Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace

The problem with open office plans is that it takes just <i>one</i> noisy person to spoil it for everybody. If managed carefully and actively, they can work -- it just takes an manager willing to correct bad behavior or send sick people home.<p>Where I work, I have a budding tupperware percussionist, three imminent victims of whooping cough, some parents managing high-maintenance offspring over cell phones, and one guy who conducts teleconferences with his desk phone. So I often sneak off to empty conference rooms with a laptop if I&#x27;m trying to concentrate.

Another thread where most commenters will advocate for remote work and&#x2F;or private offices. I agree.<p>Dan Luu recently said this about Peopleware, which advocates for offices and is highly regarded:<p>&gt; This book seemed convincing when I read it in college. It even had all sorts of studies backing up what they said. No deadlines is better than having deadlines. Offices are better than cubicles. Basically all devs I talk to agree with this stuff.<p>&gt; But virtually every successful company is run the opposite way. Even Microsoft is remodeling buildings from individual offices to open plan layouts. Could it be that all of this stuff just doesn’t matter that much? If it really is that important, how come companies that are true believers, like Fog Creek, aren’t running roughshod over their competitors?<p>&gt; This book agrees with my biases and I’d love for this book to be right, but the meta evidence makes me want to re-read this with a critical eye and look up primary sources.<p>--<p>What&#x27;s HN opinions?

I&#x27;ve worked in a private office, small shared-office, cube farms, open plan, and remote. What I&#x27;ve always thought was a good mix was:<p>- Developers (and sometimes others that need quietude, like art&#x2F;graphics people) get either a private office each or a shared, developer-only office<p>- Marketing and sales that need constant communication &#x2F; thrive on motion and energy get open plans<p>- A mix of full-on conference rooms and small, private phone&#x2F;meeting rooms<p>- Account managers, finance, managers get their own space, which can be cubes or shared offices.<p>Putting people who need to concentrate in with people whose job is to constantly talk and&#x2F;or socialize is a recipe for (asymmetrically) poor productivity. The fact that office designs are sometimes dictated by the vicissitudes of management fads and a misguided desire to save money by just building one-size-fits-all layouts, even though a good design will pay for itself many times over, is very unfortunate.

I will never understand why this is such a point of contention on HN and why it isn&#x27;t accepted that some people legitimately prefer open office plans while others prefer quiet. And even more practical and intelligent would be to offer different kinds of spaces so that people can choose where to work based on a particular mood. But instead we just get weekly complaints about open offices.<p>I&#x27;m probably more productive in a quiet private office space but is the point of my work solely to be most productive in the role I have right now? I organically absorb more information about the company working in an open office. That information can have a valuable impact on my work. I end up organically sharing ideas with my co-workers more often in an open office. And in terms of long term happiness I don&#x27;t want to spend every moment of every day alone coding. There&#x27;s a balance to be struck.

I am currently working in a very crowded open office. We have small desks where we sit almost elbow to elbow, the place is all hard surfaces (it&#x27;s an old industrial building made into office space), and there is a fair amount of noise.<p>But none of this would bother me except for the fact that one senior person has decided to have speakers installed in the ceiling, and we have to listen to non-stop spotify playing top 40 or whatever, all day every day.<p>The constant music drives me insane, it just drones on and on. I wear noise cancelling headphones with rain sounds to drown it out but I don&#x27;t like wearing headphones all day and it hinders collaborating with my neighbours. I can&#x27;t tell if management is clueless or simply does not give a toss. Probably both.

The open office revolution needs to die. I don&#x27;t like wearing headphones all day, but I also don&#x27;t like hearing 30 people&#x27;s conversations either.<p>I had a (old) guy that used to sit in my area who would argue with his manager in person and argue (loudly) with everyone he was on the phone with (including his wife).<p>He got moved a couple of months ago and there were no tears shed.

I was working in an open space for a couple of years. The phones were ringing happily, including the official corporate ones, which were standing on each desk. People were talking all the time. Talking, walking, looking at my screen, of course with lots of comments to my code. 70 people in the floor.<p>We had all the funny things for the group integration all the time. All the things except for thinking.<p>Yes, I was sitting all the time with my headphones, shouting maximally to my ears. Until one of those people making noise told me that it is not team friendly to have so loud phones, as he hears the music, and cannot concentrate.<p>Of course the management had their separate offices, with walls, and doors. They didn&#x27;t see any problem.<p>For the last 6 years I&#x27;ve been working remotely from home. Well, what a change. In 4 hours I could do more than for a week in the open space.

