It's an interesting question- which one helped me focus on my role and deliver? I can see in the abstract that distributed work can both demand and benefit from strong focus. In my case, when I was a "distributed" worker I had a much narrower scope of responsibility and along with that, less ability to gauge whether something was "good enough" to ship and perfectionism/procrastination and poor remote communication on my part really hampered my work. As an in-person worker, when we were betting the company I was able to constantly assess all work being done by all the company and pivot us and others to what was the most risk-mitigating thing we needed to do. When distributed, I suppose that was the role my Engineering VP was supposed to do and I was just focused on my narrow domain, but overall the company wasn't able to leverage my problem solving and triaging strengths and I was just a remote coder/designer resource with a task. When it was late, I knew it was bad, but I didn't have a sense of the consequences to the broader team (just my own job). In hindsight I think management was trying to shelter me from the stress and I respect that but I was really stunned at the end of the day how out of the loop I was. I was East Coast, CEO was East Coast but four hours away, some execs were West Coast, Engineering Lead was UK. I did a great job for them with engineering for in-person clients, but when I switched to being managed from overseas it really didn't work out. I always didn't want to interrupt the UK VP since he was so busy and/or because I was behind but the communication dynamic was ultimately dysfunctional for which I take more than half the responsibility. (I have since been on the flip side of that coin with a remote worker! It's an interesting challenge.)