires a dress code that can range from business casual to formal attire. Clothing items like suits, ties, dresses, and other work-appropriate items are required for certain professions and they can have a hefty price tag. This can also become increasingly expensive with dry cleaning and other laundry expenses.

Remote work still requires appropriate clothing and professionalism, but it drastically reduces the need for formal work attire. You can save hundreds of dollars on clothing and laundry services by working from home.

  • Pro tip : Buying clothing items that can be worn for work and leisure are a great option for remote workers. Clothing items such as jumpsuits, polo shirts, and other business casual attire can help save you money in the long run.

5. Increased Productivity

Many remote workers in the past year reported increased productivity due to working from home. In a survey of remote teams, 65 percent of workers said they felt more productive at home than they did in the office.

  • Pro tip : Setting limits on your phone for social media, games, and other activities can help you stay focused while working from home. You can also turn off notifications during the workday to stay productive and keep focused.

essay on pros and cons of work from home

6. More Family Time

Long hours in the office can reduce the amount of time you’re able to spend at home with your loved ones, especially if you work night shifts or long days. Working from home allows for more quality time with family since you’re more likely to be in the same place at the same time.

  • Pro tip : It’s important to make time for important people in your life. To do so, set boundaries and stick to a hard stop when your workday ends so that you can spend quality time with loved ones.

7. Environmentally Friendly

Commuting has an effect on the entire ecosystem we live in, given the pollution that comes from transportation. In fact, 29 percent of greenhouse gas emissions came from transportation alone in 2019. Most people don’t have electric cars, so exhaust and other car emissions contribute to the carbon footprint on Earth.

A daily 30-mile commute to work can result in hundreds of thousands of miles on your car and significantly impact the environment throughout your career. This makes a remote work environment a healthy option for you and the planet.

  • Pro tip : To increase your positive impact on the environment, consider sustainable office furniture that is made from eco-friendly materials such as recycled wood, glass, and iron.

8. Increased Work-Life Balance

Working in-office full-time can fill up most of your day and leave you with little time to yourself after commuting. In-person work can also be so draining that by the time you do get home, you may not have the energy to meet friends and family.

Remote work can allow for more mental and physical energy, which ultimately improves your work-life balance and overall mental health.

  • Pro tip : Burnout from remote work can also happen. Be sure to do the necessary self-care to conquer burnout such as therapy, meditation, yoga, and other acts of self-love.

9. More Schedule Flexibility

The typical 9-to-5 work shift takes up most of the day so it can be difficult to schedule appointments, attend your child’s events, or other important happenings in life. Working from home allows for more flexibility in your schedule where you can fit in important events and appointments without having to take time off.

  • Pro tip : Once you’ve booked appointments or blocked off certain times on your schedule, make sure to let your coworkers or manager know not to schedule meetings at those times to avoid overlapping events.

october-2020-statistics

10. Work From Anywhere

Many remote workers took the opportunity to work from anywhere, whether it be another country or a family member’s home. The flexibility of working remotely allows you to work in different locations, like a local coffee shop, for a change of scenery.

  • Pro tip : If you do plan to work from a place other than your home, make sure the location has access to secure, high-speed internet for video conferencing and other work that requires you to be online.

The Cons of Working From Home

While there are plenty of advantages that come with remote working, it has also posed new challenges that we didn’t think about a year or so prior. Lack of movement, reduced social interaction, and other changes were some negative consequences of working from home. Below, we’ve listed some disadvantages of remote work to consider before making a decision.

1. Lack of Social Interaction

Communicating with managers and coworkers isn’t the same when conducted through a screen. Although video conferencing can help bridge the gap between social isolation and interaction, in-person interactions are few and far between when working from home.

  • Pro tip : If you do decide to work from home, make sure you have scheduled outings with family and friends in-person to make up for interactions you can’t get from work alone.

2. Increased Likelihood of Overworking

Since working from home can take out in-office distraction, there is such a thing as being too focused on work. Overworking and burnout are common results of work-related stress that comes from remote work. Getting used to spending most of your day sitting in front of your computer is a hard habit to break.

  • Pro tip : Overworking and burnout can be reduced by setting work-life boundaries  like clocking on and off at certain times of the day. This ensures you aren’t working late into the night or starting so late that you’re forced to work later.

3. Distractions at Home

For some, working from home means peace and quiet as well as freedom from distractions. However, some remote workers may have children, dogs, and other things to cater to at home that can make remote work a lot more difficult.

  • Pro tip : Should you choose to work from home, having set times where you request not to be disturbed can help decrease the number of distractions at home. You can even book a baby or dog sitter for important meetings or conferences to make sure you’re focused on the task at hand.

4. No Set Routine

In-person jobs require you to clock in and out at specific times, whereas remote workers can clock in and out with more flexibility. The lack of a set routine when working from home can result in an unpredictable schedule.

  • Pro tip : Make sure you have a list of things you plan to accomplish for the day or a simple routine to follow to give yourself a sense of normalcy.

5. Increased Need for Self-Discipline

Similar to not having a set routine, remote work requires self-discipline given the independent nature of the work model. It’s your responsibility to make sure you’re not on social media for hours when you have a project that needs to get done.

  • Pro tip : We mentioned in the pros section that increased productivity at home can be achieved through setting limits for social media and games on your phone. Another way to achieve self-discipline is creating a schedule for each day that you can hold yourself to.

6. Home Office Costs

Setting up your office at home requires space and materials that you may not have access to. This also means that your electricity bill might be higher if you work on a computer with multiple monitors. Although there are sometimes home office tax deductions, they’re not guaranteed for everyone.

  • Pro tip : There are plenty of innovative ways to incorporate an office into your home, like the closet office. Make sure not to make your bedroom your office space if you can help it so you can maintain work-life boundaries.

Home office materials can be costly, especially if you need special technology like a computer or software. We conducted a survey to determine whether American workers felt that employers should cover the costs of working from home, and about 70 percent said employers should cover some or all remote-work related expenses.

7.  Less Office Perks

Being in the office has its benefits: free lunch, access to the office gym, and other amenities that aren’t available to you if you work from home. There are also perks like office holiday celebrations or a simple chat with a coworker that make an in-person job more rewarding or enjoyable.

  • Pro tip : Working at a company with a positive and engaging company culture can make remote work more enjoyable. If you have ideas on how to make your workplace more remote-friendly, try pitching them to human resources or a culture committee at your company.

survey-remote-work-expenses

8. More Effort in Changing Scenery

Although remote work allows you to work from virtually anywhere, it does take more effort to get out of your comfort zone. If you use your computer for work, you may not have access to a laptop to bring to a local cafe or coffee shop.

  • Pro tip : If you don’t have access to a portable computer, see if your company has some to spare. A technology stipend may be in their best interest if they want increased employee satisfaction.

9. Telecommunication Difficulties

The increased telecommunication that became apparent during the pandemic was a challenge for many. Some may argue that it is more difficult to communicate via messaging platforms like Slack or email, so those who don’t prefer telecommunication may experience challenges.

  • Pro tip : It might be in your best interest to communicate with a manager or coworkers that you prefer hopping on a video conferencing platform like Zoom or Skype to talk through projects and assignments.

10. Motivational Challenges

Having the motivation to succeed in your career goes hand in hand with self-discipline — it’s much more difficult to discipline yourself when you don’t have the motivation to. Especially for those who work remotely in the long term, it can be difficult to get up and do the same thing every day.

  • Pro tip : While having a routine is important, make sure to mix up your workday. Try to start with different tasks or take breaks at different times to add variety and novelty to your schedule.

how-to-stay-productive-while-teleworking

Deciding whether to work from home or in-person is a life-altering decision for which you must weigh the pros and cons. Remote work is not for everyone — introverts may thrive in remote work environments while extroverts struggle to get their needs met. Employees with children or noisy households might consider in-person work more advantageous, while independent young professionals may prefer the cost-effectiveness of remote work.

Regardless of your situation, there are plenty of telecommuting pros and cons to consider before making such a big decision . If you have the choice to work remotely or in-person, remember that no work model is perfect but each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Just know that whatever work environment you choose, you’re not alone.

pros-and-cons-of-working-from-home

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What we learned about wellness while working from home, and how to use those insights

essay on pros and cons of work from home

Before the coronavirus pandemic, psychiatrist Jessi Gold could count on one hand the number of times she had conducted an appointment over the phone or computer.

“When we switched to being home in March, it was like, ‘Okay, it’s a short-term thing. I can do this short term,’ ” said Gold, 33, who sees health-care workers and college students at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. But as weeks stretched into months, Gold, a self-described extrovert, began to feel the strain.

“I would burn out a lot easier just staring at the computer all day. I got headaches a lot quicker. I would feel myself needing to get up and walk around and make myself have breaks,” she said. Gold also found herself missing her connection with patients, even though she was seeing them virtually.

When Gold returned to in-person sessions once a week last month, “it was like night and day for me,” she said. “I was much happier. I left work feeling so much better.”

Tell us about the hardest parts of life after social distancing

Lakshman Swamy, on the other hand, is in no rush to return to his traditional office setting. “Although I feel like I’m working a lot . . . the comfort of doing that work is really increased,” said Swamy, 38, medical director at MassHealth and an ICU doctor in Boston, whose current schedule allows him to alternate three-week stretches of remote work with one week at the hospital.

Swamy said he is more productive at home, largely because he doesn’t have to commute and has a “preserved workspace.” In addition, he said, working remotely has allowed him to spend more time with his family and take better care of himself — attending meetings while walking, for example, and making more nutritious meals. “I can bake fresh bread and eat it for breakfast while I’m in a meeting,” he said. “It’s amazing.”

At work while at home: The new paradigm

Across the country, office workers and professionals like Gold and Swamy have experienced the pros and cons of working from home, and are considering which elements they would like to incorporate or scrap in their post-pandemic work lives. Mental health experts are hoping that decisions made by employers will prioritize individual well-being as much as possible.

