Office noise bothers some people more than others
bbc.com
bbc.com
There's no "quiet" room. The meeting rooms cost a few hundred and need to be pre-booked. My home environment isn't a quiet refuge either. Beside a busy street, more flatmates than their should be and a room beside the kitchen which is used late in the night.
The only quiet I can wrangle is a few hours at a local library on weekends before the kids come in for the reading and writing sessions.
The noise has gotten bad enough that I'm considering quitting my job and running away to a small town.
Yes, you can use noise cancelling headphones but:
1. They're uncomfortable for long periods
2. They don't really block all the noise and you live in anxiety waiting for that one blaring ringtone to squeeze through
3. I find it difficult to concentrate with them on. It feels like a heavy, constricting object squeezing my temples.
No solutions, just a rant.
EDIT: Thinking about it some more on the transit to work this morning. I believe the constant battering to my senses has made me more irritable. I tend to avoid my flatmates and reply with dismissive grunts and hand waves. Ditto for people in the shared space. Small things upset me even more. A failed build pipeline or a new Jira request will infuriate me. I've been countering this with more breaks from the screen to take walks around the office block.
There are less connection drops, no voice announcements like "noise cancellation activated" just a discrete blip, the transition between modes is quite smooth, and the "pass through mode" aka transparency mode feels like you're not wearing anything. And I do find the ANC quite excellent, there's a much less reduced "ringing" you get from other NC gear (could be due to better algorithms, chip, or the mic on the inside that processes noise inside your ear canal). Overall one of the best purchases I've made.
Is this one of those "we work" type of environments where everything is rented piece meal?
NC headphones aren't designed to block all noise, only repetitive noise, basically white noise. Other noises, like ringtones, actually are louder or easier to hear on many models of NC headphones, as is speech around you. Noise-cancellation's purpose is to attenuate white noise, such as the drone of your office A/C, or your airplane's engines. It's not meant to block anything else, and if your headphones do, it's because they're also acoustically isolating (e.g., they have bin "cans" over your ears physically blocking noise, but that has nothing to do with NC).
Which is why I don't use noise cancelling headphones, instead you need passive blocking of noise, ie: material to dampen the sound from the office.
Sure sucks though.
Of course there’s still distractions every 30 minutes, but at least they’re not noise related.
If you actually have something that jarring out of your control, I would say you have a bigger problem then just "noise".
This seems like a drastic measure - do you require complete silence or is your workplace that noisey?
I wear the WorkTunes, plus ear plugs, plus I play cafe or brown noise through the headphones, plus I sometimes put on music. If that hadn't worked, I was going to go insane from the sound of the keyboard next to me.
Also, as other users have pointed out, noise-canceling just counteracts constant noise like machine hums, and the like. It won't do anything about human speech because it 1.v aries constantly and 2. takes place across a large spectrum of sound. Noise-canceling headphones can adapt but it's always going to lag behind speech or other non-constant sounds like ringtones.
The only recourse there is to use noise-canceling + blast music/pink noise/rain sounds, whatever.
Excessive by most standards but I (almost) have to have this when working in an open office.
The only minor issues is that moist starts to accumulate in the ear after a while, which I guess isn't a big deal.
If there were an alternative, we'd all run with you. There isn't, though. Something to think about when they say there's supposedly a "talent shortage" and they're having trouble "recruiting top performers".
Or you can take a massive pay cut, tank your career, and go live in the middle of nowhere.
Sounds great.
The other big thing is the lack of job opportunities in smaller cities, solvable via working remotely but still relatively uncommon, particularly for new hires.
Working remotely is an option here (if you go this route, look for a 100% remote company though).
It still sucks and I hate working, but it's the least bad path that I could find.
You can easily make 150k in this environment, where a 250k home is 3k sqft in a good neighborhood. I'm making quite a bit more in the management/director track.
Considering the ancestor comment and how the situation seems to weight on that person, I would advise to try and find a better situation, because from personal experience, when you start grinding yourself for a job postitve outcomes become very unlikely.
Meanwhile, I predict the new fad will be airline offices, because who wouldn't want all the fun and adventure of flying at the office? They'll all be sitting in economy class seats and working off tray tables, while the person in front of them leans their seat back and has loud conversations on speakerphone. And it'll be family friendly, too, with every day being "bring your screaming child to work day."
I really want one of those egg shaped sound-blocking chairs for work. I read in a wing-back chair and it's amazing how much sound deadening it provides.
I work in a coworking space. They’re not quite comfortable enough to wear continuously all day. If you take periodic breaks, and remove them when you go to the bathroom, get coffee, take a walk, that’s enough make it so you can keep them in while working at your desk.
Breaks are good so I don’t really count this as a negative.
They even perform well in super noisy coffee shops.
There is also the additional side effect that I have a reasonably large house for the same price that I would have paid for a small room in London.
There’s no right or wrong answer here though. Some people might prefer a shorter commute and I can’t blame them for that. For me, I’d rather have a longer commute but live in a larger house in nicer neighbourhood; somewhere quiet to bring my family up.
The added bonus is most IT jobs these days offer remote working so I don’t have to travel into London five days a week if I didn’t want to. Though sometimes the commute itself can be enjoyable because it’s a good chance to catch up on reading or personal programming projects (etc) since it’s 90 minutes of uninterrupted time away from the family.
This would maybe make the headphone issue more bearable (lightweight - much less uncomfortable for long periods), and the goal isn't to block out all sound, but rather to give your mind something else to focus on from an auditory standpoint. I find, personally, that having a musical anchor makes the task of mentally filtering out the noise much easier; I end up subconsciously following the melody and grooving with the rhythm a bit, but because there's no lyrics, it doesn't pull me out of the task at hand.
Everyone's different, so what works for me might not work for you, but maybe give it a shot for a week and see how effective it is. Worth a try at least.