I&#x27;d say environmental factors such as being so freaking hot that you are sweating or so freaking cold you have to bring in a heater to counteract the AC are pretty distracting as well. And in terms of productivity, not having enough ventilation so that the air builds up CO2 makes people really tired and unproductive.

Different strokes for different folks. I&#x27;m probably the only person on HN that prefers open office workspaces. I currently have an office to myself and it&#x27;s so lonely and isolating. I think I&#x27;d go crazy working all day without human interaction, so I hardly ever use it. And, no, chat isn&#x27;t an adequate substitute. I&#x27;ll generally charge up my laptop and go out and work in a break room or some other common area with actual human beings around--much better. If it gets noisy and I want to block out distractions headphones work just fine.

Couldn&#x27;t agree more on the article. Recently they put next to us a group of people who is 50% of their time on the phone. While some of them try to speak low, other just yell. It is probably the most frustrating work setup I experienced in my career. It is really distracting.

Coworker who is extremely loud on the phone. I get 0 work done when she&#x27;s on the phone. She&#x27;s so loud I can&#x27;t hear people when I&#x27;m on the phone. We have an &quot;open door&quot; policy at work so if I close my door to my own office it looks weird. If I tell her she&#x27;s being too loud I look like an asshole. We&#x27;re moving to a new building and I&#x27;m going to be on a different floor than her and I can&#x27;t wait. So many years of listening to half of a conversation is enough to make you go insane.

For an summary of all the environmental&#x2F;physiological factors that affect work performance in the office take a look at Creating the Productive Workplace [1]. Research material covered include affect of temperature (high&#x2F;low and variation), humidity, indoor air quality, ventilation and it&#x27;s control, lighting, crowding, daylight (too much&#x2F;too little), artificial light (wrong type) and noise.<p>One of the points that comes out quite strongly is that whilst each of the environmental factors does adversely&#x2F;positively impact your performance your ability to control (or lack of control) can have a greater impact. For example you will tolerate colder and warmer environments if you know that you can have some influence on the temperature .<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;279190533_Creating_the_Productive_Workplace" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;279190533_Creating_...</a>

An anecdote for those who hoped they&#x27;d find suggestions in the comments:<p>I ended up buying some over-the-head earmuff headphones aimed at construction workers (I think with a 25dB noise reduction rating). I put in ear plugs, then the headphones, and play some light music; even relatively loud and nearby conversations drop away pretty quickly. (Ordinary &quot;noise cancelling&quot; headphones aren&#x27;t intended to block the sound of talking, and don&#x27;t work as well).<p>The only issue is comfort; the headphones fit quite tightly. I got used to it after a few hours, and now don&#x27;t mind it at all. My wife tried it, and couldn&#x27;t ever adjust.

&gt; <i>&quot;In general, if it&#x27;s coming from another person, it&#x27;s much more disturbing than when it&#x27;s coming from a machine,&quot; he says</i><p>Huh. My most pet peeve in the open office floorplan was always the coworkers whose phone — not on vibrate — would start ringing. They&#x27;d look at it, decide not to answer it, <i>and proceed to just let it ring out loud until it hits voicemail.</i> Just… <i>why?</i> And attempts to educate the owner on how to silence a ringer¹ just seem to go unheeded.<p>One commenter I read once noted the concept of &quot;cell phone time out&quot; — a basket with a blanket for ringing phones with no owner to be found.<p>My current office boasted &quot;great amounts of natural light&quot;; I have exactly zero paths to natural light from my desk. (The upshot of this is that we&#x27;re in a corner that largely isolates us from the noise.) While I lean towards cubes (simply for the affordance of quiet and disease prevention), do they not mean that people in them get absolutely no natural light? (Not that I am right now myself, but it crosses my mind.)<p>We recently lost a manweek to a cold that just ran absolutely rampant through the desks. Perhaps the sad thing is that I feel that was pretty good, and could have been much worse. (Perhaps because I seem to have dodged it myself.)<p>Our new office came with less conference rooms and quiet areas. Less actual useable space per person.<p>¹And just in case you&#x27;re wondering: squeezing nearly any cell phone&#x27;s power&#x2F;volume buttons will silence the ringer during an incoming call. It doesn&#x27;t cancel the call or voicemail it: the other end is still listening to a ringtone. You can still pick up with call with the on-screen UI if you want. (At least until it truly goes to voicemail, which happens after the normal delay.) You can even do this with the phone in the pocket pretty easily, e.g., if it rings inconveniently during an important meeting.

