
Ask HN: How do you concentrate in a noisy open office environment? - phakding
I have been working on this spaghetti code that is extremely hard to follow and needed to concentrate. After weeks of not being able to successfully finish what I needed to do, I finally worked both weekend days and was able to successfully finished coding.<p>I blame part of the difficulty on the open office without private space and then partly to the daily agile meetings that make it hard to just sit down and work at a problem for longer period at a time.<p>How are you coping with it?
======
lostdog
I acknowledge that the company decided to trade productivity for saving money
on office space, and then I accept that their choice limits me to 50% of my
usual working speed. Maybe I bring this up once, but if my managers dismiss my
concern, then I accept that the company wants to pretend that there is no
tradeoff. Accepting these things makes it a bit easier to not worry so much.

In your specific case? Let your manager know that this task requires more
focus than usual, and ask them if they would prefer that you book a conference
room for 4 days or WFH for 4 days in order to concentrate on it.

Honestly, I think the only way to stop this idiocy around open offices is for
all of us to get ADHD diagnoses, and to claim a private, quiet space as a
necessary accommodation for disability.

------
laurentl
Chiming in, although most has already been said:

\- noise-canceling headphones with ambiant noise / music. I like Focus@will
for this, some of their tracks are spot-ok for me.

\- a large slot of time in which I know I can work uninterrupted. Blocking 2
hours in my agenda does the trick, any shorter and I have trouble motivating
myself to get started.

\- no distractions. I close Slack and my email client, put my phone away or in
“don’t disturb” mode, close my slacking-off browser (I use FF for most of my
browsing, including mails/blogs/comic strips, and Chrome for a few websites
and when I need to specifically use Google; closing FF effectively leaves me
with stack overflow, trello and google). I also explained to my coworkers that
headphones on = don’t disturb me unless the building is on fire (and even then
let me finish writing my method first)

If getting large-enough blocks of time is an issue, you can point your manager
to Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s schedule by Paul Graham

------
otras
I used to work at a small startup in a coworking space that was shared with
other small startups. In one large room, there would be loud conversations,
sales calls, people coming into the office for meetings, people eating lunch
together at common tables, a beeping microwave at the kitchenette, and a lot
of movement as teams would go to and from meetings.

I found that a cup of coffee, 25 minute pomodoros, large meeting-free blocks
of time, noise-cancelling headphones, white noise, and lyric-less music was
the best combination for getting work done.

I also found that I was particularly productive in the off hours. I was taking
classes during the day and would sometimes stay until 7:30 or 8 to offset the
time spent at class. When nearly everyone left around 6 or 6:30, this meant
that there was a lull in the noise and activity around me as well as no Slack
messages or meetings, which was also very helpful for concentrating.

------
shoo
Can you raise your concerns at the office with your manager and team?

If you have a good manager and good team no one should care about when or how
you work, as long as you are productive and are available every now and again
(perhaps a couple of times a week) to sync up or answer questions.

E.g. if work is not able to provide an environment conducive to thinking for
large blocks of time, can you negotiate to work from home 2-3 days per week?

I have a similar problem at my work, I will be working from home today & will
aim to spend most of the day at home with email and slack off. Lots of
thinking and programming will happen.

When I am in the office it is sometimes possible to occupy a small meeting
room for hours. If I have an afternoon without meetings I tend to try to hide
in a room for noise & physical isolation from interruptions. Headphones and
lyric free instrumental music work for me too.

~~~
phakding
I could, but I work for a small company and there's no space for larger office
or installing cubicles. So I am not sure how that request will go.

------
rafiki6
Working from home mostly. I can't focus without a quiet and calm environment.
As with many things related to worker well being, companies just don't seem to
care about this. I honestly think that had it not been for the conviction and
determination of most software developers to do good work inspite of the
sometimes sisyphian conditions they work in, most companies would flop.

------
photonios
Have you discussed working from home a day or two a week? This does wonders to
my productivity.

In summer I often take my laptop and sit on a bench close to the office. Not
quiet, but a lot less distracting than the office.

------
afarrell
1) Earplugs underneath Bose QC-35s playing foreign-language or instrumental
music (Currently: The Free Raisins [1])

2) A target shooting cap with side-blinders to block visual noise. [2]

3) 9 hours of sleep a night.

4) 15 minutes run, 20 squats, 15 pull-ups, 50 push-ups in the morning.

5) A big dot-ruled notepad (like a bullet journal, but larger) to take
notes/diagrams on. This is like swap space to augment Working Memory.

6) The app Bear to take notes in, also to augment my Working Memory.

7) 12 minutes of breath meditation when I get frazzled, to de-allocate working
memory.

8) A silly 3-second physical ritual when I start or finish a subtask where I
slowly bring my hands together or apart and hum very quietly and picture
myself allocating or de-allocating memory.

9) Two external monitors side-by-side, so I can see interrelated code all at
once.

10) A convention for where on my monitors I tend to put things (roughly: db-
ish code to the left, browser-ish code to the right.) so I don’t have to store
that in working memory.

11) The app Anki to store flashcards to use Spaced Repetition more quickly
cement php knowledge into my long-term memory so that it is more effectively
“chunked” when I need to manipulate it in working memory.

12) The app SelfControl to block distracting websites from my laptop, which I
might otherwise reflecively visit to escape from the discomfort of dealing
with a frustrating task.

13) The self-narrative, “this is frustrating. This is uncomfortable. This is
worth it and I’m stronger than I think” to say to myself when I run into an
inscrutable php error.

14) An attitude of insisting on a clear _why_ for any task so that I know that
it actually matters to the people I work with.

15) Pushing meetings and interviews to beginning and end of day. My team does
its “standup” by posting {yesterday, today, blockers} to slack by 10:30am.

16) A team that is used to a clean, modular, and well-tested ruby codebase and
so is committed to incrementally chipping away at the mess of this externally-
acquired one.

17) Humor from team members in dealing with the um...interesting Developer
Experience design choices of this php web framework.

18) Occasional pair programming

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Out-Box-Free-
Raisins/dp/B00MHX16PQ](https://www.amazon.com/Out-Box-Free-
Raisins/dp/B00MHX16PQ)

[2] [https://www.intershoot.co.uk/acatalog/ahg-Anschutz-
Hat-325C-...](https://www.intershoot.co.uk/acatalog/ahg-Anschutz-
Hat-325C-294.html)

~~~
shoo
> A target shooting cap with side-blinders to block visual noise

Clever. One of my old colleagues used to bring a pair of ear muffs to work and
wear them at his desk for noise isolation. That job was in a research lab, not
an open plan programming sweatshop, so we all had cube farm partitions between
our desks. Such luxury in hindsight...

------
Lordarminius
Ask management for a quiet office. Any intelligent boss should understand the
need for this. Anything less is a sorry hack

