As a parent of, IMHO the first six months are when they need the most attention, not when they're the easiest. Infants desire constant affection, feeding, cleaning, and some never stop crying.
Once they can crawl it's off to the races. Basically anything can hold their attention for half an hour while you take a short meeting.
I've worked from home with two infants, then toddlers, and now kids. Infants were the hardest.
In my experience, once they start crawling, they are putting things in their mouth, or falling, or getting a finger stuck, or making a mess, or wanting to feed…and confining them to a kid safe zone just makes them want to be out of the zone.
The trick I've used is make a kid safe zone inside another kid safe zone, and they'll spend inordinate amounts of time trying to get out of the first into the second.
Note that "kid safe" and "kid unchangeable" are not the same, be sure to leave things that they can safely mess up (boxes of Duplo are great for this). It helps even more if you've told them not to touch the Duplo, heh.
And if they have visual line-of-sight to you, they'll often stay calmer, but if you move out of line of sight then the howling starts.
Ah, I liken it to rising flood waters. I removed everything in every space of the house that was remotely dangerous and could conceivably be reached by young children. So they had the run of the house, and it was totally safe.