Therefore you must also adapt.
Therefore it falls to yourself to improve your environment.
This may be a reasonable view for a large company, but they're talking about their experience at a three-person startup. At that scale if there's something that needs to be different you have to step up and change it yourself, and set the culture for the company you're building.
An employee cannot change this, only suggest.
There’s too much light in my eyes, and dark glasses are uncomfortable. Well, have you tried shining another light at your face? Maybe a different color of light would help.
Thank you for that.
There is an analogy to light that actually applies. Imagine a small green LED in your field of vision that flashes now and then. Might be distracting. But now imagine the room is 100x brighter than that small green LED. You might be unable to perceive the LED anymore. (However, if the problem is, as you state, that there is "too much light", then, yeah, adding more light wouldn't help unless you could somehow create destructive interference.)
Whether all this actually works for a specific person is a different matter. I personally hate listening to white noise, so that wouldn't help me. Perhaps other kinds of noise could work.
I sleep to brown noise (have done so for the past 8 years -- so this is not a fad thing for me), and I use a different brown noise with headphones at work to help me concentrate in a noisy office environment.
I use Noisli profiles to generate these noises, but any number of apps will do the job.
I won't claim it works for everyone, but this combination works very well for me.
p.s. Ear plugs at work also work amazingly well. Low tech and effective.
Just an FYI, while this is basically true for neurotypical people, for some people (for example those with ADHD or who might be on the autism spectrum), there's difficulty filtering, so this ends up just adding cognitive load rather than accomplishing a filtering effect.
To use a dumb visual analogy, imagine you tried to hide some carpet stains by putting another rug over it. Some people can partially see through rugs, and so now they have to deal with the rug _and_ the carpet stains.
Of course this stuff is still worth trying out, ultimately a lot of these kinds of things are deeply personal, and it's pretty easy to try.
One of the most popular white noise machines is the Marpac Dohm Classic, which many people (including myself) would vouch for.
https://www.amazon.com/Marpac-Classic-White-Noise-Machine/dp...
It's a fan in a box, with a certain shape so that when the fan is spinning it ends up generating a nice sound.
Thanks for the info
What “theory” is this? Because I’ve tried it (not by choice) in practice, many times, over the decades, and never found it to work at all. I’m genuinely curious why people think it could ever work, when empirically it does not.
Theoretically the brain will adapt to working while hanging 100’ in the air, too. I adapt to height fairly quickly and don’t mind working up in the air. Many people apparently do, and no amount of telling them that it’s “theoretically” possible will make them productive workers there.
It seems patently unfair that modern offices picked the one type of distracting sensory input that happens to be my kryptonite.
I damaged my hearing trying to have enough sound to drown out the triggering sounds around me. (misophonia got a lot worse during working in open office too)
What kills productivity in an office environment is actually signals that cut through that noise. Phones ringing, conversations between coworkers, printers whirling to life, someone opening a cellophane wrapper and chewing on a candy, etc. Most of these things aren't useful, but they're distracting, because your brain is tuned to constantly be on the lookout for new audio signals to shift your focus to. This is probably a survival instinct, as becoming aware of an approaching predator is important to avoid becoming lunch. In an office, the goal isn't thus to add more noise, but to mask the noise, so that it is less distracting.
Music is not "more noise," but more like a big, obvious beacon of focus. You might think of it like a controlled, intentional distraction. It's juuuust enough of an audio signal that your mind can keep its focus in one place, and just barely loud enough that when your coworkers phone rings, it isn't quite so jarring. That tiny, tiny little adjustment in the relative weight of the signals can make all the difference in the world, preventing you from unnecessary context switches throughout your day and helping you to maintain flow while working on a complex task.
It's not perfect, no. Obviously the perfect environment would be 100% in the control of the worker, who could dictate the noise level and comfortable temperature and everything else on a personal level. But, well, the real world isn't perfect, and it can be good to have options. :)
Ive got in-ear noise cancelling headphones and they're amazing. I often come up for air to hear a debate going on not far from me. Because they're noise cancelling I can set the volume lower than I would otherwise.
Edit: I play music I know well so it doesn't distract. My wife uses rain/wave sounds. White noise would work for others.
Noise cancelling AirPods and gentle background sounds may provide a smooth enough waveform to be ignored, while stopping the increase in audio sensitivity, and smooth out “spikes” of surrounding noise.
Perception of sound is not just some cumulative scalar, that view is far too simplistic
They probably believe it because it works for them. Because it works for me.
I suggest listening to one of the following:
1. Music you don't already know because you can't hum along to them and won't get distracted by the lyrics (Spotify radios can be great, though they get repetitive if you listen to them a lot)
2. Classical music is great if not too tired otherwise it puts you to sleep
3. Deep / underground house like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz26ohrCNIY&t=2s great if you're cranking at a quantitative problem or coding
4. Instrumental jazz to me is the midpoint between the intensity of listening to house and the absolute serenity of classical music, but ymmv
(of course it helps if one likes this kind of thing, which I do)
It's still better than the incessant jabbering of phone meetings and other office noise.
Some days, the noise puts me on the verge of another breakdown. And no one in management cares.
Hearing protection always talks about attenuation in terms of dB(A) (A-weighting being a sensible thing to do when measuring perceived sound levels). 30dB(A) is a significant attenuation (logarithmic scale, don't forget). 35dB(A) is quite an improvement over 30dB(A).
For long-term use, ear plugs aren't great. But ear defenders can be had cheaply which will work well; I know of some people who use ear defenders atop in-ear active-noise-cancelling headphones as a double-whammy.
The correct answer is to work/sleep in quiet places, though, but I realise this is fast becoming a luxury.
