Are there any strategies you can use to remain focused when working in a open plan environment?

Question

I work in a open plan office that houses about 50 to 60 people. It is mostly engineers at their desks working away, so it is a typical office environment. As you can imagine, sometimes, the noise and the distractions (visual and physical) can get in the way of focusing and doing work.

Sometimes, I try to get back focus by putting a set of headphones and listing to some music, or booking an meeting room for about an hour to work in private. However, these are sub-optimal.

What strategies are possible that I use to get focus back?

Answer 1

I was at a conference recently where Sven Peters from Atlassian held a presentation on the subject "7 things that make good teams great", presentation available here. One of the advices related to this topic. What they did was to create a "Do not disturb" time. The idea was to set aside a certain time, like 14:00 - 17:00 where no interruptions where allowed. Phones were turned off, email clients were shut down and a "Do not disturb" sign was hung in the hall/door. If a question came up that needed discussion, they took it to a separate room.

This allowed them the advantages of a team sitting together in the same room, but at the same time they got a chance to get into that important workflow.

Answer 2

We have mostly open seating too. I share your pain.

You didn't mention visual distraction, but that can be a big contributor too. If you have any leeway at all over this, getting any sort of visual barrier can help immensely. You might not realize how much people walking by in your peripheral vision can distract you until you cut it off.

The biggest problem for most people, in my experience, is the noise. If your objection to wearing headphones is that you're substituting the distraction of music for the distraction of the office, try noise-canceling headphones instead. Some of my coworkers use them and they say it doesn't hinder them the way wearing earplugs would.

If the problem with headphones is physical, not what's coming through them, then see how the people sitting nearby feel about white-noise generation. It doesn't do much for the loud conversations, but it raises the floor some on what's enough noise to be distracting in the first place.

These are only partial mitigations, not real solutions. I suspect the only real solution involves not doing open seating, but that's out of scope.

Answer 3

I have a nice set of custom in-ear headphones. Noise isolation without resorting to full-on noise-cancellation. The visual of employees wearing big headphones when visitors/clients come through is not a good thing (in some organizations).

To keep focus, I work in 25-minute blocks using a modified Pomodoro technique. It's an easy way to keep focus on specific tasks.

Answer 4

Headphones tend to make your ears hot, especially the closed-back type which is preferable in an office environment like mentioned. I also can only wear for a max of about an hour then it gets too uncomfortable which in itself is a distraction.

Also I tend to notice that the heat in these open plan environments is an issue as is the lighting. Right now it is nearly 25 degrees in our office and the humidity is extremely low at 25% making it feel hotter than it is. There are several overhead luminaries each with 3 or 4 fluorescent bulbs in them scattered every 2 or 3 feet of which I have had to ask to be switched off.

The lighting and air quality plays a massive part in your ability to concentrate for longer periods of time. I myself start to suffer from headaches in the office if i have concentrated for a prolonged period of time on something and I am convinced it is down to the lighting in the office as this does not happen to me when I work on my home computer.

The key is to take regular breaks to try and prevent wearing yourself out.

I find it is quite limiting what you can do in these circumstances. I too feel your pain.