I've worked remotely for almost eight years now. Much of that from home; the last couple from a small office space that I rent down the street from home. I work

I've worked remotely for almost eight years now. Much of that from home; the last couple from a small office space that I rent down the street from home. I worked in open plan offices for about 15 years prior to going remote. Both situations are a mixed bag. There are productive days and heavily distracted days in a shared office and there are productive and not so productive days working remotely. Working remotely but not from home is the easy winner for me in terms of overall productivity with a much higher percentage of productive days. Working from home (before the pandemic, when my partner also started working from home) was still significantly better than working in an open plan office, though it did take me the first couple years to work out that I had to be very strict about keeping a separation (work machine gets turned off at 5pm and no work email can reach me outside working hours). When the pandemic hit and my partner started working from home as well (and she's a university professor so it was a lot of loud video calls while she taught her classes), my productivity crashed (but also, pandemic stress). If your home is distracting than, yeah, your productivity is going to crater. But the same is really true for something like an open plan office (I used to get most of my work done by going in extremely early so I could have two productive hours a day before everyone else showed up).