Now, since my solution is to shut my door, you'd think I could just say, "Yup, nothing matters" and ignore it. But it just doesn't work that way.

But I realize that this is supposing two idealized coworkers in a perfect vacuum.

What if the relevant conversation is the 6th nearest? Uh Oh!

My point is that open office doesn't really help because you can only really pay attention to the people relatively close to you and then only X conversations at a time anyway (for me, X is usually 1). Any other conversations happening anywhere else, I will miss.

Better would be a "remote work friendly" culture where discussions happen in slack or somewhere async like that. You can then check it when you're not trying to focus and you won't miss things simply because of proximity. Best of all, you don't get distracted from your actual work when you try to focus.

> Why would I ever need to focus on anything at work?

Exactly... better not do any work so you can pay full attention to what everybody else is doing, in case something is relevant to what you're not doing...

Also, I'm a native English speaker. I speak very little Spanish, but when my co-workers converse in Spanish my brain gets completely sidetracked trying to understand what they're saying. It's even worse with they're speaking Spanish on the phone.

It's as if when I can only hear or understand part of the conversation my undisciplined brain sucks up loads of CPU cycles trying to fill in the gaps. So I picked up a pair of sound cancelling headphones and block everything out with white-noise or music. But now my ears sweat...

That's why I listen to techno/trance music. High energy, but intended as pure background, always changing but never distractingly so. Enhances an experience/activity, but never demands your attention; not something you can sit down and listen to for its own sake.

I used to use techno for strictly background/energy, but have come to enjoy some artists independently.

Mostly in the IDM subgenre; Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Koyxen, and Square Pusher have a solid mix of enjoyable music that doesn't distract.