  Most works on open quantum systems generally focus on the reduced physical
system by tracing out the environment degrees of freedom. Here we show that the
qubit distributions with the environment are essential for a thorough analysis,
and demonstrate that the way that quantum correlations are distributed in a
quantum register is constrained by the way in which each subsystem gets
correlated with the environment. For a two-qubit system coupled to a common
dissipative environment $\mathcal{E}$, we show how to optimise interqubit
correlations and entanglement via a quantification of the qubit-environment
information flow, in a process that, perhaps surprisingly, does not rely on the
knowledge of the state of the environment. To illustrate our findings, we
consider an optically-driven bipartite interacting qubit $AB$ system under the
action of $\mathcal{E}$. By tailoring the light-matter interaction, a
relationship between the qubits early stage disentanglement and the
qubit-environment entanglement distribution is found. We also show that, under
suitable initial conditions, the qubits energy asymmetry allows the
identification of physical scenarios whereby qubit-qubit entanglement minima
coincide with the extrema of the $A\mathcal{E}$ and $B\mathcal{E}$ entanglement
oscillations.
