The simple answer to this question is yes - but only for certain types of people and in certain setups.
My first experience with remote work dates back to 2017. In the early days of founding BeastBI GmbH, we supported other companies with their digital marketing projects. However, I often had to travel to their locations because delivering the work from our own office wasn’t always an option - less due to necessity, and more because of the rigid working structures our clients had in place back then. Even so, I was often able to work from home or remotely.
After COVID, the overall perception of remote work changed dramatically. Since the end of 2022, I’ve been working fully remote, and after nearly a decade of experience, I’ve developed a well-rounded perspective on productivity and remote work.
First, we need to briefly define what I mean by productivity. It’s not just about completing routine tasks or finishing as many as possible in a short time. It’s about genuinely moving tasks forward and successfully completing projects. Productivity, therefore, operates on multiple levels.
Efficiency – How effectively are time and energy used? How much distraction is there?
Quality of work – How strong are the results? Do they create real value or generate revenue?
Job satisfaction – Do I enjoy my work environment? Do I feel connected to the company and maintain healthy relationships with colleagues?
Long-term performance – What about burnout risks, recovery, and more?
In the first section, I examine working hours, energy expenditure, and the overall intensity with which someone can focus on their work.
Regular commuters - and even employees with a relatively short commute - know that it’s easy to spend 30–60 minutes a day just getting to work. Remote work or working from home doesn’t just save time; it also saves mental energy. As a result, you gain significantly more capacity for productive work.
Assuming someone works the same number of hours at home as they would on-site already creates a net gain in both time and quality of life. The effect adds up quickly. Saving five hours per week adds up to 200–250 hours per year. Of course, some jobs must be done on-site. But for roles that can be performed remotely - which includes almost all digital professions - this factor alone is substantial. On top of that, remote work allows more flexibility in managing non-work commitments such as childcare, errands, sports, or other personal responsibilities.
To be clear, remote work tends to offer advantages for people with strong self-organization skills, a strong sense of time, and a strong performance mindset.
In this context, it’s also worth mentioning the so-called “work time fraud.” I would argue that people in offices necessarily work more than those in home offices. Offices come with their own inefficiencies: extended coffee breaks, unnecessary meetings, and meetings that turn into private conversations. Regardless of meetings or coffee breaks, employees can spend time on private matters at their computers or simply work slowly and inefficiently. The issue is more complex than it appears.
If we look more closely at meetings, there’s a common assumption that remote or asynchronous work requires more of them. In my experience, that’s not necessarily true. Yes, there are organizations and roles where people spend seven out of eight hours in meetings and get very little done - but that’s usually role-specific or the exception rather than the rule. In many cases, regular check-ins, short messages, or quick calls are entirely sufficient. At their core, short digital alignments are no different from walking over to a colleague’s desk - just with less temptation of extended small talk. And if we’re honest, if someone wants a private chat, they’ll manage to do so, whether remote or on-site.
At BeastBI, for example, we don’t run recurring full-team status meetings because, in most cases, they offer limited real value to the individual beyond self-presentation. Arguments such as knowledge sharing, updates, or team bonding are often overstated justifications. Bottom line: when it comes purely to time, remote work is a significant advantage for the individual employee.
Let’s now look at energy in the context of remote work versus on-site work.
I don’t know anyone who arrives at the office after a 30-minute commute - best case with traffic, bad weather, or delays and thinks, “I’m completely energized now” or “I’m about to deliver my best performance.” If anything, this effect is even worse after work.
In my opinion, this is one of the reasons people often lack the energy for sports, hobbies, friends, family, partners, or simply for quality time with themselves. That energy deficit shows up in fast food, irritability, lack of drive, or endless doom-scrolling. I don’t mean to remove personal responsibility here, but eight working hours can easily turn into nine or ten once commuting and daily logistics are factored in. Without strong discipline or a well-structured system, it’s easy to default to the path of least resistance. In line with the time argument, remote setups also enable better energy management whether that’s exercising during lunch, cooking a healthy meal, or simply taking a 15–30-minute walk around the block.
We all operate with limited physical, mental, and emotional capacity. Anything that reduces unnecessary stress and pressure preserves energy. From that perspective, this point clearly favors remote work setups again.
I’ll say it upfront: this point is probably a draw - and will likely always remain one - though with a slight edge in favor of on-site work.
