I began building websites in my college dorm room in the late 1990s. By my senior year, my time was split two ways; I was taking a few courses to finish up my credits during the day, and I was freelancing in web design from my dorm room in the evenings. Homework? What homework?

While some of my contemporaries were working minimum wage at the dining hall or computer lab (remember those?), here I was, in my boxers, moving a mouse around the screen making five times as much per hour. My commute to bed was a step, or sometimes two steps on a bad day.

For awhile, I was living The Life. I was getting my degree and earning a respectable salary for a college student working from his bedroom.

The fall after I graduated, I began work at a small technology firm in Chicago. I started just as the dot-com bubble burst and the American economy went into a tailspin. Six weeks into the job, my position there also burst. I went back to live with my parents. Suddenly I was a 22-year-old adult picking up a few freelance web projects, again, from the comfort of my bedroom.

The first few weeks felt great. After the initial honeymoon, being in my pajamas felt kind of different. I wasn’t in school anymore. My friends weren’t down the hall or just up campus. It was just me and my desktop. Without other required diversions in place (like going to class and finishing my degree), work filled up all of my time.

It wasn’t that I was sweating away eight hours a day; it was that I was working in short spurts throughout the day. A couple hours of real work in the morning, a snack break, a few hours of daytime court television, a few more hours of work, a run, a meal, and—oh, yes—a few more hours of work to cap off the evening. My five to five hours of billable time was spread thinly across twelve to fourteen hours. There was no separation between work life and real life. I wasn’t working passionately or efficiently anymore.

As Parkinson’s law states, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” When I was able to be “at work” any hour of the day, there was a whole lot of time to fill up. Suddenly, my 40-hour work week turned into a 168-hour mush of work, sleep, and kinda-being-around-work.

Working from home is a luxury. Most people would trade a two-hour commute for a fall-out-of-bed commute. But if you have that luxury, don’t code in your bedroom. Or your living room, for that matter. Find a confined area to work, preferably a second room, where you can physically leave from after your workday is over. Shut the door at the end of the day, hang up the “Closed” sign, and get on with the rest of your life until tomorrow.

That’s how you really live The Life.