Note that there is a considerable amount of technique in using earplugs correctly. You don't just shove them toward your ear and hope for the best. Normally, they are rolled tightly, and then inserted fairly deeply into the ear canal, where they then expand. Have someone demonstrate, watch a video on it, or read the instructions very closely.
https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/all-3m-products/~/All...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/3M-1100-Foam-Plugs-200-Pair/dp/B008MV... [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BYAP7I
That might mean a small town, or it might mean a $3000/mo+ studio apartment. How do you get to having enough cash flow to afford that space? Can you nix the hotdesking membership? Worst case, can you bail on the startup and join a megacorp?
How will that help with the noise problem?
There is a fair chance that your core annoyance is something else.
That is, if you somehow got a perfectly sounds proofed workroom of your own, you would after a while realize that you're still irritable, find it difficult to concentrate etc.
Often, we don't want to face our real problems and assign discomfort to some external thing we have no power over. "If only X was gone, I'd be happy". But when X disappears little changes.
People desiring quiet places or isolation to think isn't a particularly new phenomenon, so there's a good chance that this is the core problem.
That said there's a lot of things that can add stress and in isolation this one particular one might not be too bad. But then it becomes an optimization problem, there are many sources of stress that are hard or difficult to solve but the work environment is low hanging fruit and easy to solve so we focus on that.
This is why touring the office is an important part of a job interview, the places with a good environment will be happy to show you around. Fortunately some companies are so clueless they'll even advertise their modern open plan office, you don't even need to apply to those.
I commend you on the achievement of reaching a state of mental nirvana that allows you to concentrate equally in chaotic and quiet environments - very impressive. I would venture to say that the vast majority of the population will never reach this state.
Since he's also permanently annoyed outside work, non work factors fit the data.
On the opposite note, I can perform extremely well in noisey environments if I am enjoying what I am doing - like I am able to just tune it out.
Circumstance and other stressors may be a main factor, or it could just be the noise. I imagine it really depends on the person.
Long story short, a workspace has to cater to multiple different people - shocking, I know.
Consider alternatives. Libraries can be excellent work environments, if quiet. And talk to staff about getting a quiet area -- many libraries are tending increasingly to "conversations allowed", which can be annoying.
I'd find lack of access to my own frequently used materials, notes, papers, etc., to be frustrating, though.
Many academic libraries (ranging from community college, to public or some private colleges and universities) have quiet spaces.
Off-hours / off-season spaces may be findable, though that can get creative.
I'm rarely out without a few pair of high-efficiency earplugs myself. These can block much (though not all) noise quite effectively. You'll want the ones which block speech specifically, not just high-frequency sounds.
I know in some countries there are dedicated study spaces which you can pay to access. That would indeed be nice. Co-working spaces could have served this role except many play up the social aspects and have open office configurations. They do have private office spaces but they are expensive.
This is far better than the whole totally enclosed ear-muffs + disposable ear buds approach (which does work but creates an uncomfortable pressure on your ears):
https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/audiovideo/he...
> Scenario 2: You find yourself at a popular new restaurant, where loud music and reverberant acoustics make it difficult to hold conversations (even if you don’t have hearing loss). Your hearables are monitoring your mental effort, again by tracking your brain waves, determining when you are struggling to hear. They then appropriately adjust the signal-to-noise ratio and directionality of their built-in mics to make it easier for you to understand what people nearby are saying. These hearables can distinguish your friends from the patrons you wish to ignore, based on audio fingerprints that the device previously collected.
Some of these are still in development or super expensive.
In terms of some practical solutions today, there's a brand called IQbuds ($300-$500) which use a similar strategy and can be custom-molded to fit your ears (just like a hearing aid) so they can be worn over a full workday:
Recently.
Like...in the last two hours recently.
looks longingly out the window...terminal makes a noise, snaps back to reality, sighs heavily, continues patching
I'm in an open-office now and use light over-ear headphones (I found the Bose Bluetooth ones good) and listen to white noise (by playing with the frequencies you can usually drown out what's bothering you). Of course my preference would be a quiet space, but this white-noise strategy has worked well for several years now.
Personally I use my trusty Bose over ear noise cancelling headphones when i’m with a customer that has loud open plan offices. I’ve had my Bose headphones for almost a decade now. Today I use them even when I’m at my office which is quiet But because its open plan I still get distracted and we are working on acoustics however most of us are deep thinking engineers and we have a liberal work from home policy so our work environment is good enough to get stuff done.
I would talk to someone you have value to the startup and people don’t even think about this till its too late.
1) Sony XM3 headphones. They are the 2nd most comfortable after the Bose headphones and have the best NC. So far, nothing you haven't done before.
2) High quality foam earplugs. I have the Mack's Ultra Soft plugs, with 32 decibel noise reduction rating. Anything with 27 decibel reduction or above should be good enough though. You may need to alternate between a few brands and variants before you find one that's comfortable enough to go many hours with.
3) Pink Noise. Play it quite softly so that you can barely even hear it at all with the plugs in. It helps to drown out the remaining external noises that come through without registering in your brain as extra noise itself (which is why I play pink noise instead of other suggestions such as calming music). I like this one: https://youtu.be/8SHf6wmX5MU
I combine all 3 for the nosiest areas like studying in a busy cafe, but you won't usually need the whole stack.
I worked in an office where they put speakers in the ceiling to radiate such noise. It was odd because no notice was given and it just happened. For the first week or two, we all thought it was airflow noise from the HVAC system until we noticed speakers in the ceiling.
It was effective, though. It did reduce the apparent noise, though our 15 person office wasn't terribly loud to begin with. An interesting side effect was that conversations, when they did occur, got louder because the noise made low volume conversations difficult to hear.
so, uh, my own solution? requires money, but is probably cheaper than giving up the big city wages (depending on your situation and remote-work opportunities.)
1. giant yellow passive hearing protectors at work with soft music.
