In the last open office I worked in, I could not find headphones that allowed me to focus, not even construction-grade earmuffs; if someone's chewing food within 10 ft, I'll hear it, and that's all I'll hear.
For literal constant music listening to actually help, it needs to be a choice, otherwise it just makes me tire of music and I don't get nearly as much out of my mental energy.
That's interesting. I have the same exact issue and whenever I tell people about it they think I am crazy. I don't have a problem with people chewing food when it's lunch break and we sit in the cafeteria, but man, when I try to focus it kills my brain. Just last week the guy next to me started eating kind of late in the day (where my brain was almost empty). I then tried to cancel it out with headphones, but that just wasn't possible anymore.
And I still don't know how to deal with it. Sometimes I try to take a walk for 5 minutes and it helps, but not always. On some days I get a full mental breakdown because I get angry at myself getting angry on somebody just making noises any normal human being does while eating
Can you elaborate a little on "listening to violent noises" approach? When do you do this, for how long? Is it graduated in intensity, like exposure therapy?
Thanks!
The therapy, unrelated to this coping approach, was focused on figuring out why I got sensitive to some noises in the first place during childhood. Very individual, but to give an example, appearance of stepfather in my life, whose eating habits were conflicting with the way I was raised before.
Sometimes it's drum and bass, mostly some synthwave/chill beats.
Edit: But the problem here is. If I am already exhausted and got distracted by those noises, then getting into focus with just music often does not work. I do have adhd and it could be that misophonia is playing into it too. Still trying to figure out my best work environment, but it's hard
I feel like Concerta marginally helps with this, but it's tough to remember the last time I've had to test it.
It consumed my consciousness in a way that literally dropped my productivity to near zero, and I couldn't catch up, and got fired. Thankfully my boss didn't do a damn thing except scold me for being slow, otherwise I'd still be making PDF editing software.
I'd just go to a cafe down the street for a few hours, which reflected poorly on me, but I had no choice. Not only was the coffee laughably better than the shit in the office, but my ability to focus there vs the office was like night and day.
I used to listen to particular bands which I felt "defined my identity" or something, which I still occasionally do, but I've since realized that when I'm working it's "distracting" to me and I now listen to things like generic "trailer" / epic music or "upbeat" music for workouts.
- Two Steps from Hell
- Sultan + Shephard
- Tom Player
- Matias Puumala
Some other random playlists:
- https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8PiJpaZ8rWVi?si=...
- https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E35ecXdUS92X1?si=...
- https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E36Le7GAznRHV?si=...
- https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1E366Mpiqxs399?si=...
I don't really curate my stuff, I occasionally "like" songs or start radios off songs I'm enjoying in the moment.
...if you're the type of person who can listen to music while working, that is.
I used to like working to the Hotline Miami soundtrack myself, which worked great for coding menial stuff but sucked for troubleshooting.
The Unreal Tournament '99 OST is way better in that it's fast, low-key, and repetitive. I put on a 3-hour megamix and I'm crushing it until lunch.
It's intense, upbeat music.
When I'm hearing someone else's thump thump music and my ear buds aren't sufficient to block it, that's the only thing I've found to work.
It's real rain noise - if you pay attention to it, you can hear the drops - but it's overall a nice white noise that isn't the "boring" white noise.
> ... Our recording has been performed in the silence of the night, in a huge space - namely the Harau Valley in Sumatra - and in the absence of any wind, as to produce the most even noise one can get.
Related / previous HN posts
https://rain.today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9908909
https://mynoise.net https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32366075
I find the 'bass rumble' and brown noise particularly useful for masking external noise, which I guess is pretty similar to a thunderstorm frequency-wise
3M Peltor Premium Plus Earmuffs X3A https://www.3m.co.uk/3M/en_GB/p/d/v101190004/
in my opinion they're really good, though, to be honest, I haven't tried them in an open space env. I'm also a sufferer of misophonia, it's beeping noises and random notifications for me.
