[t-rav]

I agree with your boss, 40h work weeks are the right way to do things. It's up to you to find the discipline to focus during the day to make it truly productive, not just feel productive.

Finding a good workflow for what you do is the hard part. A good workflow will include timeboxed sessions between 50-90 minutes with regular breaks after each session to keep your mind fresh and focused. A lunch session away from the PC, take a walk. And a firm commitment to sticking to a true 8h work day, the real mental strain happens when one tries to exceed this daily limit.

And most important factor required to only working an 8h day, is to keep the messaging and social media use to outside work hours. These nasty distractions will destroy productivity and focus likely causing you to "work" and +8h day. All the chatting and social media can wait until you are home, life will carry on. Every distraction you give into will cause you to take 20 minutes to rebuild focus.

[zimpenfish]

> messaging and social media [are] nasty distractions [that] will destroy productivity and focus

I have talkative people behind me, CTO to my left (on the phone a fair bit), sysadmins to my right (frequently desk-meeting with people), and a row of project managers over the minimal partition. Trust me when I say that there are far bigger problems for some people's focus than messaging and social media.

[cweagans]

A good, noise cancelling headset has been one of my best investments - and I'm not talking about one of the nice looking $50 models from Best Buy. I'm talking about something in the $200-300 price point - high end gaming headsets are particularly nice for a number of reasons, but anything will do.

It seems like a lot of money, but if it triples your productivity while in the office (and I'd recommend measuring it with something like RescueTime - if the headset doesn't help your productivity significantly, you can always return it), it's worth it.

[hanniabu]

Can confirm, always was skeptical when I heard people say this, but I borrowed my brothers for a week when he was on vacation and it was a game changer. Now I've become a proponent myself.

[zimpenfish]

I have in-ear Etymotics - they do an effective job of blocking most noise at a decent price point. But the combination of noises and movements and people banging laptops on the omnidesks and ... mean they're at best a limited stopgap.

[atmosx]

Maybe you should try working remotely if that is a possibility.

[zimpenfish]

It is but only really for 1 day a week at the moment.