You should work from home before you go to work

If you believe that many decisions, especially serious decisions, should be made thoughtfully rather than "off the cuff", perhaps you should be working from home an hour and a half each morning before coming to work. In my last post here on LinkedIn, I shared some of my productivity tips, including sleeping in two shifts. Tonight at dinner, I was extolling the virtues of middle-of-the-night uninterrupted work. Fred Wilson said he does the same thing, except that he sleeps straight through gets up early and works from home between 5 and 7 before going to work. So maybe the main thing is working from home when no one else is awake, so you can work without interruption. Chad Dickerson, Etsy's CEO, mentioned a study done of Swedish CEOs who worked the same way, reported by Peter Drucker. I found it on Chad's blog:
"The only published study of the way chief executives actually spend their day has been made in Sweden by Professor Sune Carlsson. For several months Carlsson and his associates clocked with a stop watch the working day of twelve leading Swedish industrialists. They noted the time spent on conversations, conferences, visits, telephone calls and so forth. They found that not one of the twelve executives was ever able to work uninterruptedly more than twenty minutes at a time—at least not in the office. Only at home was there some chance of concentration. And the only one of the twelve who did not make important, long-range decisions “off the cuff,” and sandwiched in between unimportant but long telephone calls and “crisis” problems, was the executive who worked at home every morning for an hour and a half before coming to the office."
Drucker, Peter F. The Practice of Management, 1954, referring to Carlsson’s book Executive Behavior.