I also noticed they make getting into the flow a lot more easy; and, surprisingly, they also reduce the activation energy of getting into work. I suspect that's because our envs are EXTREMELY noisy (compared with the mythical natural state) and the brain always keeps track (subconsciously) of all the noises which leads to mental energy depletion
Also, building owners are getting so desperate for tenants they'd probably cut you a good deal if you needed more space instead of less.
The reason is trivial - if you are not around half of the time rest of the team is, teamwork suffers quite a bit (which is cca constant situation with distant remote places like India, ie if you have any questions in the afternoon you are blocked and they need to wait till next day)
Those aren't the only companies that exist.
No significant numbers of people - in Zurich at least - are starting work in offices at 6am.
The vast majority of useful work I ever did was between the hours of 6-9am.
I do 6:30am - 3pm and have done for years, it fits my day well. Others I work with might not start till 10am. Thats the great thing about working from home, you get more flexability in your start/end time. As long as you get your working hours done it's a total non issue.
I agree with your sentiment but I think in this case, it's misplaced.
Personally I appreciated the flexibility to work and leave early.
The productivity multiplier does not have to be constant over the entire employee base to make it worth it. Also good direction / avoiding bad direction is one of the biggest productivity modifiers but it is harder to measure since it may look like people are productive but what they are producing is not beneficial.
The most ludicrous thing is that those managers are usually sitting in their own offices and not with the rest in open office chaos.
The CEO and directs should have a similar work situation to all the other office managers and their directs.
I would call this kind of dogfooding a necessary but insufficient condition for accepting what they say about open-plan offices.
After all, just because an open-plan office is better for people whose job (often) literally consists of talking to people all day doesn't mean it is better for people whose job is to focus all day on code, spreadsheets, or other kinds of individual work.
Microsoft used to give most employees a private office in the late 90s to roughly the mid 2010s - and that was heaven. Collaboration was great because you could go to your coworker's private office or even bring people along for the much-vaunted in-person whiteboarding. It happened a lot. The only thing that was frowned upon was to leave your office door closed 100% of the time, but some people did just that anyway; that was similar to the remote experience, but at the office.
I really wish people would stop conflating these, as if they were meaningfully equivalent.
Like, yes: compared to open-plan, high-walled cubes are obviously much better.
But I've been in high-walled cubes, and I've been in (and now have) a private office.
There's really no comparison when it comes to privacy, customizability, and just overall the feeling of it being your space.
Open offices are almost invariably terrible for employees - although I have to say that I was once in a large room with a (often closed) door along 5 other engineers as a sort of "private open office" and that was actually okay.
I was at one company; it had private offices, and this is exactly what would happen. You'd go to someone's office; you could share ideas back and forth, often on the whiteboard; it was low-judgment -- just you, the other person, and maybe a third -- so people spoke freely.
I was at another company; it had a SV-style open office and a SV-style interview which, in pre-COVID days, used a whiteboard. It was competitive; people were from top schools. You could tell nobody wanted to use the "you can write on this glass surface" whiteboards scattered around the open office, because they knew there'd be a dozen sets of eyes able to see their vulnerable thought processes and silently judge them; it'd be a show; and they were slightly traumatized by the interview that had gotten them in.
I think large open offices change things from, "I'm interacting with another person", to "I'm putting on a show." And nobody wants to put on a show, quite understandably.
I think open offices are really about reducing employees' feelings of being sheltered or safe. It comes out of the same mindset that speaks of employees "hiding" and not doing work.
I found that I was spending too much mental energy scanning the horizon for predators, and not enough thinking about the ostensible technical problem.
To be fair, it did seem like the artists did get some benefit, but it was definitely a net negative for most of the developers.
I’ve been in private offices, and cubes, and open office, and honestly the most productive environment was when I was in a set of cubicles that had sliding doors, around a bullpen with multiple tables. When you needed to go head-down to get some code down you could, but otherwise you hung out at the tables in the middle.