Most companies, even if they allow it, really hate having workers working from home.

Part of it is human nature – we’re monkeys with barely-modified DNA, so part of us believes if we can’t see it happening, it ain’t happening.

The other portion has to do with power. I realized many years ago that even more than profits, managers and companies care about power. This explains why the MPAA and RIAA deliberately harm their own customers and their own future prospects to exert more power over the marketplace.

This is another way of phrasing the observation that relative status matters more than absolute status to most humans.

Personally, working from home for me is around 2-3x as productive. Not exaggerating at all. I can do twice as much easily. Why is that? At the office, I am interrupted once every 10 minutes, sometimes as frequently as once every five minutes.

Since most of the work I do is highly cognitive and requires focus, any decrease in the interruption rate helps me immensely.

At home, the interruption rate falls to once every 2-3 hours.

And yet, my company is firmly against working from home, despite the fact that the rest of my team is all in the UK, and I have no US boss, and no US team members.

So for the sake of a fake appearance of control, my company is willing to accept me (and many other workers) being 1/2 or 1/3 as productive.

Figure that out, why don’t you?