Excellent points, corresponding strongly with my experience.
When I've shifted to night schedules, it's almost always been because daylight hours impose too many interruptions. Even very slight distractions can be hugely distruptive, particularly over time. These range from ringing phones to various street and environment noise (traffic, voices, landscaping equipment, construction), conversations or activities elsewhere in the household or building. Conversations by those you know are exceptionally distracting, far beyond all apparent proportion. The low chatter of a cafe can be tolerable, but a significant other, manager, or co-worker having a quiet converstation nearby will grab your attention, because it could be consequential.
If you don't have full control of your workspace, you've got the added issues of insufficient working room, things not remaining where you put them, and disagreements over organisation and environment (hot/cold, light/dark, windows open/closed, music/none, metal or classical, etc., etc.). Dominion matters tremendously.
The long-term vs. speculative projects issue is one that seems to hinge on trust and communications channel quality. In-person, in-office work benefits by butts-on-seats and the fact that your manager can personally and directly verify you're working on what you said you would be. Creative and speculative work is tremendously uncertain and hard to express / quantify, both as to possible value and any potential progress being made. This is one of a number of problems under the domain of what I call "manifestation", effectively, how directly manifest, tangible, or perceptible a thing is. While direct physical labour is immediately tangible (holes enlarge, wood sawed, big rocks become little oens), intellectual challenges don't lend themselves to ready visualisation or perception. A huge amount of workplace fads over the past half century (and before) have sought to address this. Most poorly.
Finding a manager (or client) who has a good grasp of this might help. I'm really not one to claim solutions, though I think I've a handle on the problem.
And writ large, this is the problem with remote work: it's not manifest.
When I've shifted to night schedules, it's almost always been because daylight hours impose too many interruptions. Even very slight distractions can be hugely distruptive, particularly over time. These range from ringing phones to various street and environment noise (traffic, voices, landscaping equipment, construction), conversations or activities elsewhere in the household or building. Conversations by those you know are exceptionally distracting, far beyond all apparent proportion. The low chatter of a cafe can be tolerable, but a significant other, manager, or co-worker having a quiet converstation nearby will grab your attention, because it could be consequential.
If you don't have full control of your workspace, you've got the added issues of insufficient working room, things not remaining where you put them, and disagreements over organisation and environment (hot/cold, light/dark, windows open/closed, music/none, metal or classical, etc., etc.). Dominion matters tremendously.
The long-term vs. speculative projects issue is one that seems to hinge on trust and communications channel quality. In-person, in-office work benefits by butts-on-seats and the fact that your manager can personally and directly verify you're working on what you said you would be. Creative and speculative work is tremendously uncertain and hard to express / quantify, both as to possible value and any potential progress being made. This is one of a number of problems under the domain of what I call "manifestation", effectively, how directly manifest, tangible, or perceptible a thing is. While direct physical labour is immediately tangible (holes enlarge, wood sawed, big rocks become little oens), intellectual challenges don't lend themselves to ready visualisation or perception. A huge amount of workplace fads over the past half century (and before) have sought to address this. Most poorly.
Finding a manager (or client) who has a good grasp of this might help. I'm really not one to claim solutions, though I think I've a handle on the problem.
And writ large, this is the problem with remote work: it's not manifest.