Active noise-cancelling headphones plus a white noise generator, is where it&#x27;s at.<p>These are the best headphones I&#x27;ve used: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.com&#x2F;B00X9KV0HU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.com&#x2F;B00X9KV0HU</a> They come in Apple- or Android-compatible versions.<p>They won&#x27;t cancel everything. In general they&#x27;re great with anything constant (hums&#x2F;motors&#x2F;fans etc.) but the more impulsive (in the physics sense) a sound wave is, the more of it seeps through. Human speech I find it damps it pretty significantly but not all the way.<p>That&#x27;s where white noise comes in. From that dampened state, a very quiet level of white noise is enough to perceptually drown out any loudmouths who have no concept of an &quot;indoor voice.&quot; Use something like simplynoise.com or an app. For Android I like Noise Machine - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=net.synopsia.noisemachine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=net.synopsia.n...</a> For iPhone I believe there&#x27;s an app literally called White Noise.<p>Not affiliated with any of these people.<p>Don&#x27;t use music... that&#x27;s just as distracting as someone talking. YMMV

honestly, that&#x27;s why I&#x27;m hardly ever in the office. there&#x27;s someone there who&#x27;s noise profile is utterly unfilterable. they fiddle with things, drop things, fidget, cough, snort phlegm up their nose, subvocalize, and generally emit an air of restlessness. nice person though.

&gt; Dooley says he found the carrot-munching funny.<p>If you have an open office, no eating at your desk period. Show some respect for your co-workers.<p>I worked next to an apple eater some time ago, slurping and chomping on his apple every day. Drove me insane. But every so often there was the bag of baby carrots. Which although less disturbing lasted much longer.<p>Then there&#x27;s the fish eaters and microwave popcorn eaters. Don&#x27;t bring that into the office. Keep it in the lunch room, eat outside or don&#x27;t bring it in!

Open office plans are a great example of cargo cult management, second only to Agile.<p>Despite numerous well controlled studies debunking the myths that people are somehow happier, more creative, or communicate better in open plans, we get: &quot;Company X was very successful, and they had an open office plan; therefore, the open office plan <i>made</i> them successful and we should have one, too.&quot; Company X was successful <i>despite</i> the open plan, not because of it.

This thread is brought to you by Bose quiet comfort headphones. They are amazing!

As someone with ADD, are work places required to accommodate for my learning disability and allow me to WFH or work in a quiet place? I&#x27;m in the US.

The company I&#x27;m currently working at bought everyone some top-of-the-line Bose noise-canceling headphones for the same reason, as we have an open plan office and coworkers can be chatty sometimes. And while the noise canceling is far from being perfect, it really makes it much easier to stay focused when working. I even wear them on my commute now as they are very good at filtering out constant amplitude white noise (such as engine hums), which helps me to focus on my reading. Unfortunately I sometimes miss my stops now :D

Office noise has become a bit of an issue for me recently, this being the reason:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tinnitus.org.uk&#x2F;hyperacusis" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tinnitus.org.uk&#x2F;hyperacusis</a><p>Although the amount of talking in the office is low and not very disturbing, and there&#x27;s certainly nothing like the horror of Spotify which one commenter here mentioned, there are people at work who make noise which sounds particularly intrusive and distracting to me (e.g. sniffing, throat clearing and similar). Of course, to many others these would not seem to be much of a problem, being more like background noise, and so most don&#x27;t fully appreciate how much of a nuisance it can be.<p>A lot of it can be covered up with earphones playing white noise, nature sounds, or similar, but too much of that during the day does seem to have a deleterious effect on hearing, such as by making tinnitus louder. Wearing them also interferes with those occasions where it is useful to talk to colleagues.