“Before we had these cookie-cutter expectations of working processes,” said Lacie Barber, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who specializes in occupational health psychology. “The benefit of covid is it made us change everything.” Rather than “rushing to go back to the way things were,” Barber said, organizations should “actually think about how it could be better than where we were.”

And while much of the country’s workers — front-line and essential employees or those in the service industry — don’t have the option of doing their jobs remotely (according to a May survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics , only 17 percent of employed people 16 and older said they had teleworked in the past four weeks), experts say wisdom gained during the pandemic can be beneficial in any work environment.

“Employers are increasingly recognizing the importance of stress management, of setting healthy boundaries, of taking care of mental health and well-being ,” said Darcy Gruttadaro, director of the Center for Workplace Mental Health at the American Psychiatric Association.

How to know when you need a mental health break and ways to make the most of it

Going forward, experts would like to see bosses create “safe avenues for our employees and our team members to be comfortable and confident in disclosing what their needs are and what their mental health challenges are,” said Julius Boatwright, founder and chief executive of Steel Smiling , a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit organization that focuses on Black mental health.

And they would like to see all employees — even those who don’t have a choice about where they work — advocate for an environment that “you believe is better for you, your job and your overall mental health,” said Benjamin Miller, a mental health expert and president for Well Being Trust , a national foundation.

Here are some lessons learned while working from home that experts say bosses and employees should keep in mind — whether work stays remote, returns to an office or becomes a hybrid model.

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It can improve well-being

How a person’s well-being was affected by working from home was largely “grounded by privilege” related to job responsibilities, home life, neighborhood and socioeconomic status, among other factors, Miller said.

But for some people, the pandemic proved “that we can integrate wellness into our lifestyle and still get work done,” said Boatwright, who has found time for healthy activities and encourages his staff to schedule at least an hour or two of self-care during the workweek.

Even if you have to return to the office, experts say, it’s possible to continue self-care. Boatwright suggested incorporating simple breathing exercises, which don’t take more than three to five minutes, into your workday.

Bosses can contribute to employees’ well-being on-site by offering to hold walking meetings outdoors, inviting mindfulness experts to lead guided sessions for staff or sponsoring occasional healthy lunches, Gruttadaro said.

It can interfere with boundaries

The past 15 months have shown that one of the main challenges of remote employment is the “blurring of boundaries” between work and home, Miller said. “And that leads to all kinds of problems.”

What burnout really means, and what bosses and employees can do about it

Gruttadaro agreed. “If you used to work eight hours and now you’re working 10 to 11 hours, something else is being given up as part of your life,” she said. “If it’s social connectedness, if it’s doing activities you previously loved, if it’s exercise, those are all unfortunate things to give up because that’s what keeps us healthy.”

The increased reliance on emails and other electronic communications while working remotely also can exacerbate “ workplace telepressure ” (feeling like you have to respond immediately to text-based messages), said Barber, who has researched the subject. This in turn can lead to higher levels of work fatigue and sleep problems.

With more people on flexible schedules, “reestablishing predictability” at work is key to reducing telepressure, Barber said. Leaders and subordinates should have discussions about explicit ground rules for communication, including expected response times, and bosses should reinforce those rules by not contacting employees outside those hours. Telling people to simply ignore messages sent at unusual times doesn’t work, she said.

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Bosses also can model healthy behavior for both at-home and office workers by encouraging employees to use vacation and take time off themselves, experts said. They should also regularly check in on staff, wherever they are.

For at-home employees, experts suggested learning to psychologically detach from their work. Possibilities include creating a “ fake commute ,” taking a walk after work or even just closing the laptop. Such habits can send “a signal that you’re done with work,” Miller said.

Why a fake commute could pave the way to work-from-home balance

It can allow more individualized schedules and settings

While there is a heightened risk of blurred boundaries in remote work, many workers appreciate having more control over when and how they work, Gruttadaro said. Some people have adapted their schedules to suit their natural energy levels; perhaps they feel most productive early in the morning or they may be night owls. Others enjoy being able to squeeze in a nap in the early afternoon and benefit from a boost in productivity afterward. These advantages can be difficult to replicate in a traditional office setting.

Nap time is the new coffee break. Here’s how to make the most of it.

There are some employees, however, who might need a more structured schedule and setting to motivate themselves, and for them, returning to an office environment may be beneficial, experts said.

Personality type matters, too. Introverts may thrive in the quiet and solitude they have at home; extroverts may do better working face-to-face with colleagues.

Working from home has been a mixed bag for many parents, who enjoyed spending more time with their children but experienced increased stress and strain from juggling work, child care and school. Many of them might have longed for office life during the pandemic, Miller said, but when children go back to in-person learning, home offices might become more appealing.

Experts emphasized that the constantly shifting work landscape reinforces the importance of having open and honest conversations about work expectations.

6 strategies for parents struggling with work-from-home interruptions

It can challenge social connections

Losing in-person contact with co-workers, family and friends during the pandemic “was a very unnatural thing to happen and that stressed a lot of people out,” leading to increased rates of isolation and loneliness, Gruttadaro said.

It’s difficult to develop and maintain relationships while fully online, Barber said. In offices, there are more opportunities for informal interactions with colleagues or bosses throughout the day “that really do build up those relationships.”

Four reasons you’re tired of Zoom calls — and what to do about it

While a return to an office setting or a hybrid work model may ease some of these pressures, there are also options for better maintaining social ties remotely. Barber suggests, for example, that managers set aside time during virtual meetings for casual chit chat, rather than diving straight into work matters.

“When it comes to the workplace, there is a difference between speaking to someone on a screen and seeing them in person” Gruttadaro said. “There is just this feeling of closeness that comes with being in the same room and there is more of a likelihood to, perhaps in some cases, share more personal information and just really have a more meaningful conversation.”

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  • Sample Essays

Working From Home Essay

In this working from home essay for IELTS you have to discuss whether you think that working from home has more advantages or disadvantages. 

This was a recent question from the test. Take a look at the essay question:

These days, many people have their own computer and telephone, so it is quite easy for them to do their job at home.

Does working at home have more advantages or more disadvantages?

In this essay you have the following task:

  • Does working at home have more advantages or disadvantages?

essay on pros and cons of work from home

This suggests that there are both pros and cons of working from home as you are asked which there are more of. 

So in your answer to this working from home essay it's better to discuss both but write more about the side that you think there are more of so that the essay content reflects your opinion. 

Try then to think of one reason for one side of the argument and two for the other side.

Organisation

It's usual in academic writing to start with the opinion that is the one you don't support so start with that one.

So based on this, the sample working from home essay is organised as follows:

  • Have more control of time ( advantage)
  • Loneliness (disadvantage)
  • Less influence in the company ( disadvantage) 

So in this case, the writer thinks of course that there are more disadvantages and this should be clearly stated when you give your opinion in the introduction and / or conclusion.

Now take a look at the model answer.

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Write about the following topic:

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own experience or knowledge.

Write at least 250 words.

Model Answer:

In the present age it is common for people to work from home because of advances in technology. On balance, I would argue that this has more negative impacts than positive. 

One advantage of working from home is the freedom it provides. Home workers can organise their work around their home life as they can stop or start work as they please, and thus if, for example, they have children, they can easily arrange to take them and pick them up from school. They can also undertake any other tasks that they need to do during the day, such as doing the laundry or shopping, and then finish work later. Overall then, employees have more control over their lives.

Despite these positive factors, however, there are a number of  disadvantages. The first of these is the fact that those who work at home nearly all the time will not be mixing with colleagues. When people are at work, they are always surrounded by others, but at home, an employee is likely to be alone most the time. This may lead to feelings of loneliness due to a lack of interaction. 

Another drawback is the fact that one may have less influence in the company. It is often the case that important decisions arise on the spur of the moment as unexpected issues arise. If an employee is not there, others may have to step in. If this occurs on a regular basis, the employees contribution to the company may decline, meaning a higher probability of getting overlooked for things such as promotion. 

In conclusion, although there are positives and negatives related to working from home, there are more negative impacts. Employees should therefore consider carefully whether working from home is the best choice. 

(293 Words)

This working from home essay would get a high score as it meets the requirements of the task, which is to discuss the pros and cons of working from home and state which there are more of.

It is also coherent and cohesive, with paragraphing used to good effect and good linking within and between sentences. 

There is a good range of lexis (vocabulary) in the essay and it is used accurately with good collocations. 

There is also a good mix of complex sentences and structures and again the grammatical accuracy is very good.

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Computer games essay: This page analyzes a computer games essay and also notes how you can make good use of the question to plan and organize your essay. You have to be careful with this essay as there is a second part to the question that is not about the pros and cons.

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This peer pressure and young people essay for IELTS is an advantage disadvantage type question, focusing on whether peer pressure is negative or positive.

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Model Traffic Problems Essay for the IELTS Teset

Traffic problems essay: This is a traffic problems essay and the specific topic is the taxing of car drivers in order to reduce these problems. You are asked to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of introducing such a policy to tackle the issue.

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This online fraud essay is about the way in which people place their personal information on the internet and whether this is a positive or negative development.

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This IELTS essay question is about whether tablets and computers are good for children. It is an essay question where you have to assess whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. You should make sure you discuss both sides of the issue.

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Food additives essay: This is basically an advantages and disadvantages essay. You need to be careful with the word ‘outweigh’ as this often confuses students.

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11 Pros and Cons of Work from Home: Exploring the Advantages and Disadvantages

This advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay will explain the pros and cons of working from home.

Discover the advantages of flexibility and increased productivity, alongside the challenges of isolation and blurred work-life boundaries.

Gain valuable insights into the work-from-home phenomenon and make informed decisions about your own professional journey.

Dive into the advantages and disadvantages of remote work, and unlock the key considerations for finding the right balance in this engaging blog post.

Let’s dive into the advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay.

Ah, the glorious freedom of working from home!

