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by BoorishBears 2318 days ago
I hear a conversation relevant to me and jump in, a conversation stops being relevant I jump out

That simple interaction has added tons of value for me over the last few years of open offices.

We have a very simple way to indicate you don't want to be interrupted, headphones or a flag

There's also tons of huddle rooms you can go into if you want to hunker down in quiet

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Everyone is different, some people feel switching from keyboard to mouse is a huge productivity drain and invest a lot in avoiding that transition

Maybe I'm just fortunate but it's never been an issue for me, people are pretty respectful of their coworkers where I've worked

2 comments

>...Everyone is different, some people feel switching from keyboard to mouse is a huge productivity drain and invest a lot in avoiding that transition

And they are likely wrong. People believe a lot of things about themselves that don't hold up to scrutiny. For example, people think they can multitask, etc and studies show that the aren't nearly as productive doing that as they think they are. People think that open offices help collaboration, but that is not what the research shows. As the article says:

>...As my colleague Jessica Stillman pointed out last week, a new study from Harvard showed that when employees move from a traditional office to an open plan office, it doesn't cause them to interact more socially or more frequently.

>Instead, the opposite happens. They start using email and messaging with much greater frequency than before. In other words, even if collaboration were a great idea (it's a questionable notion), open plan offices are the worst possible way to make it happen.

>Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage.

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-of...

And I have a way of indicating I do want to be interrupted: I leave my door open, I walk around the floor and look for other open doors, I move to the break room and have lunch with everyone else. It would bug the shit out of me if someone interjected themselves into a conversation I was having with someone else in my office.

That's the problem with open-floor-plan. It presumes "my need to know what you're saying/doing is more important than you even getting the opportunity to consent to me knowing."