One other idea might be to change into your work clothes before doing work, then change into other clothes (or perhaps even into night clothes) when you get off work.

(You could even get fancy and wear a dress or a tie "to work" if you feel like it.)

Yet another idea might be to make another user account on the machine, with a different desktop background and perhaps some other difference, and use one for work and one for play. Maybe that might help?

Who the hell in their right mind is gonna get up and put more clothes on than their underwear / nightwear unless absolutely required?

WHO?

those people need seeing to medically!

I'm mostly working from home. The first few days were pleasant, and I was prone to procastinating at times and enjoying the relative freedom to do so.

Now things have swung the other way and it's hard to get away from feeling a bit overworked and that the inefficiencies working from home (both on my end and everyone I need to connect with) is going to put us pretty far off course. Most of us are over-eating as well, since without hoarding you do still need to keep food on hand in ample supply, and being at home...it's very tempting far too often.

So as much as I hate my commute, I'd really like to go back to the office...at least a few days a week.

lol

It might help, but the downside is that I would then be wearing a suit all day (which I hate), and I'd then have double the laundry to do. If it didn't help I'd then just have made my situation worse.

The desktop background thing is a nice idea, unfortunately being a programmer I don't see the background, or anything other than my dev tools, that I'm remoting into via citrix.

I suspect this is something I will just need to get used to.
It's funny, I'm of the same opinion. Commuting is horrible, but being in an office is quite nice. Maybe after this I'll move a lot closer to work.

Well, if fancy isn't your thing, you could just wear more casual clothes, but not night clothes, when you're working.

Also, when you're not working I assume you don't have your dev tools or citrix open, correct? That should help make the two modes feel different.

(I wore a black dress to a recent meetup, and it helped, even if the Zoom session was defaced (with language that I will not repeat) and had to be cancelled.)

Also, doing a google search, it appears that the citrix client app has a Linux version; if you don't need to run anything other than citrix locally for your job, you could try that and see how it works.

^Spot on!^

Somewhat, annually. In Finland it means you get somewhat lower tax, ie. your work trips are considered as expenses for which you don't have to pay taxes. Tax deductions or whatever it is called.

Meaning, if you made, say, 50000€/year, it might be that e.g. 2000€ would be deducted from that due to work trip expenses, and you pay taxes "only" as if your total income was 48000€. So you get somewhat lower tax due to progressive tax rate here.

I barely qualify to get reimbursed for using my own car for the work trips. Most people only get reimbursed for public transport, ie. what it would cost to buy monthly or yearly tickets for public transport, even if in reality you use your own car (because you have to bring your kids to kindergarten or school or whatever). The compensation for having to use your own car is considerably higher than public transport, but still relatively small.

From my memory, you get reimbursed for using your own car if any of the following is true:
- There is no public transport available at all where you live (rural areas).
- You have to walk more than 3 km when using public transport.
- You have to wait more than 2 hours when changing public transport.
- You have to leave your home before 5 am to get to work in time, or you get back home after 0 am, when using public transport.

I got the car compensation with the last argument, ie. I'd have to leave home just before 5 am in order to get to my workplace before 8 am, with public transport. So with public transport my work trip would take a little over 3 hours, but with my own car 35-40 minutes (faster in the summer when I can drive the motorway 120 km/h, in winter the speed limit is 100 km/h or even 80 km/h depending on the weather).

But even with that compensation, gasoline costs an arm and a leg here. Currently the normal gas price is minimum 1.4 euros/litre, before the corona epidemic it was well over 1.5 €/l. I spend something like 260€ or more per month for the gasoline for my worktrips (driving 112km/day, 3360km/month, if I go to the office 5 days per week), and the tax deduction covers only a relatively small part of that expense. And my car is a small-ish and pretty economic Japanese car, not an American gas-guzzler.

Oh, and our current leftist-green government has already agreed to increase the gas tax later this year, due to "climate change" and because the members of the green party generally hate car drivers. The only place where I've seen gasoline cost more than in Finland is Norway.

I wouldn't really need a separate work PC, because I can do 95% of my work as long as I can create a VPN connection to my workplace and open a remote desktop to one of our office (Windows) servers. That server has MS Office installed and other Windows desktop stuff I'd normally need.

Pretty much the only requirements for my work PC are:

1. Can open a VPN (SSL-VPN) to our firewall. A specific VPN client or support is needed, but so far I've found it at least for Windows and Linux, so no problem there.

2. A RDP client. Naturally Windows has that (Remote Desktop), but in Linux e.g. Remmina works just as well.

3. Skype, for quick chatting with my colleagues and in case screen sharing is needed.

4. The ability to read my work email (in fact this is not necessarily needed, I can also read it in that Windows server to which I connect with RDP).

So when at home, I don't necessarily need to open my work laptop, but can do my work also from e.g. Linux Mint. I can even do it from my Raspberry Pi 4... except for Skype, as there is apparently no 32bit Skype variant, at least for ARM processors.

I like this setup also because I can keep my often used applications open in the server when I close the connection and shut down my work laptop, and later continue from where I left, even if doing from a different computer.

Started working from home about two weeks ago. I moved my screen home from work, as I only have laptops in the house and a second screen helps a lot. I miss going to the gym or swimming, but the kids and wife are home, so we can eat together. And sometimes I can take a play-break (playing with my kids, not my GOG games). Also I notice that I work a lot more from home than I used to at work... Good thing is we keep in touch on slack and zoom with colleagues. And in the evenings we might get a virtual beer with friends. It's a bit tough for the kids, not being able to go out. Also I'm starting to develop a cough and sore throat. I hope I don't have covid, last time I was outside was on Tuesday to do some groceries. As for the commute, it wasn't much anyway, 5 minutes with the car or 10 with the bike/scooter.

Working from home was something I actually looked forward to when we got the message because I don't loose as many hours, and I kinda hate working in an open arena (been much of this lately before this crisis started). Remoting by citrix, rpd (some servers) and teamviewer (some customers) works well, but now it seems I might be one of those that gets put into "sleepmode" as workload is getting lowered.

But, I seriously miss having the ability to go to a gym or just taking a fresh swim. Going restless if I don't work out regularly. Also, seeing I'm not used to work from home I have to be careful not to procrastinate or eating too much :)

PS: And yes, gas prices in Noway is seriously overpriced because most of it consist of green-taxes and what not, so I get to save that money. :D