Personally, I still kinda suspect that active noise canceling is just placebo. (I'm joking a little here, but passive noise dampening is a thousand times better than active, if you ask me.) Give me passive muffs. You still need some soft music, or your ears will adjust, but getting hearing protection earmuffs with bluetooth means the music can be soft. The other advantage is that nothing says "Don't bother me, I'm working" like giant yellow industrial earmuffs. (I like the '3m worktunes connect' - not exactly audiophile grade, but even with really soft music, it makes the office silent )
MMm. you say you find headphones 'heavy and constricting' - perhaps I should take back my advice. the passive earmuffs are both heavy and constricting. I find it kind of comforting? but if pressure is a problem, you probably won't like them.
2. at home: my own room with a solid door with weather stripping and walls with offset studs and triple pane windows. (weather stripping is super cheap and helps a lot with interior noise. A solid door is rather more expensive, and probably helps more, but as for relief per dollar, weather stripping is hard to beat)
Key here, I think, is that construction is more important than location.
3. I show up and leave work late. I get mornings (well, afternoons) for talking with people, and lots of evening time mostly by myself for actual work.
#2. is obviously pricey, but without it, I'd go insane. Personally, I find newer, well-built apartments to have less noise than older single-pane suburban housing. (but then, I think I have a lower tolerance for traffic noise than most; the neighbor warming up his junker in the morning always super bothered me when I was living in an older SFH. some people are okay with that.)
I've talked about building a sleeping box with noise dampening, but... eh, just paying the money for an apartment with proper noise dampening is doable to me.
Here's my solution: I listen to relaxing hip-hop in a language I don't understand, through a normal pair of Airpods or other non-noise-cancelling headphones. In my case, this is usually MC Solaar - nice calm delivery, rhythms, and music, and in French, which I barely understand. I think this music is better for me than more regular sounds (or noise cancelling) as the variety means that any noises that do make it through, don't really register. Really helps me zone out and concentrate.
I know this sounds really weird (I almost never tell anyone about this IRL!) but it works for me. YMM(definitely)V :)
(Can I also make another observation? Reading about your irritability with flat-mates and colleagues sounds like you're an introvert, who's just not getting any/enough solitary time. If so, this is a bigger fundamental problem that you need to address - headphones and French hip-hop won't help :) Maybe you should focus on finding a way to build regular quiet and solitude into your schedule, for the sake of your relationships, mental state, and well-being?)
(1) Typical of this group: mathematician, engineer, scientist, writer (2) project managers, C-class executives, sales, support
It is as unfair to ask a Concentrator to work in a noisy environment as it is unfair to ask a Communicator to work in silence. However, if one puts both in an environment together (which is often the case) the Ccommunicator always "wins" by suppressing the Concentrator's ability to work through the mere act of performing their duties.
Do you know of any empirical studies that support the generalization?
This was part of a presentation I gave in the early 2000s, literally begging my management not to destroy productivity by moving our company from cubicles to an "open floor plan/hot desk" environment. I wanted to boil down the issue to its essence and this dichotomy was the product. As others have pointed out, the real answer is that people work on a continuum, but my point is that if we are going to pursue a change in environments, we should attempt to understand the nature of work and strive for an ideal. Why implement a "solution" that only works for one end of the concentrator/collaborator scale?
In my case, implementation of the hot-desk program proceeded anyway, and I left the company soon after. Life is too short to be treated with such lack of consideration. The company has since laid off 10s of thousands of employees and sold off most of their once-glittering R&D campus buildings, bulldozing others. Only a thin shell of what used to be persists.
I regret that I did not ask a rhetorical question such as the following: "if you had to re-take a college mathematics exam in eight hours, and your continued employment depends on a passing score, where would you go to study? A quiet room, or a busy place like the food court at the shopping mall or a bus terminal?" but I realize the executive Q&A sessions were merely a show trial, not a true inquiry. The decisions were made well in advance.
Do you ever wonder how much better could you perform in a non-distracting environment?
However a TV is entirely different than people being around me. There's noise from various directions, distances, and volumes—not to mention the awareness of people being near which always heightens my awareness of a situation, distracting from what I am trying to focus on.
At work, headphones off, my brain is subconsciously trying to keep me informed about the noise around me in the workplace, so that I can respond if needed (generally I'm not) not helpful, brain. :P
It's the difference between sitting next to a busker in the street for 8hrs per day and listening to recorded music on your phone.. in that it's a _huge_ difference.
One solution for this is to have many easily accessible conference rooms, including one-person rooms for calls, with sufficient soundproofing that you can't hear such calls from the nearest cube outside them.
It's usually older and/or more introverted people who complain about the open-office craze, but there's absolutely no shortage of programmers who will strongly defend it.
Every single time this topic comes up on an online discussion like this, there's plenty of people like him saying the exact same thing. And I have to partially agree with him: most engineers I work with do not have a problem with these offices. It's only a few.
Also every survey I can find says that employees don't want open office layouts by a large margin. There's clearly something else going on beyond autistic programmers complaining.
I'm not a fan of open offices either, but I've worked in a bunch of different places over the years, and he's right on many points. There aren't many places left that don't have open offices of some kind, and I have not met many people who complained about them. Usually, I'm the biggest complainer. I would take surveys with a grain of salt; of course complainers like me are going to be happy to voice their opinions in surveys like this, while other people probably don't bother taking the survey. I also find that my younger coworkers seem to really enjoy the open layouts. At my current workplace where I work in a closed lab, the complaint is about the lack of windows, not the noise or the lack of privacy. Some people will make comments about certain teams having meetings that are extremely loud, or about how quiet the lab is when those teams are in their meeting, so there does seem to be some desire for a little more quietness, but these same people have no trouble having a fairly noisy conversation while people are trying to work. In my view, Americans are just loud and extroverted in general, and this extends to the current workers in this field.