Let&#x27;s be careful with the phrase &quot;open office plan&quot;. Many articles lump cubicle farms together with partition-free spaces in the same category, but whenever they&#x27;re treated as separate choices the research tends to show cubicle farms being worse than partition-free spaces on most dimensions, including noise distraction -- i.e. private offices &gt; partition-free spaces &gt; cubicle farms. Interestingly, this particular article mostly avoids this distinction but does address it in the final paragraph:<p>&quot;There are solutions, says Cornell&#x27;s Hedge. The trend toward open offices and hard office furniture makes noise distraction worse, so adding carpet, drapes and upholstery can help. He recommends, perhaps counterintuitively, getting rid of cubicle walls, which provide the illusion of sound privacy, but actually make people less aware of the noises they create.&quot;

i&#x27;ve noticed that if coworkers tend exhibit a high level of emotion in their voices during their conversations, that&#x27;s very distracting -- e.g., some people seem to just have a pattern of vocalizing stress or confusion in their tone of speech, either to each other, or on the phone etc.<p>it took me a long time to identify exactly what was bugging me (besides it obviously being noisy), but then it dawned on me, and now i pay close attention to it -- being able to cateogrize it, and then compartmentalize it away, helps a lot i think.<p>moving to an off-site coffee shop on occasion has made all the difference, despite being an equal or greater amount of noise.<p>still would prefer an office, obviously.

My solution is over the ear head phones + nature sounds. I personally like: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;texashighdef.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;texashighdef.net&#x2F;</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;whitenoisemp3s.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;whitenoisemp3s.com&#x2F;</a> (these are for purchase, but I&#x27;ve found them to be of very high quality and return to them repeatedly).<p>Your mileage may vary; some people find this stuff puts them to sleep.

It&#x27;s very strange that HN seems to sway so heavily against open offices.<p>I genuinely think the reality is that opinions are split squarely down the middle, otherwise hacking&#x2F;working in coffee shops wouldn&#x27;t be a thing for example (people seek out that specific experience)<p>It also implies that the likes of Google&#x2F;Facebook aren&#x27;t being as productive as they can be, which is hogwash in my opinion.

I work in an open office and honestly it doesn&#x27;t bother me. When I&#x27;m working on a problem intently I tend to get into a headspace where I don&#x27;t notice the distractions around me.<p>Sometimes if I&#x27;m deeply engrossed in a problem a coworker will have to repeat my name several times before I realize they are trying to get my attention.<p>Other people in my team complain about the environment a lot. The ones that do tend to listen to music on headphones to tune out.<p>I think a lot of it depends on your upbringing. I grew up as the oldest child in a house full of younger siblings my home environment was always very noisy so I suspect I have a higher tolerance for working&#x2F;studying etc in a distraction rich environment.<p>The benefit I see to an open office is being able to contribute to colleagues discussions several times a week I&#x27;ll overhear a conversation or a colleague will be listening to mine and be able to interject.<p>Several valuable conversations have started based around &quot;I overheard you were working on... I had a similar problem I solved by doing... Then often a third colleague will jump in etc. If we were each in private offices this wouldn&#x27;t have occurred.<p>Edit: Related anecdote when I was at University I spent some time working as an apprentice the company wasn&#x27;t expecting me to show up or there was some communication issue etc didn&#x27;t have a proper desk for me when I arrived so for several weeks they shoved me into the room with all the photocopiers and this huge B0 drafting printer the Mechanical Engineers used to print technical drawings. This thing was based on old dot matrix technology used to make a hell of a lot of noise when it fired up it would scare the crap out of me every time. That obviously was distracting...

Cal Newport recently is discussing about the open office. I am sure it is related to his new book, Deep Work. These following posts are explained it:<p>- Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers? [1]<p>- The Opposite of the Open Office [2]<p>The previous discussion of one of that post also appears on HN. You may check it out here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12677866" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12677866</a>.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calnewport.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;09&#x2F;is-facebooks-massive-open-office-scaring-away-developers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calnewport.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;09&#x2F;is-facebooks-massive-o...</a><p>[2]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calnewport.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;19&#x2F;the-opposite-of-the-open-office&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calnewport.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;19&#x2F;the-opposite-of-the-op...</a>

Has anyone ever worked in an open plan office space with high, transparent partitions like these:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alibaba.com&#x2F;product-detail&#x2F;Fireproofing-transparent-office-partition-office-low_1938784208.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alibaba.com&#x2F;product-detail&#x2F;Fireproofing-transpar...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stab-group.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;of%D1%96sn%D1%96-peregorodki&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stab-group.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;of%D1%96sn%D1%96-peregorod...</a><p>It seems like you could have, say, 1.5m of solid partition and then higher transparent partitions and a few lightweight doors and sort of have a cube farm that allowed in light but blocked noise.

