When I went fully remote, my productivity didn't dip. It collapsed.

It wasn't dramatic on day one. I had a laptop, a kitchen table, a reasonable internet connection, and what I believed was a decade of self-discipline. By month two, I was finishing the day with the same feeling you get after a long flight: I'd been on, technically, for nine hours and could not point to a single block of real work. Meetings ran into deep work, deep work ran into messages, messages ran into a half-written doc I'd already opened twice that morning. Each evening I'd close the laptop convinced I'd just had a bad day.

We knew remote work felt worse than office work, and we knew the productivity advice you get for that is mostly folk wisdom. Time blocking. Pomodoro. Morning routines. None of it was wrong, exactly, but none of it explained why the problem existed in the first place. So we went looking for actual papers. Not productivity blogs citing papers. The papers themselves.