As human beings, we naturally gravitate toward the path of least resistance. We move toward reward and away from discomfort. Without some form of external structure or oversight, the temptation to work less or less productively is very real. While distractions certainly exist in the office, it’s generally harder to disengage when others are physically present. At the same time, offices come with their own interruptions. But in many cases, they still offer fewer distractions than working from home, traveling, or sitting in a coworking space. That’s not universally true for everyone or every situation, but it tends to be accurate.
Of course, it’s possible to have highly focused days in a coworking space with 15 people talking around you. You can get into the zone in a café and write an excellent article or plan a project. We also need to distinguish between “working remotely from home” and “working remotely from anywhere.” Anyone who has traveled for business, especially regularly, knows that real deep work only happens in quiet environments with minimal distractions. Not every day needs to be deep work, but if your job involves more than emails and meetings, serious, high-quality output is rarely produced in beach cafés. The same applies when you’re juggling household responsibilities, childcare, and a side hustle alongside your main job.
The rule is simple: the more demanding the work, the easier it is to get distracted, and the more important a quiet workspace becomes. That can be a traditional office or a dedicated setup at home. Overall, however, I’d argue that distractions in remote setups are slightly higher than in structured office environments. For that reason, chasing extreme “work and travel” lifestyles isn’t always compatible with consistently productive work.
A common issue in modern society is that we expect too much from work. It’s supposed to be fun, fulfilling, and, of course, highly lucrative. In the process, we often forget that work is fundamentally an exchange - providing a service in return for money. Entrepreneurs or enterprises then sell those services or the resulting products further. From that perspective, it’s in the interest of every employee, freelancer, and even business owner to deliver the highest possible quality of work.
Whether that quality is easy or difficult to achieve, however, depends largely on the setup and the type of job or task at hand. Someone who primarily handles standardized tasks can usually perform them more easily, regardless of time and location. Basic administrative work, answering emails, or handling inquiries are good examples. But drafting a complex employment contract may already require a different level of focus. Not to mention complex CRM migrations or software development. Likewise, a sales representative may struggle to handle a high-stakes call in a noisy environment, whether that’s a beach bar or an overly loud open-plan office.
This shows that the quality of work depends far less on whether it’s remote or on-site, and far more on the nature of the task and the surrounding conditions.
Hot Take: That’s why, in order to consistently deliver high-quality work, you generally need a quiet environment with minimal distractions.
I rarely stay in coworking spaces or similar environments for more than a few days at a time. During phases with limited time and high pressure, I work most efficiently from home. For me and probably for most people, a model based on constant location changes isn’t sustainable in the long run. That’s why I maintain a dedicated office or workspace in both Germany and Dubai.
To share a few comparisons and observations from my own experience and from conversations with friends and peers:
Traditional employees often tell me they struggle to focus because of excessive meetings. This issue is particularly pronounced in open-plan offices. Private offices are better, but they can also lead to "internal" distractions. From my experience and countless discussions, the ideal setup is a small office with 2–6 people. You’re not so isolated that there’s no sense of accountability, but you’re also not overwhelmed by distractions. It creates a subtle level of mutual control. If we’re honest, most of us tend to do just enough to meet expectations.
Among freelancers and highly independent professionals in my circle, I mostly hear positive feedback about having a dedicated "home office" but not shared spaces like the living room. Work-and-travel setups can function for a few weeks, but after prolonged periods of constant movement and external stimulation, most people hit their limits. I’ve often heard good things about rotating between a private home office, hotel rooms, and occasional coworking spaces. However, I’ve never met anyone who could work productively from a café for more than one or two days. Not including tasks like writing emails or posting on social media. For content creators, we can make a general exception here.
Personally, I think the biggest productivity drain is the on-site meeting. While they can be productive occasionally, they are usually massive time sinks. Considering the amount of time and energy they consume, I wouldn’t recommend companies overusing in-person meetings with freelancers. It often creates unnecessary effort and stress for everyone involved. In my view, once a month should be more than enough; otherwise, it’s likely the wrong company, the wrong freelancer, or both.
One final point: I work best from a stable home setup, but variation is important. If I don’t change something about my environment every few months, I start to feel stuck and less productive. This applies to entrepreneurs, freelancers, and companies alike. A certain degree of change improves work quality for almost everyone, even if it’s just the motivation to return to a familiar routine afterward.
In the digital and mobile world we live in, work has unfortunately become less human for many people. At the end of the day, we are social beings; we cannot and do not want to exist without others. And while I regularly have many calls, they are not a substitute for real, in-person interaction.
