Selective hearing was always Superman's superpower that I envied the most. He could hear just exactly when Lois Lane would cry for help, even if not expecting. All else he could just ignore
wait... did Google let you play WoW at work to practice this new arrangement?
:-) At the time Google was pretty reasonable about people doing what ever it took to become more productive. And it wasn't exactly 'hard core' playing, it was simply a tool that provided the necessary engagement motivation.
Not unlike processing all of the works of Shakespeare into bags of words and n-gram vectors and correlation maps to get a handle on how you can slice and dice documents for search. Nobody expected the time spent slicing and dicing Shakespeare would generate useful work product, but it did help train you so that you could generate useful work product.
And like the Shakespeare exercises, once the benefit was realized you moved on.
The interesting side effect is that people actually expect me to be listening sometimes when I'm not. So they will say something, expect a response, and not get it and it will surprise (and sometimes annoy) them. I've been unable to 'selectively' listen to avoid that, its either all on (and distracting) or all off (and not distracting).