Picture this: You roll out of bed, grab a cup of joe, and dive into your work without ever facing the dreaded commute or office small talk.

It’s a dream come true for many of us, and it’s not just about the convenience of staying in our pajamas all day (although that’s definitely a perk). 

In this part of the article, we’ll explore the numerous benefits of working from home that go beyond the comfy attire, showing you why embracing the pajama professional life might be the best decision you’ll ever make.

advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay

https://unsplash.com/photos/g9KFpAfQ5bc

From bidding farewell to the dreaded commute to enjoying increased productivity, improved work-life balance, and even saving money, the perks of working from home are undeniable. It’s a lifestyle that grants you the freedom and flexibility to design your work environment and schedule tailored to your preferences and needs.

So, if you’re still on the fence about embracing the pajama professional life, consider the advantages we’ve explored.

The absence of a daily commute allows you to reclaim valuable time, reduce stress, and engage in activities that truly matter to you.

The ability to focus in a distraction-free environment leads to heightened productivity and a sense of accomplishment.

Integrating work and personal commitments seamlessly ensures a healthier work-life balance, nurturing your overall well-being.

Moreover, remote work not only benefits you personally but also has a positive impact on the environment. Reduced transportation results in cost savings and a smaller carbon footprint, making it a win-win for your wallet and the planet.

Of course, working from home has its challenges. Loneliness, the need for self-discipline, and potentially blurred boundaries between work and personal life require careful navigation. However, these challenges can be overcome with the right strategies, such as establishing a dedicated workspace, maintaining regular communication with colleagues , and setting clear boundaries.

More about the disadvantages of working from home later.

In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift towards remote work, with many companies recognizing its benefits and embracing hybrid work models. As the world becomes more interconnected, technology advancements make remote collaboration seamless, enabling professionals to thrive in their homes.

Related Reading: How to Access Chat GPT

In our advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay, we will start with the advantages of working from home.

Advantages of Working from Home Essay

Say goodbye to the commute.

Let’s face it—commuting can be a soul-sucking experience. Spending hours stuck in traffic or crammed into a crowded train is not exactly the ideal way to start or end your workday.

When you work from home, you bid farewell to the daily commute and say hello to extra time and reduced stress. Imagine reclaiming and using those lost hours for more productive or enjoyable activities. Whether catching up on sleep, exercising, or simply spending quality time with your loved ones, the lack of commuting opens up a world of possibilities.

Increased Productivity 

Working from home offers a prime environment for enhanced productivity. You can focus on your tasks without interruptions without the usual office distractions. No more impromptu meetings or colleagues popping by your desk for a chat about the latest reality TV show. Instead, you can create a dedicated workspace tailored to your needs, free from distractions.

Moreover, the flexibility of remote work allows you to structure your day in a way that suits your preferences and energy levels. If you’re an early bird, you can tackle important tasks in the morning; if you’re a night owl, you can burn the midnight oil. You’ll accomplish more in less time by aligning your work hours with peak productivity periods, giving you a sense of achievement and a better work-life balance.

Let’s further explore the pros and cons in this advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay.

Improved Work-Life Balance  

One of the most significant advantages of working from home is achieving a healthier work-life balance. Traditional office settings often blur the lines between professional and personal life, making switching off from work-related stress and responsibilities challenging.

When your office is just a few steps from your living room, you have greater control over your schedule. You can integrate personal commitments, such as attending family events, exercising, or pursuing hobbies, into your workday. This flexibility allows you to design a routine that aligns with your individual needs, leading to increased job satisfaction and overall well-being.

Furthermore, remote work saves precious time that would otherwise be spent commuting or getting ready for the office. This newfound time can be utilized for self-care, pursuing personal passions, or engaging in activities that bring you joy.

The result? You feel more fulfilled and energized, ready to enthusiastically tackle professional and personal challenges.

Cost and Environmental Benefits

Working from home can be kind to both your wallet and the environment. When you’re no longer commuting, you save on transportation costs, whether it’s fuel for your car or public transportation fares. Additionally, remote work eliminates the need for a separate work wardrobe, saving you money on professional attire.

Moreover, remote work significantly reduces carbon emissions associated with commuting. Fewer cars on the road translate to cleaner air and a smaller carbon footprint. By embracing remote jobs, you contribute to a more sustainable future and help protect the planet.

Also, one of the small benefits of working from home is that you can spend more time with your pets. Sometimes your dog or cat can feel lonely and that you don’t spend enough time with them. Remote work allows getting to know your pet closer and having quality time together. Basepaws review can also help you to know your pet better.

So, whether you’re a freelancer, a remote employee, or considering negotiating a flexible work arrangement with your employer, the benefits of working from home are waiting for you to embrace them. Say goodbye to the mundane office routine and embrace the freedom, flexibility, and personal fulfillment that come with the pajama professional life.

essay on pros and cons of work from home

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The Disadvantages of Working from Home: Balancing Flexibility with Challenges

Let’s continue our advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay by exploring the disadvantages of working from home.

The concept of remote work has gained significant traction in recent years, revolutionizing the traditional office environment.

While working from home offers numerous benefits, such as increased flexibility and reduced commuting time, it is important to recognize that it also comes with its fair share of disadvantages.

In this part of the article, we will explore the potential downsides of working from home, shedding light on the challenges individuals may face in this ever-evolving professional landscape.

Isolation and Lack of Social Interaction

One of the most common drawbacks of working from home is the feeling of isolation and limited social interaction. When employees are physically distanced from their colleagues, they miss out on the spontaneous conversations, brainstorming sessions, and the overall camaraderie that can foster creativity and collaboration. The absence of face-to-face interactions may lead to a sense of disconnection, which can impact job satisfaction and mental well-being.

Blurred Boundaries Between Work and Personal Life

Working from home often blurs the line between professional and personal life, making it challenging for individuals to maintain a healthy work-life balance. With no clear separation between the office space and home environment, it becomes tempting to work longer hours, leading to burnout and decreased productivity. Moreover, the lack of physical boundaries may result in constant interruptions from family members or the inability to switch off work-related thoughts, thereby adding to stress levels.

Distractions and Lack of Focus

The home environment can be full of distractions, ranging from household chores to family responsibilities. The presence of tempting diversions, such as household tasks, television, or social media , can significantly impact an individual’s ability to concentrate on their work tasks. Procrastination becomes easier, and maintaining focus becomes a constant challenge, potentially hampering productivity and overall performance.

Limited Access to Resources and Technology

While technological advancements have made remote work more feasible, it is undeniable that not all employees have equal access to the necessary resources and technology.

In some cases, employees may lack a stable internet connection, have outdated equipment, or face other technological limitations. These disparities can create barriers to effective communication, collaboration, and access to vital tools or software, thus hindering productivity and professional growth.

Reduced Career Development Opportunities

Working remotely can limit an individual’s exposure to various career development opportunities. In a traditional office setting, employees have the advantage of face-to-face interactions, networking events, and informal learning experiences. Remote workers may miss out on these crucial avenues for professional growth, potentially impacting their chances of career advancement and skill development.

Strained Communication and Collaboration

Despite the advancements in communication technology, remote work can still present challenges when it comes to effective collaboration.

Remote employees heavily rely on digital communication tools, such as email, instant messaging, and video conferencing. However, misinterpretations, technical glitches, and limited non-verbal cues can hamper effective communication, leading to misunderstandings and reduced team cohesion.

Building trust and maintaining strong relationships with colleagues and supervisors can be more challenging when working remotely.

Impact on Mental Health and Well-being

The work-from-home setup can have a significant impact on an individual’s mental health and overall well-being. The lack of social interaction, feelings of isolation, and increased blurring of boundaries can lead to heightened stress levels, loneliness, and even depression.

Additionally, the absence of a physically separate workspace may contribute to difficulties in disconnecting from work, preventing individuals from fully unwinding and recharging during their personal time.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Work from Home Essay: FAQ

What are advantages and disadvantages of work from home.

Advantages: No commute, work in your pajamas. Disadvantages: Lack of digital resources, feeling of isolation, home life and work life becomes blurred.

What are disadvantages of working from home?

Lack of digital resources, feeling of isolation, home life and work life becomes blurred.

Conclusion: Advantages and Disadvantages of Work from Home Essay

While working from home offers undeniable benefits, it is crucial to acknowledge and address the disadvantages that come along with it.

The isolation, blurred boundaries, distractions, limited resources, reduced career development opportunities, strained communication, and potential impact on mental health highlight the need for proactive measures to counter these challenges.

Employers and employees must work together to find solutions that foster connectivity, establish clear boundaries, and promote a healthy work-life balance. By recognizing and addressing the disadvantages, we can strive towards a more balanced and productive remote work experience.

As you can see, working from home offers numerous advantages beyond the absence of a dress code. Remote work has become a preferred choice for many professionals thanks to eliminating the commute to improve productivity, achieving a better work-life balance, and contributing to a greener planet.

So, go ahead and embrace the perks of working from home. Your pajamas will thank you! However, working from home offers many benefits that extend far beyond lounging in your favorite PJs.

To recap: The advantages and disadvantages of working from home bring both opportunities and challenges to individuals and organizations alike.

On the positive side, remote work offers flexibility, increased productivity, and reduced commuting time. It allows individuals to create a better work-life balance and offers opportunities for those with physical disabilities or caregiving responsibilities. Moreover, it enables companies to tap into a global talent pool and save costs on office space.

However, there are also downsides to consider. Working from home can blur the boundaries between work and personal life, leading to longer working hours and burnout. The lack of face-to-face interaction may hamper collaboration and team bonding, affecting creativity and innovation. Additionally, the absence of a dedicated workspace can create distractions and hinder productivity.

Ultimately, the decision to embrace remote work depends on individual preferences, job requirements, and the nature of the organization. It is crucial to strike a balance between the advantages and disadvantages, implementing strategies to overcome the challenges while leveraging the benefits.

