[gowld]

"I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance.

"He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.[...] But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."

--Richard Hamming, "You and Your Research " http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

[TeMPOraL]

Yes. But unfortunately, most of us aren't researchers, we are code monkeys, paid for contributions to company's project - contributions that mostly require concentration, not cross-domain research thinking. Note that when Hamming talks about working on "right" vs. "wrong" thing, he's talking about practical, mundane stuff vs. ground-breaking, world-class research. Not many of us here are paid for the latter, and as much as we do it, we probably do it outside work setting.

Even though, an "open-door" office is still infinitely better than no office. You get to focus in between visits, and the visits are less frequent simply because the other party needs to lift their butt and walk to your office.