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In open offices, I just used to put head phones on, listen to non-vocal music and be super focused for many hours. Being visible from behind puts stress on you

In open offices, I just used to put head phones on, listen to non-vocal music and be super focused for many hours. Being visible from behind puts stress on you. You may not be aware of it, but it will catch up with you before you're 35. Headphones don't help for that. It's not just the noise that makes open-plan offices so terrible. Booth-style open-plan offices would be a step up, but nearly as expensive as private offices and since this open-plan thing is really about cheapness (and back-door age discrimination, in some cases) that does not sell it. Teams in open office often go to lunch together, have more personal exchanges and have far more socialization This has more to do with the people than the office layout. There are open-plan offices with eat-at-desk culture and there are private-office layouts where people eat lunch together and play board games after work. Private offices don't mean that there aren't open spaces when people want them. In private offices, I often see people catching up on news websites and FB and in fact I even knew a guy who freely admitted that he spent entire days on YouTube. I spend more time goofing off in open-plan offices, because I have to hide the goofing off. Here's how it works for me. I have a certain amount of goofing off that I need to do per day, just because I'm a curious person (it's not actual "goofing off", it's just not immediately work-related). In a private-office layout, it might be 10 minutes every 2 hours spent checking the news, on HN or Reddit, reading a poetry book on the internets, whatever. In an open-plan layout, it takes 20 minutes to get that 10 minutes of goofing off in, because even though I don't actually need to hide it (I'm senior enough that I could pull the "so fucking what" card, and no one cares anyway because everyone goofs off a little bit) I still feel that social pressure.

jdswain 12y ago
I once was working for a UK govt department as a contractor and was between tasks with nothing to do. The management thought it was easier to keep me on than to hire again when the work increased, so I was there with nothing to do. My manager and everyone around me knew I had nothing to do, but I still found it quite stressful doing things like reading Slashdot while at work (it was a long time ago). In the end I started my own project using the work development tools so it looked like I was working as normal, but after a while that was also too much so I found another contract. I do agree about extra stress in open plan workspaces. I'm the kind of person that can't block out people around me like I notice some other people do, so everyone that walks past my desk I feel the need to glance up at them. In coffee shops I prefer the seating with my back to the wall. Music can be used to block out some of that distraction, but not all of it.

jdswain 12y ago

I once was working for a UK govt department as a contractor and was between tasks with nothing to do. The management thought it was easier to keep me on than to hire again when the work increased, so I was there with nothing to do. My manager and everyone around me knew I had nothing to do, but I still found it quite stressful doing things like reading Slashdot while at work (it was a long time ago). In the end I started my own project using the work development tools so it looked like I was working as normal, but after a while that was also too much so I found another contract. I do agree about extra stress in open plan workspaces. I'm the kind of person that can't block out people around me like I notice some other people do, so everyone that walks past my desk I feel the need to glance up at them. In coffee shops I prefer the seating with my back to the wall. Music can be used to block out some of that distraction, but not all of it.