Whether it’s a hybrid model or a fully remote setup, clear communication, efficient task management, and regular check-ins become crucial to maintaining a productive and connected workforce.

Overall, the rise of work from home represents a significant shift in the way we work. It offers unique opportunities for individuals and organizations to adapt to the changing landscape of the modern workplace.

By carefully weighing the advantages and disadvantages presented in this advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay and implementing effective strategies, we can harness the potential of remote work while mitigating its challenges, ultimately fostering a more flexible, efficient, and balanced work environment.

Readers, please share this advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay so people considering abandoning the 9 to 5 traditional workday discover this post.

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Working from home has its advantages, but employees miss their coworkers

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  • After a year of working from home, employees miss in-person conversations, lunches, happy hours and the structure of office life, according to a recent report.
  • Still, many say they would like to continue to telecommute, at least part of the time.

Here's what workers lose by working from home for long periods—or permanently

As much as workers have enjoyed the benefits of telecommuting, many wouldn't mind returning to the office — as soon as possible.

After a year of working from home amid the Covid-19 outbreak, employees miss in-person conversations most of all, according to a recent report by management consultancy Seyfarth at Work.

Lunches and happy hours with colleagues, more daily structure and fewer interruptions by children also ranked high in the poll of more than 500 workers from companies of all sizes conducted between January and February.

"People loved the cooperative feeling of being in a workplace with colleagues," said Philippe Weiss, president of Seyfarth at Work.

"What was surprising was that even 16% said they missed the commute," Weiss noted.

That's the moment they can transition in and out of the workday, he said, underscoring the loss of boundaries between work and home in the last year.

"What the pandemic has crystalized is that everyone is looking at their own work and their own families and how the two are interrelated," he added.

More from Personal Finance: When will you be able to get vaccinated at work? A return to the office may be coming as vaccinations increase Pandemic pushes millions from the labor force

Already, there is a lot of discussion about who will be required to return to the office  and when . 

More than half of employees said that, given the option, they would want to keep working from home even after the coronavirus crisis subsides at least part of the time, according to a separate survey by the  Pew Research Center .

Going forward, many companies have said they may adopt some sort of  flexible weekly schedule , according to another report from  The Conference Board .

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Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary

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Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary, Doctoral School of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Sociology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

  • Balazs Aczel, 
  • Marton Kovacs, 
  • Tanja van der Lippe, 
  • Barnabas Szaszi

PLOS

  • Published: March 25, 2021
  • https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127
  • Peer Review
  • Reader Comments

Table 1

The flexibility allowed by the mobilization of technology disintegrated the traditional work-life boundary for most professionals. Whether working from home is the key or impediment to academics’ efficiency and work-life balance became a daunting question for both scientists and their employers. The recent pandemic brought into focus the merits and challenges of working from home on a level of personal experience. Using a convenient sampling, we surveyed 704 academics while working from home and found that the pandemic lockdown decreased the work efficiency for almost half of the researchers but around a quarter of them were more efficient during this time compared to the time before. Based on the gathered personal experience, 70% of the researchers think that in the future they would be similarly or more efficient than before if they could spend more of their work-time at home. They indicated that in the office they are better at sharing thoughts with colleagues, keeping in touch with their team, and collecting data, whereas at home they are better at working on their manuscript, reading the literature, and analyzing their data. Taking well-being also into account, 66% of them would find it ideal to work more from home in the future than they did before the lockdown. These results draw attention to how working from home is becoming a major element of researchers’ life and that we have to learn more about its influencer factors and coping tactics in order to optimize its arrangements.

Citation: Aczel B, Kovacs M, van der Lippe T, Szaszi B (2021) Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0249127. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127

Editor: Johnson Chun-Sing Cheung, The University of Hong Kong, HONG KONG

Received: September 24, 2020; Accepted: March 11, 2021; Published: March 25, 2021

Copyright: © 2021 Aczel et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All research materials, the collected raw and processed anonymous data, just as well the code for data management and statistical analyses are publicly shared on the OSF page of the project: OSF: https://osf.io/v97fy/ .

Funding: TVL's contribution is part of the research program Sustainable Cooperation – Roadmaps to Resilient Societies (SCOOP). She is grateful to the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) for their support in the context of its 2017 Gravitation Program (grant number 024.003.025).

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Fleeing from the Great Plague that reached Cambridge in 1665, Newton retreated to his countryside home where he continued working for the next year and a half. During this time, he developed his theories on calculus, optics, and the law of gravitation—fundamentally changing the path of science for centuries. Newton himself described this period as the most productive time of his life [ 1 ]. Is working from home indeed the key to efficiency for scientists also in modern times? A solution for working without disturbance by colleagues and being able to manage a work-life balance? What personal and professional factors influence the relation between productivity and working from home? These are the main questions that the present paper aims to tackle. The Covid-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to analyze the implications of working from home in great detail.

Working away from the traditional office is increasingly an option in today’s world. The phenomenon has been studied under numerous, partially overlapping terms, such as telecommuting, telework, virtual office, remote work, location independent working, home office. In this paper, we will use ‘working from home’ (WFH), a term that typically covers working from any location other than the dedicated area provided by the employer.

The practice of WFH and its effect on job efficiency and well-being are reasonably well explored outside of academia [ 2 , 3 ]. Internet access and the increase of personal IT infrastructure made WFH a growing trend throughout the last decades [ 4 ]. In 2015, over 12% of EU workers [ 5 ] and near one-quarter of US employees [ 6 ] worked at least partly from home. A recent survey conducted among 27,500 millennials and Gen Z-s indicated that their majority would like to work remotely more frequently [ 7 ]. The literature suggests that people working from home need flexibility for different reasons. Home-working is a typical solution for those who need to look after dependent children [ 8 ] but many employees just seek a better work-life balance [ 7 ] and the comfort of an alternative work environment [ 9 ].

Non-academic areas report work-efficiency benefits for WFH but they also show some downsides of this arrangement. A good example is the broad-scale experiment in which call center employees were randomly assigned to work from home or in the office for nine months [ 10 ]. A 13% work performance increase was found in the working from home group. These workers also reported improved work satisfaction. Still, after the experiment, 50% of them preferred to go back to the office mainly because of feeling isolated at home.

Home-working has several straightforward positive aspects, such as not having to commute, easier management of household responsibilities [ 11 ] and family demands [ 12 ], along with increased autonomy over time use [ 13 , 14 ], and fewer interruptions [ 15 , 16 ]. Personal comfort is often listed as an advantage of the home environment [e.g., 15 ], though setting up a home office comes with physical and infrastructural demands [ 17 ]. People working from home consistently report greater job motivation and satisfaction [ 4 , 11 , 18 , 19 ] which is probably due to the greater work-related control and work-life flexibility [ 20 ]. A longitudinal nationally representative sample of 30,000 households in the UK revealed that homeworking is positively related with leisure time satisfaction [ 21 ], suggesting that people working from home can allocate more time for leisure activities.

Often-mentioned negative aspects of WFH include being disconnected from co-workers, experiencing isolation due to the physical and social distance to team members [ 22 , 23 ]. Also, home-working employees reported more difficulties with switching off and they worked beyond their formal working hours [ 4 ]. Working from home is especially difficult for those with small children [ 24 ], but intrusion from other family members, neighbours, and friends were also found to be major challenges of WFH [e.g., 17 ]. Moreover, being away from the office may also create a lack of visibility and increases teleworkers’ fear that being out of sight limits opportunities for promotion, rewards, and positive performance reviews [ 25 ].

Importantly, increased freedom imposes higher demands on workers to control not just the environment, but themselves too. WFH comes with the need to develop work-life boundary control tactics [ 26 ] and to be skilled at self-discipline, self-motivation, and good time management [ 27 ]. Increased flexibility can easily lead to multitasking and work-family role blurring [ 28 ]. Table 1 provides non-comprehensive lists of mostly positive and mostly negative consequences of WFH, based on the literature reviewed here.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.t001

Compared to the private sector, our knowledge is scarce about how academics experience working from home. Researchers in higher education institutes work in very similar arrangements. Typically, they are expected to personally attend their workplace, if not for teaching or supervision, then for meetings or to confer with colleagues. In the remaining worktime, they work in their lab or, if allowed, they may choose to do some of their tasks remotely. Along with the benefits on productivity when working from home, academics have already experienced some of its drawbacks at the start of the popularity of personal computers. As Snizek observed in the ‘80s, “(f)aculty who work long hours at home using their microcomputers indicate feelings of isolation and often lament the loss of collegial feedback and reinforcement” [page 622, 29 ].

Until now, the academics whose WFH experience had been given attention were mostly those participating in online distance education [e.g., 30 , 31 ]. They experienced increased autonomy, flexibility in workday schedule, the elimination of unwanted distractions [ 32 ], along with high levels of work productivity and satisfaction [ 33 ], but they also observed inadequate communication and the lack of opportunities for skill development [ 34 ]. The Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to study the WFH experience of a greater spectrum of academics, since at one point most of them had to do all their work from home.

We have only fragmented knowledge about the moderators of WFH success. We know that control over time is limited by the domestic tasks one has while working from home. The view that women’s work is more influenced by family obligations than men’s is consistently shown in the literature [e.g., 35 – 37 ]. Sullivan and Lewis [ 38 ] argued that women who work from home are able to fulfil their domestic role better and manage their family duties more to their satisfaction, but that comes at the expense of higher perceived work–family conflict [see also 39 ]. Not surprisingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, female scientists suffered a greater disruption than men in their academic productivity and time spent on research, most likely due to demands of childcare [ 40 , 41 ].

In summary, until recently, the effect of WFH on academics’ life and productivity received limited attention. However, during the recent pandemic lockdown, scientists, on an unprecedented scale, had to find solutions to continue their research from home. The situation unavoidably brought into focus the merits and challenges of WFH on a level of personal experience. Institutions were compelled to support WFH arrangements by adequate regulations, services, and infrastructure. Some researchers and institutions might have found benefits in the new arrangements and may wish to continue WFH in some form; for others WFH brought disproportionately larger challenges. The present study aims to facilitate the systematic exploration and support of researchers’ efficiency and work-life balance when working from home.

