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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

Coworkers discussing an issue I'm working on? Super distracting.

Discussing anything, for me. I never know if it's something I should be listening to or not. It might become important.

Now, since my solution is to shut my door, you'd think I could just say, "Yup, nothing matters" and ignore it. But it just doesn't work that way.

Right, it's whether or not I can put the conversation into a context. If not, it's just noise. If I can organize it or think about how accurate the information is, you have my un-un-divided attention.

Ideally, if it's something important to you, your coworkers should get your attention, or at least communicate the results of their discussion to you.

But I realize that this is supposing two idealized coworkers in a perfect vacuum.

In the open office environment I used to work in I got quite good at ignoring coworkers discussions about stuff they were working on. But as they crammed more and more people into the building, the probability of being within earshot of multiple discussions at once went up. I could sit in my chair getting angry when there was only two. When it got to three concurrent discussions I found I had to leave the vicinity. Some people could ignore it all. Impressive.

Someone mentions your name in passing? Good-bye productivity.

Yes, but I'd argue that would be an argument in favor of open offices - overhearing things that are relevant to you and/or you have knowledge of allows you to jump into the conversation and participate.

Yes, it does. God forbid I wanted to work on something and not keep listening to the five nearest conversations in case they are relevant to me, though. Why would I ever need to focus on anything at work?

> keep listening to the five nearest conversations in case they are relevant to me

What if the relevant conversation is the 6th nearest? Uh Oh!

My point is that open office doesn't really help because you can only really pay attention to the people relatively close to you and then only X conversations at a time anyway (for me, X is usually 1). Any other conversations happening anywhere else, I will miss.

Better would be a "remote work friendly" culture where discussions happen in slack or somewhere async like that. You can then check it when you're not trying to focus and you won't miss things simply because of proximity. Best of all, you don't get distracted from your actual work when you try to focus.

> Why would I ever need to focus on anything at work?

Exactly... better not do any work so you can pay full attention to what everybody else is doing, in case something is relevant to what you're not doing...

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