They're getting modded down because the argument is: people don't complain to me about open offices, therefore everyone is happy with open office layouts except people with autism.
> There aren't many places left that don't have open offices of some kind
Depends on what you mean by open office. Not many places have dedicated private offices for each developer, but cubicles, small team rooms, temporary private spaces etc... are very common.
>I have not met many people who complained about them. Usually, I'm the biggest complainer. I would take surveys with a grain of salt; of course complainers like me are going to be happy to voice their opinions in surveys like this, while other people probably don't bother taking the survey.
So take surveys with a grain of salt, but not anecdotal evidence? It's much more likely that you're suffering from selection and confirmation bias than it is that every survey I can find online is. We're not talking about online polls open to anyone, but randomized samples. Here's one where they hired an independent research agency that randomly sampled over 4k adults in the US. 66% of the office workers want a closed office layout. That's a huge margin--big enough to overcome any minor issues with the survey. And definitely stronger evidence than 2 people on hacker news saying that people don't complain to them.
https://files.getroom.com/ROOM-2018-Open-Office-Woes-Report....
> In my view, Americans are just loud and extroverted in general, and this extends to the current workers in this field.
You are definitely suffering from confirmation bias here.
Also basically every study that has been done on open office layouts shows that it's detrimental to business and moral.
> The real reason people tend to dislike open plan is screen privacy.
Still going to call citation needed on you tho. I've heard many people complain in person, and this wasn't a big reason I heard. The last place I worked, almost every single person spent a lot of money on noise cancelling headphones.
Like any strongly held belief, you're going to find like-minded people and convince yourself that you're a majority. And, especially, we're unhappy and that means we want to justify our unhappiness, and if we were the majority we'd obviously be justified.
But I think all these things are true at the same time:
1. There is a minority of people who are genuinely miserable in open offices.
2. A sizable group of people dislike specific things (too much chatter, clicking pens, etc.) but they don't think about it much.
3. A plurality are oblivious to the noise and are having fun at work.
4. And open offices decrease everyone's ability to focus and are no better for collaboration than any other design.
5. The raison d'etre of an office is to get work done and silence facilitates that.
So we're a minority, but regardless there's a solid case against open offices.
I'm also strange in other ways. Music does nothing at all for me and I have a really hard time remembering things that are spoken to me (but have an almost photographic memory of anything I read). I suspect I have some sort of auditory defect that all of this is wrapped up in.
gonna have to stop you right there mate
In fact I will flit between those two extremes in any given day based purely on the work I'm doing. eg if I'm doing management administration then I tend to be more chatty because it's lots of small jobs that often require coordinating other people vs when I'm solving engineering problems and I just want a quiet controlled environment.
Since then, I have worked in cubicles or desks in open-plan offices.
Now, almost 10 years later, as a (small) team lead at a relatively prestigious company, I realize that I may never have my own office again in my professional career. This thought is oddly depressing.
When I really need to concentrate on a task, I take a portion of the morning and do the task at home, in my home office. I am very aware this is not something most people can do (both because I have the authority to just not come in on a given morning, and because I can afford to have a home office in my own home which is mostly silent). Many on my team do the same thing, possibly accepting that the office is a fundamentally distracting environment. I worry what effects this may have on younger team members who don't have access to a home office.
I do see the benefits of open-plan offices (for one, being at work feels less alienating), but I think we may have lost something important in the transition.
The other type of noise that really affects my ability to concentrate is loud whistling that people will sometimes do as they walk down the halls, again reflecting off all the surfaces in the office, which my brain seems to involuntarily interpret as "Hey! Hey! Hey, hey look! Hey!" and constantly resets my focus as though someone had just tapped me on the shoulder every few seconds.
When I'm not trying to concentrate hard on something I tend not to be bothered by even these noises - but when working it can feel almost like being physically harassed. I suppose this is a form of misophonia, but it is extremely context-dependent and at other times I enjoy the diversity of sounds (including the whistling).
i work with radio equipment, and one of my coworkers always tests voice transmission by whistling into the mic. i do fine with noise but that one gets my goat a little bit.
What really gets to me is loud and furious typing. Otherwise most office noise doesn’t bother me. But that’s mostly because I’m surrounded by colleagues who I get along with.
I can either be the asshole who doesn't care, and subsequently be freed from my anxiety, or live in anxiety but at least not be as much of an asshole.
Most of the time people tell me they didn't even realize I was typing with a non-standard keyboard.
One thing they didn't mention that gets me is not related to noise. It's privacy. I have an extremely strong innate need for privacy and I'm not sure where that comes from. I never liked sharing personal details or preferences (like favourite bands), and the idea of someone watching me work just makes me uneasy.
It's not even a fear of being caught out avoiding work. I'll happily sit there and read HN in full sight. It's just off-putting and distracting and makes it hard to do real work so anything that takes my attention away will win.
My current workplace has low-walled shared cubicles which is at least better than the big no-barrier desks I see at startups. Barely.
I don't even like to have conversations about more-than-superficial topics in crowded places. If a restaurant seats me across the table from my dining partner but elbow-to-elbow with random other diners at parallel tables, I will hate it and never return.
I think there's this interplay between privacy and intimacy. I don't want to give too much to strangers but want to get close when I decide to.
Isn't this nearly universal? Aside from some exhibitionists no one speaks about that "feeling of being watched" in a positive light and there are all sorts of social norms developed around how long it's appropriate to stare at someone, the people that stray beyond these norms are generally labeled as creepy.
There's also the extra visual stimulus of people moving around, headphones don't solve either of these problems.
FWIW it's not the idea of being watched by someone in particular that bothers me, it's just that I feel much more comfortable in a room with a door closed. It's more of a security/safety/comfort thing.
This is why you might like the 'noise' produced by you voluntarily as in e.g. playing a 'busy office noise ambience' from YouTube through your headphones or speakers , while hating the 'real' office noises around you or even the same track played by your coworker.
