Ask HN: How do you concentrate in a noisy open office environment? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you concentrate in a noisy open office environment?

11 pointsphakding10 comments

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.

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.

How are you coping with it?

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

> 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...

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

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