In related news, water is wet.<p>Unstructured space is terrible for working and terrible for collaboration.

I just quit my software development Job at 120k &#x2F;year (Waterloo)<p>I couldn&#x27;t fucking stand the noise and distractions.<p>Now I work remote, at home, on my own gigs. Never work in an &quot;open office again&quot;

I&#x27;m a little late to this discussion but I wear headphones&#x2F;earbuds the entire time I&#x27;m in my office and if people are being loud I just turn up my music. I am no fan of open floor plans but at the same time they don&#x27;t bother me as long as I can wear my headphones and people aren&#x27;t constantly trying to get my attention vis non-chat methods (chat me and say you need to talk, saying my name or waving at me it not going to grab my attention).

When it gets real bad, sometimes I put in my handy old industrial orange foam ear-plugs[1]. What&#x27;s good for bringing the scream of a chainsaw down to a dull wail will just about block out all but the loudest conference calls completely. Although I suppose it might be a tad ruder than headphones...<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.howardleight.com&#x2F;earplugs&#x2F;max" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.howardleight.com&#x2F;earplugs&#x2F;max</a>

One of the greatest inventions of the humanity: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com.br&#x2F;search?q=noise+reduction+ear+plugs&amp;safe=active&amp;biw=1087&amp;bih=753&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;sqi=2&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjj57_EmfnPAhUBciYKHcR2CrkQ_AUIBigB" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com.br&#x2F;search?q=noise+reduction+ear+plugs...</a><p>With them, you can easily turn off or on ambient noise.

I can relate to a lot in the article having worked in open plan for 10 years. I always get a lot more done working from home - ambient distraction level is really low. The worst thing is sick people contaminating and rowdy loud people especially when we are expected to take regular video conferences at our desks.<p>It would be interesting given a poll who would opt for:<p>- open plan, no separators<p>- hot-desking<p>- individual offices<p>- individual offices + open areas

For those who might be distracted by music, I bring earplugs to work. That you also have to take them out to talk means that you&#x27;re also distracting less people. They should be giving them away at the front desk. Bright orange so people know not to disturb you unless necessary.

I find if there is a big contrast in noises, say if the office is usually quiet and a coworker starts making noises, they are more distractive than if in a constantly noisy environment and a loud coworker makes noise. I would say the contrast is a huge factor as the article seem to suggest

Bought a pair of good closed back headphones after using semi-open headphones for ages. Lots of money you can pour into these, but can&#x27;t complain having great sound and not able to hear the noise of my colleagues.

Caves and Commons. Have an area where people can go to work without interruption, and have a common area where people can work in an open space and collaborate. Don&#x27;t anchor an individual to either space.

How many people in one room makes open space? I work with 8-10 people in one room and found a moderate distraction till I&#x27;ve turn my desk to the wall and I have everyone behind me.

What about the distractions in peripheral vision? It is easier to suppress sound than moving people and hailing or “shaking” wooden floor.

It&#x27;s funny how in the past 20 years the VC funding rounds have gotten much larger while the work environments have gotten much worse.

This isn&#x27;t news. That&#x27;s why open offices are often so annoying. Good circumaural headphones are indispensable there.

But why? Its so much fun to place 10 sales people in an open space office and watch it burn!!

I understand people can be and are distractions but from my background I believe you should be able to perform your tasks regardless. While a legitimate issue, this sounds like searching for excuses. You perform in the environment you are in. Everyone else is suffering the same distractions.

For sure. But then again I just got a headphone.

NPR is a distraction in the house....

Or we can adapt to the real world where people around us necessarily have an effect on us - and learn to live in that world?<p>We don&#x27;t need to work in libraries, we need to just adapt.

I&#x27;m not really sure where the issue is?<p>I work in a noisy office. The only reason why my productivity goes down is because I&#x27;m nosy as shit and have all these opinions I want to share.

It&#x27;s better to work in somewhat noisy environment, where everybody can stare at your monitor, than commit suicide after two years of sitting in dark gloomy gray-walled cubicle without any natural light.<p>I honestly can&#x27;t understand people that can work in those depressing conditions.