Then someone bought the empty lot next door and started building a house. I ordered these 3M X5A earmuffs for $30. They are remarkably effective and proved to be a terrific investment.
https://smile.amazon.com/3M-Peltor-Over-Earmuffs-X5A/dp/B00C...
Do you have a recommendation for headphones with similar usage? Mine are about to go out (left headset) and I know I’ll be in a need of new ones soon.
1. Noise masking - covering the external sound with another sound.
2. Noise blocking - sealing the ears so the external sound doesn't get through.
3. Noise canceling - active noise canceling technology which listens to external sound with a microphone and adds an inverted waveform to cancel it.
I use all three and they all work depending on the scenario and my preferences at the moment. The most effective noise-masking type is in-ear buds because they also provide noise blocking. I have an earlier version similar to these https://smile.amazon.com/Etymotic-Research-Noise-Isolating-E.... They are very effective and provide great sound. However, noise masking is usually only a shorter-duration option for me if I'm trying to work or otherwise focus because sounds tend to distract me even if it's ambient music I like or white/pink noise. Thus, trading an uncontrolled soundscape for a controlled one isn't always ideal for me. Some people also find in-ear styles less comfortable due to inserting in the ear canal.
For noise-blocking I use the X5A over-ear muffs that I linked above when at my home office desk. The upsides are high effectiveness and they come on and off quickly compared to in-ear plugs. Downsides are that they are too bulky to travel and over longer periods the clamping pressure can on occasion grow slightly fatiguing. This can be mitigated by bending the joining U-arm that goes over the top to stretch it a bit wider, possibly at the cost of slightly less noise-blocking. Long-duration comfort will depend on your particular ear and head shape but they work well for me. A general downside of over-ear style muffs is they can get in the way when sleeping if you're a side-sleeper.
When away from my desk I use foam in-ear plugs for noise-blocking because they are small and light. The biggest downside is that they take a bit of time to "install" properly for full effectiveness. They need to be compressed into a smaller tube shape by rolling them tightly between the fingers and then quickly inserted deep into the ear canal. Once in place they will slowly re-expand blocking external sound very effectively. If they are inserted properly, they can take a bit of time and care to remove. This is because they can create an air-tight vacuum seal in the ear canal and yanking them out quickly can be unpleasant.
I've tried many different brands of foam in-ears and these are the highest-rated for noise reduction (NRR 33) https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IL9MRLC. They are also comfortable for me but this will vary by person. My wife has smaller or more sensitive ear canals and prefers smaller in-ear plugs. That link has several sub-types and I keep a pair of both the plain and the corded type in my backpack when on the go. The plain type is good for sleeping whether on an airplane or when I check into a hotel at 3a and the last room they have sounds like it's inches from a highway, railyard, rock concert or airport runway. The corded type is easier/quicker to remove because they have the cord to pull on but the downside is the cord can occasionally conduct a bit of noise via vibration into the ear when it brushes against things. This style also has the benefit of the bright blue cord providing a visual cue to others that I have something in my ears and may not hear them if they talk to me. This is good when I'm in an open environment, coffee shop or restaurant. Unlike over-ears, in-ears also give me the flexibility to vary the amount of noise reduction by changing how deeply I seat them.
Finally, there are the active noise canceling variety. This type is especially well-suited for environments with constant background noise that's not overly loud, for example, airplane engines and office hubbub. I find them somewhat less effective at reducing loud primary sources like a person talking loudly next to you. They still will reduce the noise substantially but usually not eliminate it. Often the combination of ambient music, soundscapes or pink noise on low volume plus the active noise canceling is sufficient but not always. I have these https://smile.amazon.com/Bose-718840-0010-QuietComfort-Cance... and they work extraordinarily well. Downsides are that they are wired and have a small battery at the plug end of the cord. This is because active noise canceling requires constant DSP cycles and is thus power-hungry.
I haven't yet added wireless earbuds with active noise canceling (ANC) to my options. As of today, these tend to either have shorter battery life, less effective ANC or be high-cost. This is an example of good but expensive https://smile.amazon.com/Sony-WF-1000XM3-Industry-Canceling-.... I think the wireless ANC tech is still evolving too quickly to sink a lot of money in a pair. Also, I've previously misplaced a pair of cheap wireless earbuds which makes me more cautious. The MediaTek chipset that Sony uses is new and quite powerful but, fortunately, starting to be offered to other manufacturers (under MediaTek subsidiary's name) so I expect next year we'll see some of the well-regarded Chi-Fi vendors with sub-$100 options. I do have cheap (~$40) Chi-Fi wireless earbuds (non-ANC) that have excellent quality when external noise reduction isn't a priority.
In case you're not aware, there are also specialty earplugs designed to attenuate certain frequencies more than others. These are targeted primarily at performing musicians and concert-goers and often marketed under the term "Acoustic Filters" https://smile.amazon.com/s?k="acoustic+filters". These were previously quite expensive and could involve custom-fitted molds but prices have come down recently. I highly recommend using these when at concerts or clubs. Hearing loss sucks and is easily mitigated.
Hope that helps.
Add a very gentle 30db pink noise with Etymotic and I don't hear 99% of the noises.
Best protection so far - X5A along with Etymotic under them and pink noise playing.
I want to try some ANC pairs but they're quite expensive and I've read it only works for constant noises. Do they work in an office/coworking environment with people chatting everywhere?
Colleagues next to me eating hard carrots, chips, anything crunchy. Or Chinese expats who slurp their soup and coffee (normal in their culture; rude in mine)... it drove me crazy.
The singing one drove me insane at my last job. An office lady walked around the office, she would loudly and falsely be singing nonsense like: "LALALALA POMPOM PIEWPIEW LALA" (verbatim) and sometimes fragments from pop songs, in her broken English: "I CAN'T GET NO SASIFICTION LALAPOMPOM".