Materials and methods

Our study procedure and analysis plan were preregistered at https://osf.io/jg5bz (all deviations from the plan are listed in S1 File ). The survey included questions on research work efficiency, work-life balance, demographics, professional and personal background information. The study protocol has been approved by the Institutional Review Board from Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary (approval number: 2020/131). The Transparency Report of the study, the complete text of the questionnaire items and the instructions are shared at our OSF repository: https://osf.io/v97fy/ .

As the objective of this study was to gain insight about researchers’ experience of WFH, we aimed to increase the size and diversity of our sample rather than ascertaining the representativeness of our sample. Therefore, we distributed our online survey link among researchers in professional newsletters, university mailing lists, on social media, and by sending group-emails to authors (additional details about sampling are in S1 File ). As a result of the nature of our sampling strategy, it is not known how many researchers have seen our participation request. Additionally, we did not collect the country of residence of the respondents. Responses analyzed in this study were collected between 2020-04-24 and 2020-07-13. Overall, 858 individuals started the survey and 154 were excluded because they did not continue the survey beyond the first question. As a result, 704 respondents were included in the analysis.

We sent the questionnaire individually to each of the respondents through the Qualtrics Mailer service. Written informed consent and access to the preregistration of the research was provided to every respondent before starting the survey. Then, respondents who agreed to participate in the study could fill out the questionnaire. To encourage participation, we offered that upon completion they can enter a lottery to win a 100 USD voucher.

This is a general description of the survey items. The full survey with the display logic and exact phrasing of the items is transported from Qualtrics and uploaded to the projects’ OSF page: https://osf.io/8ze2g/ .

Efficiency of research work.

The respondents were asked to compare the efficiency of their research work during the lockdown to their work before the lockdown. They were also asked to use their present and previous experience to indicate whether working more from home in the future would change the efficiency of their research work compared to the time before the lockdown. For both questions, they could choose among three options: “less efficient”; “more efficient”, and “similarly efficient”.

Comparing working from home to working in the office.

Participants were asked to compare working from home to working from the office. For this question they could indicate their preference on a 7-point dimension (1: At home; 7: In the office), along 15 efficiency or well-being related aspects of research work (e.g., working on the manuscript, maintaining work-life balance). These aspects were collected in a pilot study conducted with 55 researchers who were asked to indicate in free text responses the areas in which their work benefits/suffers when working from home. More details of the pilot study are provided in S1 File .

Actual and ideal time spent working from home.

To study the actual and ideal time spent working from home, researcher were asked to indicate on a 0–100% scale (1) what percentage of their work time they spent working from home before the pandemic and (2) how much would be ideal for them working from home in the future concerning both research efficiency and work-life balance.

Feasibility of working more from home.

With simple Yes/No options, we asked the respondents to indicate whether they think that working more from home would be feasible considering all their other duties (education, administration, etc.) and the given circumstances at home (infrastructure, level of disturbance).

Background information.

Background questions were asked by providing preset lists concerning their academic position (e.g., full professor), area of research (e.g., social sciences), type of workplace (e.g., purely research institute), gender, age group, living situation (e.g., single-parent with non-adult child(ren)), and the age and the number of their children.

The respondents were also asked to select one of the offered options to indicate: whether or not they worked more from home during the coronavirus lockdown than before; whether it is possible for them to collect data remotely; whether they have education duties at work; if their research requires intensive team-work; whether their home office is fully equipped; whether their partner was also working from home during the pandemic; how far their office is from home; whether they had to do home-schooling during the pandemic; whether there was someone else looking after their child(ren) during their work from home in lockdown. When the question did not apply to them, they could select the ‘NA’ option as well.

Data preprocessing and analyses

All the data preprocessing and analyses were conducted in R [ 42 ], with the use of the tidyverse packages [ 43 ]. Before the analysis of the survey responses, we read all the free-text comments to ascertain that they do not contain personal information and they are in line with the respondent’s answers. We found that for 5 items the respondents’ comments contradicted their survey choices (e.g., whether they have children), therefore, we excluded the responses of the corresponding items from further analyses (see S1 File ). Following the preregistration, we only conducted descriptive statistics of the survey results.

Background information

The summary of the key demographic information of the 704 complete responses is presented in Table 2 . A full summary of all the collected background information of the respondents are available in S1 File .

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.t002

Efficiency of research work

The results showed that 94% (n = 662) of the surveyed researchers worked more from home during the COVID-19 lockdown compared to the time before. Of these researchers, 47% found that due to working more from home their research became, in general, less efficient, 23% found it more efficient, and 30% found no difference compared to working before the lockdown. Within this database, we also explored the effect of the lockdown on the efficiency of people living with children (n = 290). Here, we found that 58% of them experienced that due to working more from home their research became, in general, less efficient, 20% found it more efficient, and 22% found no difference compared to working before the lockdown. Of those researchers who live with children, we found that 71% of the 21 single parents and 57% of the 269 partnered parents found working less efficient when working from home compared to the time before the lockdown.

When asking about how working more from home would affect the efficiency of their research after the lockdown, of those who have not already been working from home full time (n = 684), 29% assumed that it could make their research, in general, less efficient, 29% said that it would be more efficient, and 41% assumed no difference compared to the time before the lockdown ( Fig 1 ).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.g001

Focusing on the efficiency of the subgroup of people who live with children (n = 295), we found that for 32% their research work would be less efficient, for 30% it would be no different, and for 38% it would be more efficient to work from home after the lockdown, compared to the time before the lockdown.

Comparing working from home to working in the office

When comparing working from home to working in the office in general, people found that they can better achieve certain aspects of the research in one place than the other. They indicated that in the office they are better at sharing thoughts with colleagues, keeping in touch with their team, and collecting data, whereas at home they are better at working on their manuscript, reading the literature, and analyzing their data ( Fig 2 ).

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The bars represent response averages of the given aspects.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.g002

Actual and ideal time spent working from home

We also asked the researchers how much of their work time they spent working from home in the past, and how much it would be ideal for them to work from home in the future concerning both research efficiency and well-being. Fig 3 shows the distribution of percentages of time working from home in the past and in an ideal future. Comparing these values for each researcher, we found that 66% of them want to work more from home in the future than they did before the lockdown, whereas 16% of them want to work less from home, and 18% of them want to spend the same percentage of their work time at home in the future as before. (These latter calculations were not preregistered).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.g003

Feasibility of working more from home

Taken all their other duties (education, administration, etc.) and provided circumstances at home (infrastructure, level of disturbance), of researchers who would like to work more from home in the future (n = 461), 86% think that it would be possible to do so. Even among those who have teaching duties at work (n = 376), 84% think that more working from home would be ideal and possible.

Researchers’ work and life have radically changed in recent times. The flexibility allowed by the mobilization of technology and the continuous access to the internet disintegrated the traditional work-life boundary. Where, when, and how we work depends more and more on our own arrangements. The recent pandemic only highlighted an already existing task: researchers’ worklife has to be redefined. The key challenge in a new work-life model is to find strategies to balance the demands of work and personal life. As a first step, the present paper explored how working from home affects researchers’ efficiency and well-being.

Our results showed that while the pandemic-related lockdown decreased the work efficiency for almost half of the researchers (47%), around a quarter (23%) of them experienced that they were more efficient during this time compared to the time before. Based on personal experience, 70% of the researchers think that after the lockdown they would be similarly (41%) or more efficient (29%) than before if they could spend more of their work-time at home. The remaining 30% thought that after the lockdown their work efficiency would decrease if they worked from home, which is noticeably lower than the 47% who claimed the same for the lockdown period. From these values we speculate that some of the obstacles of their work efficiency were specific to the pandemic lockdown. Such obstacles could have been the need to learn new methods to teach online [ 44 ] or the trouble adapting to the new lifestyle [ 45 ]. Furthermore, we found that working from the office and working from home support different aspects of research. Not surprisingly, activities that involve colleagues or team members are better bound to the office, but tasks that need focused attention, such as working on the manuscript or analyzing the data are better achieved from home.

A central motivation of our study was to explore what proportion of their worktime researchers would find ideal to work from home, concerning both research efficiency and work-life balance. Two thirds of the researchers indicated that it would be better to work more from home in the future. It seemed that sharing work somewhat equally between the two venues is the most preferred arrangement. A great majority (86%) of those who would like to work more from home in the future, think that it would be possible to do so. As a conclusion, both the work and non-work life of researchers would take benefits should more WFH be allowed and neither workplace duties, nor their domestic circumstances are limits of such a change. That researchers have a preference to work more from home, might be due to the fact that they are more and more pressured by their work. Finishing manuscripts, and reading literature is easier to find time for when working from home.

A main message of the results of our present survey is that although almost half of the respondents reported reduced work efficiency during the lockdown, the majority of them would prefer the current remote work setting to some extent in the future. It is important to stress, however, that working from home is not equally advantageous for researchers. Several external and personal factors must play a role in researchers’ work efficiency and work-life balance. In this analysis, we concentrated only on family status, but further dedicated studies will be required to gain a deeper understanding of the complex interaction of professional, institutional, personal, and domestic factors in this matter. While our study could only initiate the exploration of academics’ WFH benefits and challenges, we can already discuss a few relevant aspects regarding the work-life interface.

Our data show that researchers who live with dependent children can exploit the advantages of working from home less than those who do not have childcare duties, irrespective of the pandemic lockdown. Looking after children is clearly a main source of people’s task overload and, as a result, work-family conflict [ 46 , 47 ]. As an implication, employers should pay special respect to employees’ childcare situations when defining work arrangements. It should be clear, however, that other caring responsibilities should also be respected such as looking after elderly or disabled relatives [ 48 ]. Furthermore, to avoid equating non-work life with family-life, a broader diversity of life circumstances, such as those who live alone, should be taken into consideration [ 49 ].

