The missing 5% does not include paid breaks but things like walking to the meeting room, going to the bathroom, checkout out projects or doing updates.
I absolutely loathe people who come to the office to chat as if we were close friends. I understand during breaks and lunch but not at the work desk. Constant out of topic chatter is the bane of any open office.
The days I love the most are those where I manage to enter "flow" in the morning and keep working for the entire day.
My greatest dream is to be able to completely shut down the signal from the ears to the brain, with the ability to restore it at will, of course.
This passive sound isolation means I can set some music at low volume and be completely isolated from the outside world.
Active isolation is rubbish because it lets voices through.
Here is what I use : Shure SE215 - https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/shure/se215#compar...
I consider that with those, I can work as well as I can alone at home. Otherwise, I also suffer from a very noisy office with constant laughter, anecdotes, movie and TV show reviews, people reading emails out loud to team mates etc. and can't ever enter the flow.
I am also a big fan of using fake babble noise to mask surrounding chatter. After about 5 minutes, the brain ignores all of it including the real chatter that is around you. Namely this https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/babbleNoiseGenerator.php or this https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/cafeRestaurantNoiseGenerat....