I wanted to murder her. No joke. If I could get away with it, I would have. The anger was physical and deep. Rage and disgust was the feeling, and I felt personally attacked. It felt like a "fight or flee" instinct, where I'd prefer to fight.
Many angry looks thrown at her (not just from me!) didn't make any difference. She must've felt like she was a rock star or something.
On my last day in the office I mentioned her to the rest of the office. Turns out everyone was annoyed by her. Nobody spoke up.
I have misophonia. The hospital close to my home in Amsterdam did a lot of scientific research into it. And nowadays I work from home, fully remote, as a software engineer. Life is good.
For me it's people who talk while eating and who read emails aloud while writing them. So annoying!
I have had to resort to taking noise cancelling headphones to work.
I complained to my employer, who did nothing about it because he thought it was funny.
During this entire process, Bob would talk, saying something like this:
> Bob is starting the FTP program. Bob is typing his name and password. Bob is starting the file transfer. Bob's exiting. Bob is selecting the file and printing it. Bob is selecting two sided printing. Bob has sent the file to the printer. Now Bob is walking to the printer. Bob is picking up the sheets. Bob is looking for a stapler. Bob found it, and is stapling the sheets. Bob is walking to tzs' desk. Bob's handing the printout to tzs.
Just in case you're not using hyperbole, you might consider some visits with a good counselor. I think most people can learn techniques to avoid getting so angry, and the unhappiness that comes with it.
Medicine used: Depakine (valproic acid).
Breathing helps too, but I find it difficult to remember.
That said, I've also been tested for all kinds of problems (yay affordable health care + endless supplies of mental care), and I'm completely normal and not dangerous. I just have misophonia.
They did studies on misophonia and I was part of it during another unrelated rehabilitation (accident related) for which I was treated in the same hospital.
Interestingly, it's not a mental problem, it's physical, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44084-8
I once worked with a guy whose normal breathing made a whistling sound. I was sitting about 20 feet from him and one day I was about to go insane. I immediately bought a pair of Bose QC-15 headphones and it made all the difference in the world.
Currently, there's a lady who sits on the other side of my cubicle wall who wears a charm bracelet. The sound of her charm bracelet hitting and dragging across the desktop all day drives me batty.
I suppose I must have misophonia (first heard about it in this thread). There are times when I wish I were deaf.
I hear ya (pun somewhat intended), I wish there was an off-switch in my ears. I'd miss music and the voices of loved ones, but the peace and quiet would make me infinitely more productive in life.
It was pure madness. Especially because in between he'd talk to me. As if he expected me to listen to him all the time!
The day I moved into my own office and could close the door was the happiest day I had in my whole working life.
5 desk smallish office, we had one coworker who already has a very high natural voice volume and tone, who could not be stopped from having all sorts of personal calls while at the desk.
Boss would do nothing (but was closing his office door not to hear him) since he was a pathological submissive introvert.
We asked politely to at least leave the room. We asked not so politely. We had the office manager come and talk to him, the quiet would last two or three days and then it will all start again.
Calling his spouse, calling his kids and doing homework with them at the phone, calling his parents, mechanic, house renovator and whatnot.
We started counting and averaged around 7 calls a day, which we could not avoid to hear.
In 2018 the total was around 1800 calls.
That's a great way of putting it.
One of my pet peeves is along a similar line. I have a quiet voice. When I was younger, I had a quieter voice. The change happened because people were happy to ask me to repeat myself or, in a more blunt way, that I need to speak up. That's fine, it's my problem, it's me failing to communicate properly, and I've learned to be loud enough most of the time because of it.
But it doesn't happen the other way. It's not 'OK' to tell someone they talk too loudly. You can try, and they may temporarily adjust (while, actually, thinking it's your problem) but they won't change their voice for good, like I had to.
If it's a failure of communication for me to be heard by the person stood next to me, it should also be a failure for a person talking to someone at the same distance if I can hear them on the other side of a busy office or a train carriage. And if someone has a bassy vocal fry that penetrates walls, they should raise their pitch. I don't want to have to opt out of their conversation and, if I do, I have to be confrontational.
I've found I can politely request that people not have meetings standing three feet from me, and I can generally get people to not yell across the entire room.
But every now and then this womans let off her ear-shattering "AHHH HUHUHUHUHUHUHUHUHUH" laugh and not once has my muse inspired me with words that would convey a gentle, face-saving admonishment.
It's ultimately because she's laughing. Her laugh sounds like someone torturing a seal with a jackhammer, but my company policy is that it's a fun place to work. And that means people get loud, and if I don't like it, I can look for work elsewhere.
1) Those it bothers become the low-performers who have less psychological safety and influence.
2) Hiring good managers is hard and so managers who have the caring to listen to these concerns won’t have time to prioritize them amidst those of the 7-12 other people they have 1-1s with.
- moved into an office where a very noisy dot-matrix printer printed out every opening and closing of a door in the building. Nobody ever looked at the printouts. I unplugged it and put it in a dumpster. Nobody ever complained.
- working for an oil company, my boss was sitting next to a big HP plotter that was horribly noisy - he wore industrial-strength hearing protectors all the time, which didn't help if you wanted to phone him. I suggested that moving the plotter would be a good idea (there were lots of places to put it), but as usual with engineering companies, a sensible solution is not top of the list.
- howling air conditioning - that place I left after a couple of weeks.
Bottom line, there is no way you have to put up with noise - stand up for yourselves and just say "no".
I guess so.
Likely because they didn't actually check the context.
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/the-parable-of-chestertons-fen...
While I sort of agree, it's not about a fence but getting as much info as reasonably possible before acting. Next time you change something you don't understand because of curiosity, there may be injuries or deaths.
