Brains are highly associative. Different neurons fire depending on things like location and time of day. This has been studied in terms of learning. Students wh

Brains are highly associative. Different neurons fire depending on things like location and time of day. This has been studied in terms of learning. Students who are tested on a subject tend to test better if the test is in the same location as the learning. And also test better if the time of day is the same. (The flip side for this with learning is recall will be worse when it matters, so it’s even better to teach in a variety of locations and times.) So, given the associativeness of neurons, it’s very common for people to have different levels of productivity in 2 different environments. If you play games on the same computer you do work on, then just sitting at said computer can be a distraction. Also just the act of moving to a distinct location can put the mental state into work mode. You may not be as susceptible to some of these effects as others, so you might not notice as much, but they are very real, and can be difficult to work around.