People who are in the office almost every day often can’t imagine what it means to spend most of the day alone. I’m personally more introverted and comfortable spending time by myself. I also have a high level of self-organization and intrinsic motivation. That may be true for many freelancers and certainly for some employees as well. But the real question is: how strong is someone’s self-management when tasks, deadlines, and goals are not 100% clearly defined?
I organize my travel, coworking spaces, and entire work environment independently, and I’m very satisfied with that. But how many employees would benefit from or even prefer more flexibility? And here comes a hard truth for parts of middle and upper management: good employees will perform well regardless of where they work. The same applies to average and weak performers. Insisting on strict on-site rules often reflects a false sense of control or a culture that leadership wants to maintain. The uncomfortable reality is that many companies don’t want to admit that a significant portion of their workforce consists of low performers. People who are slow, overly complex, or simply unmotivated. Managers believe pressure and supervision can compensate for this, and while that may work marginally, it simultaneously reduces job satisfaction and performance among the true high performers. As in many areas of life, the 80/20 principle applies.
I am fully convinced that in digital roles, you can only retain top talent by offering freedom and flexibility. We no longer work in factories where output is directly tied to the number of hours spent on-site. Of course, you can achieve more in four focused hours than in one, no question. But can you really achieve proportionally more in eight hours compared to six? In jobs centered on thinking, problem-solving, and strategy, where actual execution may account for only 20% of the time, the answer is often no. This applies to HR, marketing, finance, IT, and most other areas of the digital economy.
My core argument is simple: “Only happy cows produce milk.” The real question isn’t whether someone works six or eight hours from home; it’s whether they deliver results.
A significant share of workplace dissatisfaction, especially among high performers, stems from being measured by the same standards as everyone else. Some of this also comes from a lack of courage among leaders to clearly identify weak performance and act accordingly.
Overall, small but satisfied remote teams are often more productive than larger on-site teams, which tend to perform at their weakest members' level. Of course, managing remote teams requires structure and intentional leadership, but let's focus here purely on productivity in the context of remote versus on-site work and the underlying role of job satisfaction.
As a final thought on this topic: for capable and self-organized employees, motivation beats control every single time. The goal should not be to optimize for maximum formal fairness, but to optimize the working environment for those who actually drive results. I’m aware that labor laws in some countries don’t always align with this perspective but many of those laws were created for a different era. And that’s precisely why we keep having endless debates about home office, hybrid models, and fully on-site work.
In future posts, it will become clear that I don’t place much weight on studies, sources, or similar references. Most of them are biased in one direction or another, and for every study, you can usually find one that argues the opposite. At its core, this is my opinion, shaped by years of experience and hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations.
That said, I’ll engage in a bit of cherry-picking here and highlight a few studies that support the case for remote work:
Many studies report productivity increases among remote workers. (1), (2), (3)
If we now look at long-term job satisfaction as the synthesis of the previous three sections, one thing becomes clear: no one wants to waste time commuting if it isn’t necessary. No one wants to work harder than required. That is true for low and high performers; therefore, giving them the freedom to choose whether they work from home or elsewhere is usually the better option.
Over time, overly rigid systems tend to frustrate high performers in particular. They will either try to game the system to their advantage or eventually burn out. The real objective should be to align employee goals with company goals to maximize productivity and satisfaction.
That alignment may sometimes require difficult or uncomfortable decisions, but that’s simply part of operating in a modern working world.
My opinion: Companies that don’t embrace remote work in the long term will lose their best employees or struggle to attract truly great talent in the first place.
Productivity increases when remote work is designed properly
Overall, remote work or working from home is, in my view, the clearly superior working model. Arguments around productivity or company culture are often excuses for weak leadership and poor hiring decisions. I’m not even touching on side topics like cost savings from smaller offices or the broader societal benefits, such as reduced traffic. In another article, I’ll go deeper into the topic of so-called “fake jobs.”
My conclusion: companies that strongly insist on on-site presence are like dinosaurs. They may survive due to market power or structural advantages, but they are rarely truly focused on employee well-being or maximizing productivity.
With a bit more willingness to reward high performers and a shift away from entitlement thinking back toward a performance-driven culture, we could see real progress, particularly in Germany and across Europe. Is that likely to happen any time soon? Probably not. But one article at a time, one bold thesis after another.