It seems likely that after the pandemic significantly more work will be supplied from home [ 50 ]. The more of the researchers’ work will be done from home in the future, the greater the challenge will grow to integrate their work and non-work life. The extensive research on work-life conflict, should help us examine the issue and to develop coping strategies applicable for academics’ life. The Boundary Theory [ 26 , 51 , 52 ] proved to be a useful framework to understand the work-home interface. According to this theory, individuals utilize different tactics to create and maintain an ideal level of work-home segmentation. These boundaries often serve as “mental fences” to simplify the environment into domains, such as work or home, to help us attend our roles, such as being an employee or a parent. These boundaries are more or less permeable, depending on how much the individual attending one role can be influenced by another role. Individuals differ in the degree to which they prefer and are able to segment their roles, but each boundary crossing requires a cognitive “leap” between these categories [ 53 ]. The source of conflict is the demands of the different roles and responsibilities competing for one’s physical and mental resources. Working from home can easily blur the boundary between work and non-work domains. The conflict caused by the intrusion of the home world to one’s work time, just as well the intrusion of work tasks to one’s personal life are definite sources of weakened ability to concentrate on one’s tasks [ 54 ], exhaustion [ 55 ], and negative job satisfaction [ 56 ].

What can researchers do to mitigate this challenge? Various tactics have been identified for controlling one’s borders between work and non-work. One can separate the two domains by temporal, physical, behavioral, and communicative segmentation [ 26 ]. Professionals often have preferences and self-developed tactics for boundary management. People who prefer tighter boundary management apply strong segmentation between work and home [ 57 , 58 ]. For instance, they don’t do domestic tasks in worktime (temporal segmentation), close their door when working from home (physical segmentation), don’t read work emails at weekends (behavioral segmentation), or negotiate strict boundary rules with family members (communicative segmentation). People on the other on one side of the segmentation-integration continuum, might not mind, or cannot avoid, ad-hoc boundary-crossings and integrate the two domains by letting private space and time be mixed with their work.

Researchers, just like other workers, need to develop new arrangements and skills to cope with the disintegration of the traditional work-life boundaries. To know how research and education institutes could best support this change would require a comprehensive exploration of the factors in researchers’ WFH life. There is probably no one-size-fits-all approach to promote employees’ efficiency and well-being. Life circumstances often limit how much control people can have over their work-life boundaries when working from home [ 59 ]. Our results strongly indicate that some can boost work efficiency and wellbeing when working from home, others need external solutions, such as the office, to provide boundaries between their life domains. Until we gain comprehensive insight about the topic, individuals are probably the best judges of their own situation and of what arrangements may be beneficial for them in different times [ 60 ]. The more autonomy the employers provide to researchers in distributing their work between the office and home (while not lowering their expectations), the more they let them optimize this arrangement to their circumstances.

Our study has several limitations: to investigate how factors such as research domain, seniority, or geographic location contribute to WFH efficiency and well-being would have needed a much greater sample. Moreover, the country of residence of the respondents was not collected in our survey and this factor could potentially alter the perception of WFH due to differing social and infrastructural factors. Whereas the world-wide lockdown has provided a general experience to WFH to academics, the special circumstances just as well biased their judgment of the arrangement. With this exploratory research, we could only scratch the surface of the topic, the reader can probably generate a number of testable hypotheses that would be relevant to the topic but we could not analyze in this exploration.

Newton working in lockdown became the idealized image of the home-working scientist. Unquestionably, he was a genius, but his success probably needed a fortunate work-life boundary. Should he had noisy neighbours, or taunting domestic duties, he might have achieved much less while working from home. With this paper, we aim to draw attention to how WFH is becoming a major element of researchers’ life and that we have to be prepared for this change. We hope that personal experience or the topic’s relevance to the future of science will invite researchers to continue this work.

Supporting information

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.s001

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Szonja Horvath, Matyas Sarudi, and Zsuzsa Szekely for their help with reviewing the free text responses.

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Working from Home: Pros, Cons, and Strategies for Success

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Published: Sep 7, 2023

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Advantages of working from home, disadvantages of working from home, strategies for success in working from home.

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essay on pros and cons of work from home

Working from home (Corrected Essay)

Working from home (Corrected Essay)

Some say that it would be better if the majority of employees worked from home instead of traveling to a workplace every day. Do you think the advantages of working from home outweigh the disadvantages?

Office has no longer been the only work place since many people are considering working from home. Some may argue the majority of employees should change their work place from office to home. In my opinion, the benefits of working from home can surely surpass the drawbacks due to the following reasons:

Office has no longer been the only work place since many people are considering working from home. Some may argue the majority of employees should change their work place from office to home. In my opinion, the benefits of working from home can surely surpass offset the drawbacks due to the following reasons: various reasons.

The first sentence is not accurate. It implies that people did not work from home in the past; however, throughout history, many people did work from home, for example, the classical novelists and artists.

“ Can surely ” is an informal expression and does not contribute anything to the preciseness of your writing.

The correct verb to follow the word “benefit” is not “ to surpass ”, but rather “ to offset ”, “ to outweigh ”, or “ to exceed ”.

Do not end your sentence with a colon ( “:” ), unless you want to provide a list of items immediately after that.

Working from home is a lot more comfortable for lots of people. Employees can save a great deal of time and money since they do not have to travel so often, which means people will have more time for work and for themselves, too. Less travelling will also help reduce traffice traffic jam congestion and pollutants to our environment environmental pollution . Besides, working at home does not mean staying inside all day long, people can choose to work in their garden or backyard, wherever makes them feel convenient to work. Moreover, employees are under less stresses stress since they get to decide when to work and when to take rest with a flexible working schedule . These things will help giving out better perfomance to tasks.

Words like “comfortable”, or “convenient” are too generic to use in an IELTS writing context. Generally, it’s better to use other words.

Lengthy phrases like “a great deal of time and money” (7 words) are considered as informal and ambiguous. Try to use shorter expressions, for example “time-saving and cost-efficient” (3 words only).

In a formal context, “ traffic congestion ” is more preferrable than “ traffic jam ”. When being alone, the word “ jam ” can be understood as a type of food. It’s always better to use a word that only has one meaning, regardless of the context.

The third sentence in this body paragraph is an example of poor cohesion. “ Traffic jam ” is not parallel to “ pollutants to our environment ”. “ Traffic jam ” is a condition (abstract), not a physical material (touchable by human) like “ pollutants ”. Therefore, you need to use another condition that is parallel to “ traffic jam ” (“ environmental pollution ”)

The fourth sentence (“ Besides, working at… ”) should be placed in the second body paragraph. The author is tailoring his ideas by providing the advantages of working from home in the first body paragraph, then listing the disadvantages in the second body paragraph while attacking those disadvantages notion at the same time. This kind of idea (“ to play the devil’s advocate ”) is good, but the execution isn’t. Insufficient coherence like this will hamper your score in Coherence & Cohesion criterion.

“Stress” as in “psychological stress” is an uncountable noun.

Try to improve the conciseness of your essay by rewritting a sentence clause (S+V) into a noun phrase. For example, “ since they get to decide when to work and when to take rest ” can be shorten into “ with a flexible working schedule ”.

The last sentence is redundant and ungrammatical.

To be fair, There are still some disadvantages that home-working could bring of teleworking . For instance, working from personal space will reduce direct face-to-face interactions among colleagues. But However, the problem is solved thanks to the Internet. As for now, people from around the globe can easily contact and work with others from distances. Another drawback is that some people may get distracted from work by external factors. This situation requires employees to be highly awared awarded of what they should and should not do for their paid jobs.

The accurate way to describe the act of working from home is not “ home-working ”, but rather “ teleworking ” or “ telecommuting ”. The author has miss his chance to improve the Lexical Resource score.

Generally, in a writing context, do not start your sentence with a short subordinate conjuction (“ and ”, “ or ”, “ but ”, “ for ”).

The third sentence in this paragraph is very unclear, especially when the followed sentence does not provide a good explanation. The author has to elaborate more on the Internet’s merits (social softwares such as “ instant messaging ”, “ collaborative software ”, etc)

The author has failed to provide a counter-argument for the notion of “ people may get distracted from work by external factors ”. Not to mentions he does not elaborate what is the “ external factors ”. Again, weak cohesion.

Do not simply stating “ this ” as a sentence subject. This type of grammatical mistake is called “unclear antecedent”, or “unclear aphoric noun”, and should be avoid by extending the subject with a word like “ condition ”, “ situation ”, “ issue ”, etc.

In conclusion, working from home should be encouraged because the advantages overcome the disadvantages.

The conclusion is coherent with the introduction and the two body paragraphs. Though, it is a little bit too short.

(Words: 261)

Overall: 6.0

Task Response: 6

✓ addresses all parts of the task although some parts may be more fully covered than others (the author has written more than 250 words and addressed the topic question)

✓ presents a relevant position although the conclusions may become unclear or repetitive

✓ presents relevant main ideas but some may be inadequately developed/unclear

Coherence and Cohesion: 6

✓ arranges information and ideas coherently and there is a clear overall progression (the ideas in each paragraphs are coherent with eachother)

✓ uses cohesive devices effectively, but cohesion within and/or between sentences may be faulty or mechanical

✓ may not always use referencing clearly or appropriately (the author usually fails at providing good supporting evidence for his argument)

✓ uses paragraphing, but not always logically (the fourth sentence in Body Paragraph 1 should be placed in Body 2 instead)

Lexical Resource: 5

✓ uses a limited range of vocabulary, but this is minimally adequate for the task (all the vocab used in this essay are very generic) ✓ may make noticeable errors in spelling and/or word formation that may cause some difficulty for the reader

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: 6

✓ uses a mix of simple and complex sentence forms

✓ makes some errors in grammar and punctuation but they rarely reduce communication

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This essay is corrected by Anh Tran - Let's Write Something Group .

