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I work in an open office environment. Lots of cubicles, bright lights, noisy. The works. There is no privacy, no ability to shut a door and focus. I’m constantly interrupted by folks who want something or who are chatterboxes. By the end of the day my head is spinning. Why do we expect maximum productivity in this setup? Every day I feel like I’m doing my taxes in a high school cafeteria.
— Head Spinning
Doing your taxes in a high school cafeteria is a lovely rhetorical flourish and/or a very specific anxiety dream. Maybe you wrote this question from your desk in your privacy-free cacophony of an open-office environment, in which case your creativity isn’t suffering from not having a door to shut. Maybe you wrote it once you got home, realizing that now that your shift in the cubicle circus is over, it’s time to actually do work.
That need to do actual work somewhere else is one of the main problems with the modern, open-office environment, according to Nir Eyal, the author of “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.”
“The dream is you can come up with creative new ideas spontaneously,” he said of wall-less workspaces, “where fortuitous interactions with colleagues can lead to interesting results, as you’re walking to go get a coffee.”
The reality, though? “For most of us, what we have to do is do our damn work,” Mr. Eyal said. And that can mean that the office is for meetings, and your own home, after office hours, is for work, which is not fair.
Mr. Eyal is one of several experts I called in search of some concrete tips — for you, for me, for the many people I thought might recognize their own work situations in the one you have described.
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