I work from home. The company I work for has no real offices.

It's highly overrated.

"Realistically, folks don't do more than a few of hours of truly productive work even if they're in the office"

Hey! I resent that remark! Why, I oughta...Oops, the boss is calling.

I'm a quasi-freelance computer programmer, and I've been working from home for about two years now, as has my husband. For the most part, it suits me very well, but it does have its downsides. Chief among these is that work will take over your life if you're not careful, because you can't just "leave it at the office". With all those little distractions you mention, you wind up spending a much larger portion of your day in work-mode. I start working at 8:30 AM and usually don't stop until 7:30 or 8 PM; I'm not working steadily that whole time, but all of the little 15-minute distractions don't really register as non-work time. At the end of the day, I feel like I've put in a 12-hour workday, but only six to eight of those hours are billable.

The other problem is that there is no concept of a day off, or a sick day, or sometimes even a weekend. The clients call and the work comes in, and it's harder to ignore when it's coming into your home than when it's piling up at the office. I periodically do some on-site work for various clients, and I actually find it rather restful, because my days are much shorter. You really have to be disciplined about NOT working, which I find harder than making myself work enough.

On the subject of productive work, most consulting-type industries consider six or six and a half billable hours as a full day's work, because it's very difficult to do more than that unless you a) overbill clients; b) use minimum billable increments, so you can bill 15 minutes for 5-minute tasks; c) work more than eight hours; or d) go on-site, where every minute of your time is billable.

I have worked from home, known others that have done so, and have also worked from a 'remote location' - meaning I worked in a satellite office far away from HQ with people that had no connection to my division. I second Atlee Breland's observations, and can also state that both the remote location and the work-from-home also had the drawback of missing the intra-office politics (of course, that is also a feature - you get more done) that so often determine assignments and promotions. Work is a social activity as much as anything else.

My experience working at home is somewhat like Atlee's (except I'm not freelance). For some time, our office encouraged working at home, and I tended to be much more productive (because it was hard to "turn off" at 8 hours). Now, the office discourages it out of the fear that not everyone can be trusted. While that's true I suppose, they've basically reduced the amount of time I actually spend "writing" for them (although I'm obviously still a newshound, which is related to work, but is done more on "my" time now). End result -- lower productivity. But they don't seem to mind, because they "see" me every day typing away. Woo.

My company has extensive support for telecommuting but don't explicitly encourage it. I think that's right, because oddly enough people are different and telecommuting is a boost for some and a burden for others. For instance, because I'm a sociopath I do better working at home. An associate of mine tried it for a while but she just couldn't handle not socializing with her co-workers.

She Who Is Perfect In All Ways has been telecommuting lately because of the new pooper. It boosts her productivity because while her family pops in and bothers her (as per Ms. Breland) we do it less than her co-workers. She can also do work early morning and late evening and have her off time during the middle of the day when most interruptions occur.

If you want my view on a major productivity enhancement, though, it's wireless networking. Long, boring meetings can now be a productivity win because I can work on my wireless laptop while being insulated from people bugging me.

Since my own employer deals with high volumes of original and printed-out documents (litigation support for various Federal governmental agencies), I don't have any immediate prospect of being able to telecommute. Not that you're wrong about the amount of productive work that actually gets done in the average "8-hour" day, which is, to begin with, actually 7.5 hours because of mandated coffee breaks, and which is further divided into 6-minute billable increments; the relatively low production requirements further dictate that not a whole lot of documents actually get processed per hour. But then, that's government work for you.