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I'm moving my office at work from a nice office next to the production office (noisy, people banging in and out all day) to a much bigger windowless space on th

• wpietri 9y ago
  Yes, noise is a total productivity killer for me. I can't think, and thinking is most of my job! And what people designing offices never seem to understand is that noise is situational, relational. Some of my best working experiences have been in open-plan space with shared tables. And some of my worst have too. The difference is whether the people around me share the same definitions of "signal" and "noise". If the only people in earshot are my team, we quickly work out a shared sense of what's good to talk about in the team space. But if the people in earshot are on different teams, it's a fucking nightmare. We have very different understandings of what "signal" is. E.g., to a recruiter or someone in sales, "signal" is loud, emotionally intense conversations. But to me that's the worst kind of noise. And there's little social context for negotiating shared use.