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essay on pros and cons of work from home

Pros and Cons of Work From Home Report

There are times where some people will be prevented from working in a particular company because they could not leave the house. For example, a mom of two or more kids will really find it hard to manage the time of working while taking care of the needs of her children. This is the very reason why home sourcing or work-from-home schemes are becoming really popular. In fact, it was found out that in America alone, there is a continuously growing number of Americans, some 20 million right now, who do at least some of their work at home.

We’re not just talking about telecommuters who work for companies that give them the flexibility to work from home (Brooks, 2005). We’re also talking about a new, un-tethered workforce, made of contract workers, consultants, and freelancers. Thanks to cell phones and broadband, they have flexible schedules and their homes are also their offices.

But there are a number of advantages and disadvantages when one prefers to work from home. As for the pros or the advantages, the list includes (Bostick, 2004):

  • Travel to and from work is eliminated. This produces a domino effect because, with the need to commute to and from work, the person himself can save money for gas, car maintenance, and other utilities. It can also save him time and energy as he does not need to wake earlier to prepare himself (take a bath, change clothes, etc.)
  • No need to worry about dress codes. Most people who are now working from home have admitted that they normally work wearing their pajamas and they do not worry about what their boss or co-workers might think about their looks (as there is no one that can see him/her while working).
  • Flexible time and work pace. People who work from home are normally given deadlines and it doesn’t matter when or how they do it, what is important is that they will be able to provide the needed output in the set schedule.
  • Better health. People who work from home need not worry about pollution and other work hazards and stress. In fact, most of them revealed that they become healthier when they started their home sourcing jobs. They have more control of their time and of themselves. They have lesser worries.

Indeed, it can be summarized that those who can work this way and can afford to work this way often lead pretty comfortable lives. But there are still some negative sides to working from home. For many others, health insurance is expensive, retirement benefits non-existent, which can make life precarious (Brooks, 2005). Other disadvantages include:

  • Lack of social interaction. When one works from home, he just normally work in front of his computer or through the phone. He will not have the chance to talk eye-to-eye with his colleagues. Working from home is almost synonymous with becoming isolated in one’s house.
  • Presence of temptations and distractions. The house or home provides comfort. There are TVs, beds, radios, kids, and other family members which can be a form of distraction to work. One could not really focus when the TVs volume is too high. If the kids are asking for attention, it is just expected that the mom or the dad will be looking after them instead of finishing the work assigned.
  • Irregular paycheck. Working from home does not count the number of hours one has worked. The pay is normally dependent on the output given. Hence, there are days when a paycheck can be good and there are days when it can be utterly disappointing.

There are pros and cons to every decision made. If one decides to work from home instead of the normal office job, then one has to face the disadvantages and disadvantages it may bring. But the beauty of this work from home is that it provides an additional option to aspiring workers. Now they can choose to work inside the comforts of their house or inside an office building that hired them.

Bostick, Fran. March 2004. “Several pros and cons to working from home”. Birmingham Business Journal.

Brooks, Anthony. 2005 “More Americans Choosing to Work from Home”. National Public Radio, Inc.

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IvyPanda. (2021, September 15). Pros and Cons of Work From Home. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pros-and-cons-of-work-from-home/

"Pros and Cons of Work From Home." IvyPanda , 15 Sept. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/pros-and-cons-of-work-from-home/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Pros and Cons of Work From Home'. 15 September.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Pros and Cons of Work From Home." September 15, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pros-and-cons-of-work-from-home/.

1. IvyPanda . "Pros and Cons of Work From Home." September 15, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pros-and-cons-of-work-from-home/.

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IvyPanda . "Pros and Cons of Work From Home." September 15, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pros-and-cons-of-work-from-home/.

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Woman eating takeaway food while working on her laptop

Working from home can bring big health benefits, study finds

A review of 1,930 papers into home working found major pluses, but also downsides such as antisocial hours and being overlooked for promotion

Working from home allows people to eat more healthily, feel less stressed and have lower blood pressure, according to a large-scale review of academic literature on post-pandemic workplaces.

Yet remote workers are also more likely to eat snacks, drink more, smoke more and put on weight, the study found. And employers who believe that people working from home are lazy should think again – they are less likely to take time off sick, tend to work longer hours and to work evenings and weekends.

The review , funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research Health Protection Research Unit in Emergency Preparedness and Response – a partnership between the UK Health Security Agency, King’s College London, and the University of East Anglia – considered 1,930 academic papers on home working, teleworking and other types of hybrid and home working in an effort to distil the often contradictory research.

Prof Neil Greenberg, a psychiatrist at King’s College London and one of the study’s authors, said the study showed that workers and employers needed to start considering home working with the same seriousness as they did office working.

“In the old days of office working, people realised that if you put everyone in the same room with no sound-proofing, it was all unpleasant and you didn’t have a very productive workforce,” he said.

“Now that we’ve shifted to a home working culture, it makes sense for organisations and the government to make sure that people who are home working are doing it in as effective a way as possible.”

The review, published in the Journal of Occupational Health , identified three themes – the working environment at home, the effect on workers’ lives and careers, and the effect on their health. Greenberg said the research showed that there were winners and losers in many areas of home working. The working environment depended on how much space there was at home, the available equipment and on how much control workers had over their day.

People on higher incomes often enjoyed home working more, but those with more responsibilities at home such as childcare or housework – often women and those living alone – tended to be more stressed.

“Overall, people felt more productive at home,” Greenberg said. “It was particularly good for creative things, but much more difficult dealing with tedious matters. A lot of people worried about career prospects – this feeling that if you’re not present in the office, you’re going to get overlooked.”

Effects on health were clearer. The transition to home working during Covid was linked “with an increase in intake of vegetables, fruit, dairy, snacks, and self-made meals; younger workers and females benefited the most in terms of healthier eating,” the paper said.

One of the studies reviewed found that 46.9% of employees working from home had gained weight, and another put the figure at 41%. Most of the papers reviewed showed that homeworkers were more sedentary.

Greenberg said: “Managers needed to think about finding ways to support their homeworkers and help create their working environment.

“There’s a great adage in science that at some point, we need to stop admiring the problem and actually think about solutions,” he said. “We know quite a lot now. So we need to ask ‘what is the best training for an individual who’s going to become a partial homeworker?’ What we don’t need to do is to ask ‘would it be helpful to train someone to homework?’ The answer is clearly yes.”

Since the end of Covid restrictions in 2022, some companies have insisted that employees return to the office full-time, with firms such as JP Morgan requiring managers to be in five days a week.

“If companies like JP Morgan are afraid that people at home will be slacking, or won’t be doing a good job, and they can’t keep an eye on them, then I think that is an outdated concept,” Greenberg said.

Refusing WFH options will mean that talented employees may find other jobs, and makes companies less flexible in the event of future crises, such as another health emergency or strikes or severe weather conditions that prevent people from reaching their offices, he added.

“If they are doing it merely out of fear, then they risk being left behind,” he said. “We looked at a huge amount of evidence of the years and what our review shows is that there are ways to make the home working approach actually work well for the organisation and also for the employee.”

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Bottom line

I'm writing this using the Apple Vision Pro with a supersized version of my MacBook desktop in front me that's way bigger than my work monitor, the Apple Music app pinned to the left in my home office and Slack pinned to the right by my window. I'm jamming to The Bravery's "Believe" and I think it's appropriate. Because Apple needs to get early adopters to believe enough in the concept of spatial computing to be willing to part with $3,500.

Now that I've been using the Vision Pro for a few weeks and testing out all of the best Vision Pro apps and experiences, I can say it feels just as magical as when I first tried it. But this is also a device that weighs on you after a while, both literally and figuratively. Who is the Vision Pro for really and is it really worth the premium? Here's 6 reasons to buy the Vision Pro and 3 reasons to skip it based on my testing. 

Reasons to Buy Apple Vision Pro

The eye-tracking interface and hand gestures are amazingly intuitive .

One of the best things about the Vision Pro is VisionOS and how you interact with it. There are no controllers to bother with here. You just stare at the app, link or other item you want to select and tap your fingers together. It's cool just to see the iOS-like app icons light up as your eyes dart around the Vision Pro's display. Yes, it just works.

The other gestures are just as intuitive. If you want to scroll sideways or up and down, you just put your fingers together and pull in the direction you want to go. Want to zoom in on a picture in the Photos app? Just bring your two hands together and then spread them apart. If you want to pull up the Control Panel at any time, you just look up and select the downward facing arrow.

It's a small thing, but the fact that you can use the Digital Crown to both control the level of immersion of your Environment and the volume depending on where you look is really clever.

Spatial computing takes multitasking to the next level

@tomsguide ♬ Aglow (Intro) - Slowed Down Version - Karamel Kel

Here's something you need to know about the Vision Pro. Yes, it's an augmented reality and virtual reality headset in one, but it's first and foremost a spatial computer. And that means multitasking like you've never seen or experienced before. 

With the Vision Pro you can pin multiple apps around the room you're in and easily move them and resize them. If you take the headset off, the Vision Pro is smart enough to remember where the apps were when you put it back on. 

It gets better: You can easily cut and paste from one app to another in VisionOS, as well as drag and drop content, such as pics from the Photos app into Messages. 

Awesome movie experience — especially in 3D — and Immersive video 

I have a confession. I hate watching 3D movies in the theaters because the effect generally feels cheap and not that convincing. But watching 3D movies through the Vision Pro looks and feels different than anything I've tried before. There's more than 200 movies available through the Apple TV app, and Disney Plus also offers more than 40 3D movies and counting.

I rewatched Avengers: Infinity War in 3D on Disney Plus using the Vision Pro, and it was like I was watching it for the first time. As Captain America hugged Bucky (The Winter Soldier) before Wakanda came under attack, there was an impressive level of depth to the characters without being too in your face. 

