Hi. I've been working from home for about 1.5 years and have had spells of working remotely from coworking places.
I am very distractible. It was and remains very difficult. However, I think I'm in a zone now where work is a place I go to in my head, rather than a place that exists in reality.
Meta-advice: keep trying things. There is no settled consensus. For now, this is a very individual choice.
How you work at home / live your life:
Some people advise a strict separation between work and home. I don't agree. The best benefits of working from home are cooking more of my own food, doing chores during the day, and working the hours that I choose. Exception: never code from your bed.
I have put some effort into making my desk area nice. It helps.
The real question is staying motivated when you don't see faces, or hear voices, or are even in physical proximity to anyone that you work with. I find that I need voices/faces to believe that anyone cares that I exist. I have a very supportive spouse, so a lot of that is taken care for me. Even so I leave the house once a day, minimum. I often go to the library, cafes, or restaurants. And I have a regular "hack session" with a friend of mine in a similar situation on Mondays. Mostly we just chitchat with the excuse that we might actually hack on something, but it's important.
How you work with co-workers:
General theme: many things that used to happen randomly or accidentally now will have to be done intentionally.
You probably have standups or some other regular way to check in with your co-workers. Keep doing those and take them seriously. Always ask more questions than you think you should. You don't get chances to ask them later.
Build informal and private channels for your team. It's important for your team to have a place where your team talks among yourselves and where you feel you have privacy. My current company isn't that nosey (and we're the Slack admins anyway) so a private Slack channel works. If you have to go to Signal or Keybase, do it and say it's for "emergency ops".
In other companies where I've been remote, or part of a remote office, I've found that the Donut Slack app has been very helpful. It just randomly assigns you a "date" of sorts with a co-worker, and it is almost as good to do over video chat. You need these kind of random unstructured interactions with coworkers both for your social needs and to be effective in a large organization. It may seem weird to take a coffee to your desk and have no official business talking to a coworker, but it really helps.
I am very distractible. It was and remains very difficult. However, I think I'm in a zone now where work is a place I go to in my head, rather than a place that exists in reality.
Meta-advice: keep trying things. There is no settled consensus. For now, this is a very individual choice.
How you work at home / live your life:
Some people advise a strict separation between work and home. I don't agree. The best benefits of working from home are cooking more of my own food, doing chores during the day, and working the hours that I choose. Exception: never code from your bed.
I have put some effort into making my desk area nice. It helps.
The real question is staying motivated when you don't see faces, or hear voices, or are even in physical proximity to anyone that you work with. I find that I need voices/faces to believe that anyone cares that I exist. I have a very supportive spouse, so a lot of that is taken care for me. Even so I leave the house once a day, minimum. I often go to the library, cafes, or restaurants. And I have a regular "hack session" with a friend of mine in a similar situation on Mondays. Mostly we just chitchat with the excuse that we might actually hack on something, but it's important.
How you work with co-workers:
General theme: many things that used to happen randomly or accidentally now will have to be done intentionally.
You probably have standups or some other regular way to check in with your co-workers. Keep doing those and take them seriously. Always ask more questions than you think you should. You don't get chances to ask them later.
Build informal and private channels for your team. It's important for your team to have a place where your team talks among yourselves and where you feel you have privacy. My current company isn't that nosey (and we're the Slack admins anyway) so a private Slack channel works. If you have to go to Signal or Keybase, do it and say it's for "emergency ops".
In other companies where I've been remote, or part of a remote office, I've found that the Donut Slack app has been very helpful. It just randomly assigns you a "date" of sorts with a co-worker, and it is almost as good to do over video chat. You need these kind of random unstructured interactions with coworkers both for your social needs and to be effective in a large organization. It may seem weird to take a coffee to your desk and have no official business talking to a coworker, but it really helps.