I've been working remotely full-time for the past 2 years, and before that I took regular breaks of a week or two, to work outside of the office.
I get a lot more done when I'm outside of the office. I track the time of how much actual work I do, and it is regularly 7 or 8 hours a day - I never did this much work in the office. You need self discipline to do this, but I find it's a lot easier to work from home as there are too many distractions in an office that were outside of my control. Working in an office with set hours I felt compelled to stay until 6pm even if I didn't feel like doing anything productive, now I'm free to take a break for an hour or so to recharge and continue working afterwards (yes, taking a break does help!).
I think whether communication is going to be a problem or not is very dependant on your company culture. The company I worked for when I first started working remotely did everything face-to-face and hardly anything was written down, as such it was hard. I'm now working for a company with various offices and remote workers worldwide, my team is distributed across 5 different timezones (with a 13.5 hour difference), and it works a lot better. We have daily standups and bi-weekly planning meetings (over Skype, just audio), if something isn't clear we just have an impromptu 5 minute call. We use JIRA and Confluence which are both pretty horrible, but it's good to know that there is one place to find everything and exactly what is going on.
I don't feel the real human element is an issue. Work has always been separate from the rest of my life, so I have always had friends outside of work.
> I don't feel the real human element is an issue.
I've been remote since 2009, and sometimes the team dynamics can get a bit rocky. Having a regular (2-4x a year) meeting where all the remotes on a team come face to face does wonders to address this. It's worked best for me when the team rents out a whole house and spends a week together working out of it and cooking for each other. Lots of fun, and you get a much better feeling for each others' sense of humor, etc.
One of the teams I work remote for has regular F2F meetings too. We don't rent out a house together (I wouldn't like that, one reason I remote is I like my personal space) but we'll spend the days at a co-working space, and go out together during the evenings for dinner.
We also flew in several of our clients for a dinner we organized, so that the clients could meet all of the team including remote crew as well. That was a brilliant idea.
I get a lot more done when I'm outside of the office. I track the time of how much actual work I do, and it is regularly 7 or 8 hours a day - I never did this much work in the office. You need self discipline to do this, but I find it's a lot easier to work from home as there are too many distractions in an office that were outside of my control. Working in an office with set hours I felt compelled to stay until 6pm even if I didn't feel like doing anything productive, now I'm free to take a break for an hour or so to recharge and continue working afterwards (yes, taking a break does help!).
I think whether communication is going to be a problem or not is very dependant on your company culture. The company I worked for when I first started working remotely did everything face-to-face and hardly anything was written down, as such it was hard. I'm now working for a company with various offices and remote workers worldwide, my team is distributed across 5 different timezones (with a 13.5 hour difference), and it works a lot better. We have daily standups and bi-weekly planning meetings (over Skype, just audio), if something isn't clear we just have an impromptu 5 minute call. We use JIRA and Confluence which are both pretty horrible, but it's good to know that there is one place to find everything and exactly what is going on.
I don't feel the real human element is an issue. Work has always been separate from the rest of my life, so I have always had friends outside of work.