The next frontier is Immersive video, which put you front and center in a new 3D format with a 180-degree field of view captured with 8K cameras. I marveled as I saw a woman in front of me walk a tightrope in between two mountains 3,000 feet above the Earth. 

Impressive spatial photos and videos (and panoramas)

Spatial videos and photos are not exclusive to the Vision Pro, but this is the product that will put them on the map. It's not a coincidence that Meta has announced that it is bringing spatial photos and video support to the Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest Pro .

The gist is that the Vision Pro can capture both 3D photos and videos you can play back in the headset itself, or you can capture spatial videos with your iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max and then view them in the Vision Pro. The effect is pretty mesmerizing. When watching a spatial video of my golden retriever I felt like I could reach out and pet him. I guarantee you will get emotional when using this feature.

Works with your MacBook like frickin' magic

The Vision Pro is a lot more valuable if you own one of the best MacBooks rather than a Windows laptop . And that's because Apple's headset works seamlessly with your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with the Mac Virtual Display feature. Just stare at your MacBook and you'll see a Connect button floating above its screen. Tap connect and your desktop will pop off your laptop and into your virtual space.

From there, you can resize your desktop and get a sharp 4K picture. Even better, you can interact with this desktop just as you normally would, complete with keyboard and mouse support. 

Compelling AR apps and experiences

@tomsguide ♬ Suspense, horror, piano and music box - takaya

So far the Apple Vision Pro has more than 600 native apps, plus more than one million compatible iPhone and iPad apps. Some of the best Vision Pro apps so far include augmented reality experiences and games like Encounter Dinosaurs, where a dinosaur can follow your gaze and literally pops through the nearest wall to sniff you. 

I've also had a blast playing Synth Riders, a music and rhythm game that has you hit colored balls of lights to the beat, as well as What the Golf?, which puts a mini golf course right in your room and lets you walk around the course while maintaining great fidelity. The djay app is also compelling, letting you interact with a 3D turntable to perform various DJ effects. 

Reasons to skip Apple Vision Pro

The battery is always with you.

The Vision Pro feels like the future, but the included battery feels like an anchor into the past. While most VR and AR headsets have the battery built in, the Vision Pro has an external battery that must always be attached. 

This battery is heavier than the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the cord isn't that long, but you can easily use the Vision Pro with the battery in your pocket. When at your desk you can plug the battery in via the included 30W power adapter. 

It's kinda heavy

There's no getting around the fact that the Vision Pro is hefty. At 1.3 to 1.4 pounds, it's considerably heavier than the Meta Quest 3 , and it can get uncomfortable to wear after 30 minutes or so.

The good news is that you get two included headband options in the Solo Knit band and Dual Loop band, and the latter is the much better choice for more evenly distributing the weight across your head. I can wear the Vision Pro for up to a couple of hours without discomfort with that band, though you still feel some pressure.

Very expensive (not counting accessories!)

The Apple Vision Pro starts at $3,500, which is about the same price as the super premium 77-inch LG G3 OLED TV . But that's the starting price. 

If you want to use Zeiss lenses with the Vision Pro, you'll pay $99 for readers and $149 for a prescription. And if you want the carrying case — which looks like a big marshmallow —  you're looking at an additional $199. If you're worried about the Vision Pro's durability, you'll fork over $499 for Apple Care+ plan for unlimited repairs and damage protection.

Personas are creepy (for now)

@tomsguide ♬ Somewhere Only We Know (Remix) - Angga Sky

Some big missing apps like Netflix and YouTube

The Apple Vision Pro is missing some pretty heavy hitters in terms of native apps — at least for now. This includes Netflix and YouTube . In fact, there are no iPad-compatible versions of these apps either. I personally would like to see all the Google apps here, such as Google Drive and especially Google Meet so I could use my Persona during video calls with the rest of my team. 

The good news is that YouTube says that a native Vision Pro app is on the roadmap , so it could very well be in development right now. 

My Apple Vision Pro review goes into a lot more detail in terms of what this spatial computer is like to use. But if I had to sum up the Vision Pro in a few words: Amazing, immersive and pricey.

At $3,500 this is a tough sell for most, but I do think the Vision Pro is the best mixed reality headset by far and could be worth the premium for multitasking power users, business travelers and early adopters who want to be on the cutting edge.

Even if you can't afford one you owe it to yourself to try the Vision Pro at an Apple Store to get a taste of what the future of computing is like. Just make sure to not cross the street while wearing it. 

More from Tom's Guide

  • Best VR headsets
  • 7 ways Meta Quest 3 beats Apple Vision Pro
  • The best Apple Vision Pro alternatives

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Mark Spoonauer

Mark Spoonauer is the global editor in chief of Tom's Guide and has covered technology for over 20 years. In addition to overseeing the direction of Tom's Guide, Mark specializes in covering all things mobile, having reviewed dozens of smartphones and other gadgets. He has spoken at key industry events and appears regularly on TV to discuss the latest trends, including Cheddar , Fox Business and other outlets. Mark was previously editor in chief of Laptop Mag, and his work has appeared in Wired, Popular Science and Inc. Follow him on Twitter at @mspoonauer.

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Heat pumps, furnaces and air conditioners: Which is your best choice?

A heat pump on the side of a wooden building.

It's not glamorous, and most of the time it's hidden inside your walls, but it's hugely important to your home: HVAC.

Heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems can make or break the comfort of your home -- not to mention your budget. From furnaces to radiators and heat pumps, you're probably familiar with a lot of different heating and cooling options. Which one is best for your home?

It depends somewhat on where you live, but new technology is making HVAC more efficient (and potentially affordable) than ever before. Here's how to make sense of the big shifts in the industry, and decide which type of system is best for you.

How HVAC systems work

Most HVAC systems work on a simple equation that balances "distribution and return" of air throughout your home, according to Daniel Berry, chair of the HVAC program at the Fortis Institute in Scranton .

A standard gas furnace, for example, is calibrated to the size of your home and the climate you live in. It's designed to suck in ambient air from your home, boost it by 50 degrees Fahrenheit by burning natural gas (which is largely made of the fossil fuel methane) and then blow it through your house.

A central AC system works in a similar way, by condensing a refrigerant outside your house and cooling it off by blowing outside air over it. Then the refrigerant moves indoors, where it expands and gets colder. Indoor air is blown over the cold part of the air conditioner and distributed through your house's system of metal ducts. "You're going to have a tunnel effect of ductwork going through your house," Berry said.

Heat pumps work a lot like air conditioners. However, heat pumps can reverse the process and heat your house too, even in cold temperatures .

Air source heat pumps (which complete this process by transferring heat to or from the air outside your home) can heat or cool your whole home using air ducts or part of it with a smaller, wall-mounted unit called a mini split.

Ground-source heat pumps, also called geothermal heat pumps, exchange heat with the ground. Installation requires some trenching to bury some tubing and is more expensive, but the systems are more efficient.

Pros and cons of different HVAC systems

Each type of HVAC system has had its heyday, and you may have lived with various types of heat and cooling in homes of different ages. Here are the pros and cons of each type of system.

Hot-air gas furnace

Central air conditioning, air source heat pumps, ground source heat pumps, how to choose an hvac system.

Though many different types of HVAC are still available, Berry says there's really no competition these days. "If I was going to put a unit in, there's no question in my mind I would go with a heat pump," he said. "No if, ands or buts about it."

For existing homes, Berry recommends mini-split air source heat pumps, but for new construction it's best to go with a central heat pump system. Either way, this type of heat is the most efficient, cost-effective and comfortable option, Berry said. "You can't really beat those," he said.

How to choose an HVAC installer?

Finding an HVAC installer right now -- like finding any contractor -- can be challenging. Berry recommends getting at least three to four quotes and asking for a guaranteed installation timeline, that way you know you're getting the best deal.

To find a reputable installer, Berry advises you seek out established companies that have a good reputation among your neighbors. "You're going to want somebody who is dependable, reliable, who's been around for a while," he said. Don't be afraid to ask the installer for past customers who you can contact and ask about their experience, Berry recommends.

HVAC installation

In an ideal world, it takes about two weeks to install a new HVAC system, Berry said. Add in some buffer time for unexpected problems, and 30 days is a good estimate to work with.

But before you set a contractor loose on your home, make sure that estimated time frame is in your contract with the installer, Berry said. Reputable installers have an incentive to get the job done in a timely manner, so they can get on to the next job -- so if your contractor declines to give you a timeline, that might be a red flag, according to Berry.

Tubing for a ground source heat pump before it's buried.

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HVAC maintenance and care

If you have any kind of system that involves ductwork (like a gas furnace or central AC), there's one piece of maintenance you can do yourself: changing the air filters.

Beyond that, Berry recommends calling in the professionals. Gas furnaces should be checked once a year, and Berry said service usually takes about an hour and a half. (If it takes any less, you might be getting ripped off.) Air source heat pumps should also be serviced once every one or two years, and don't forget to clean the filters on the mini-splits too.

The same advice applies here: Make sure to work with a reputable, long-established HVAC company, even if it's a bit more expensive, Berry said.

Are there tax credits available?

Luckily, Berry's recommended HVAC technology -- air source heat pumps -- are also being incentivized by the government right now. A federal tax credit covers 30% of the project cost, up to $2,000.

There are other types of HVAC eligible for federal money: Check out the rebates for biomass stoves/boilers , central AC , gas furnaces and geothermal heat pumps.

Some states have additional credits available for heating systems. Check with your local power company for more details. 

Improve your home's energy efficiency

Heating systems are fundamentally designed to overcome the loss of heat that happens when air leaves your home through windows, doors and walls. 

Many homeowners now invest heavily in insulation and weather-sealing, which can significantly reduce the amount of heat your home loses. And in turn, that can allow you to get away with a smaller (and cheaper) heating system. New windows, doors, insulation and air sealing items also qualify for up to $1,200 in tax credits .

Berry recommends, however, that you don't go too small with your heating installation: No matter how insulated your home, you still want an HVAC system that can keep you toasty on the most frigid night.

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