Between morning rituals, standups, meetings, breaks, and blocking tasks I'm probably spending around 40% of my time on real work. Open offices probably cut th

Between morning rituals, standups, meetings, breaks, and blocking tasks I'm probably spending around 40% of my time on real work. Open offices probably cut that in half. The problem is most claimed benefits are really just poor project management - which is really the biggest cause of low productivity. It isn't a good thing that you can easily interrupt a neighbor to solve an issue. Because 9/10 neighbors won't complain and you'll keep on doing it because you keep getting your issues solved. Interruptions should be difficult to encourage the creation of self-service tools or processes to solve common problems. I've seen the same person interrupted like 10 times in 30 minutes because he is so damn good at fixing everyone else's problems. Most places don't use available tracking software well and they hire non technical people to manage technical projects. This leads to using multiple task tracking systems poorly and poorly defined direction and tasks. There aren't good processes in place to solve different types of issues so they revert to the lowest common denominator (face to face or email) when they could otherwise be handled asynchronously. If everyone gets nice clearly defined tasks defined and managed in a single place and there are tools in place so they can help themselves you get a bunch better environment regardless of how people are sitting.