Yes and no. A little meditation:

Fom day 1 in my first job, I promised myself not to take any work home. Simply because I know it would be addictive. I would return home late, work on a problem through the night, and have only a little bit of sleep. And that would not happen once or twice, but more or less every day. And I did not take work home for about two decades.

There were little exceptions. When I set up OpenVPN at work so that my boss could work from home, I also set up a VPN account for me. For testing, and for those days when the early birds at work ran into trouble while I was still busy preparing breakfast. Those little things like "oops, I deleted $IMPORTANTFILE, could you please restore it from the backup?"

But generally, I did not take work home. I need about an hour to drive home, that's plenty time to think about unsolved problems. It's my little kind of meditation. More than once, I found a solution or at least I had an idea how to solve a pending problem while driving home. In that case, I simply stopped, wrote down some notes, and started thinking about really important problems like what to cook for the week-end.

Then, COVID-19 happened. Our gouvernment made it mandatory to offer home office to anybody remotely able to work from home. Nobody was forced, but it was highly recommended. So my boss asked me "can we do it?" Of course, OpenVPN works fine, I just needed to create some more accounts, and after about an hour, the whole company except for the cleaning lady had VPN accounts and could work from home. It worked surprisingly well. Our regular weekly meeting was changed to an online conference system, our PBX already supported virtual conference rooms, and only occasionally, a few people worked in the office to test the integration of hard- and software we developed.

I started to like working from home. Five seconds for the way from breakfast to office are hard to beat, and distractions are really low compared to the office. It was great for the problem I was working on. It was an isolated problem with very few external dependencies. A blackbox being fed with some measurement data and returning some useful results had to be ported from a mess of Excel VBA to C# (see [OT] Finding similar program code). Working eight hours with messy VBA is also a good way to prevent working a single second more that eight hours. ;-)

I missed the meditative hour driving back home to calm down and get the stuff out of my head. And after that problem was done, other problems appeared that needed more communication. Phone calls can do a lot, but just walking over to the next office does more. Also, our offices are open. We close the doors only if we really need an undisturbed hour. That means some distraction, but you also hear what happens, and where problems pop up.

A simple example: Solving hardware problems is not my job, but hearing one of the hardware experts getting mad about transistors releasing magic smoke, again and again, despite the simulation working properly is a reason to walk over to the hardware lab. Just listening what he tries to archive, and having a look at the circuit diagram. In that case, the simulation was perfectly happy with a reverse base-emitter voltage of about -24 V. Datasheet and silicon agreed that magic smoke would be released at about -7 V. Adding a simple zener diode solved the issue. That would never have happened working from home offices. Sure, he would have found the solution all by himself, but he might have killed a few more transistors along the way. Rubber duck debugging for hardware.

The mandatory home office offer is now history, we have now largely returned to the office, but switching to home office has become something usual. Instead of wasting a vacation day for thinks like a craftsman fixing something at home, or an unexpededly closed kindergarden, you simply switch to home office. All you have to do is to mark that day as home office in our public calendar at least one day ago, no questions asked.

I still like to work from home if the problem at hand can be solved in isolation. I don't carry 100 kg of hardware and test equipment back home to debug the software running on the hardware. A single PCB and some adapters is a different story ...

Alexander