> This is typical of the dogmatic approach to reasoning that you find in many religious texts
That's pretty much what you've done here; taken the extreme view of what I'm trying to say.
Back on the subject: the dot matrix printer was not the guy's property and it may have been streaming a hardcopy of some server's intrusion log. That would explain why it was there but nobody looked. It's there in case someone ever needed to.
(edit: it's printed door movements, not server stuff. If the doors are opened by badges, it's still movement detection, at least of the most basic, people-y, sort)
Think: someone must have been feeding the printer paper or it would have run out years ago. It's there for a reason. See possibly why in my other comment.
I'm usually critical of SV style creative destruction, but sometimes asking for forgiveness instead of permission really is the only way to get things done. As long as it's a strategy, not the strategy.
Asking someone why the printer does that would have been good. It would have been an opportunity to show initiative to superiors either way. One way you get to remove something everyone hates. Another way you get to find a less intrusive system to solve whatever problem the printouts solve.
It may not have been a problem as they suggest, but not hearing anything is not the same as not causing a problem. I've had people just do things thinking I was making up the issue with what they wanted to do. Of course, it caused the problem, and I didn't know the source until they mockingly said "I did it and you never complained!"
There's a big downside here. If he had asked the purpose of the printer, that would have identified him as the one who disliked it, and the most likely perpetrator if something happened to it.
Also remember the old saying, "it's always better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission". It's true usually. If he had asked to do something about the printer, the likely answer would have been "no", because the superiors didn't want to expend any energy on it and it wasn't bothering them.
Amazing. Good work.
The main issue: Upper management didn't care, they all had their own offices that were removed and much nicer. The rest of us peons were in an open office hell, my team was on an island that anyone could walk around at any time...we were unmoored and near a clangy door, it was very hard to focus.
At one point I sat for months in a radio room, next to a really noise rack. Temperature was often 30 degrees C.
The reason I sat there was because the sound of the fans were much easier to block out than people (without support contracts : ) popping in to ask questions while I where supposed to help people who had support contracts.
I did work short term in an open office where someone suggested it was "rude" of me to wear earphones. Same person chewed with their mouth open while eating crunchy food at their desk all day, within earshot. But.... I'm rude somehow.
I think everyone here wishes you the best of luck.
alias noise='play -n synth brownnoise synth pinknoise mix synth sine amod 0.02 80'
Maybe it's something you could suggest?
This is what I have to do when I hear someone whistling in the office. Also other sounds and behaviours, i.e. the guy sitting next to me started clipping his nails at his desk one morning. I had to go stand outside for an hour before I calmed down.
What I'd suggest:
1. You're going to harp on it. It starts with the annoying sounds, but then you're telling yourself about how rude they are, how gross they are, the injustice of it all.
Yes, here and there you've got a point, but 99% of it is you trying to rationalize your feelings, and then it wants to assign blame because people are the perpetrators of it.
2. Take breaks to stop harping on it. I vape, so that's my excuse, but you don't even need one, you're just taking five minutes every hour or so to stretch your legs. Deliberately do something that occupies your mind and gets your stress levels down.
3. See if you can work from home a day a week, or even a half-day. Take vacation as regularly as possible.
I think it's both made worse by stress and increases stress levels, classic feedback loop, so my approach is to avoid it as much as possible and use other means to get my stress levels down.
You'll have good days and bad days, if you're really down and ready to yell at people, maybe talk to a shrink.
Thankfully, this is a relatively small and flat org that somewhat embraces autonomy. I personally take as many breaks as I can or want because it's still part of work. Likewise working out of a coffee shop is something I'm very comfortable with, so I've started doing that as well. Working from home is less common here, so that'll be a discussion I think.
Also thanks for not mentioning whatever the other one was. The sounds I'm fully stressed about are the ones I mentioned, but others are just revolting in a vaccuum. Like farts, audible burps, coughing without covering.
(the better solution of course is to fully mute these notifications in Slack)
I.e., it's not always clear what the standard is that everybody is expected to meet, and there's no risk-free way of asking somebody to be quieter.
And so, in addition to anger at the noise itself, we also have a recipe for simmering resentment and impotent rage.
“Have you talked to him about it?” “It’s really not a problem” “Well I could sit you farther away from him, but we don’t have any open desks on this side of the office, do you want to sit on the other side by yourself?” “I didn’t mean that, I’d rather keep my desk.” “Well I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.”
“Well that went downhill fast.” - I did not say out loud.
I got the vibe I wasn’t the first to bring it up, and perhaps others had been less ambivalent towards the interruption.
I like my dead pan delivery of ridiculous statements. I had not considered the ramifications of that one being taken seriously, nor that it might be.
On the other hand if I'm debugging something that should be problematic I don't notice the noise much, for any normal programming task as long as you don't interrupt me directly I can concentrate just fine. I even like it sort of noisy.
I'd describe it slightly different than lack of control, even if it's essentially the same: the noise is something to blame for the lack of progress so the helpless mind will blame it a lot. It's also an outlet for that tiny amount of anger about the failure, anger that would otherwise just fuel more focus, and then that anger itself becomes the main distraction, creating a leveraged effect much bigger than the noise itself. Today I had to silence a broken door before I could eventually beat that bug, didn't even feel much different than introducing the appropriate instrumentations in the view...
(about headphones, I used to do that when noticing first signs of that running in circles noise sensitivity, but now I absolutely can't be bothered to sacrifice my hearing to make up for the deficiencies of the workplace provided by my employer)
I grew up as an only child on a fairly pastoral 15 acres, so very different environment compared to most people who have siblings. As an adult, office noise bothers me a lot more than most, especially conversations.
The idea of being productive in a cafe / starbucks is almost absurd to me, like a Monty Python sketch. Although, I sort of feel the same about Open Office plans, which is less funny, especially in the Bay Area.
The thing about offices is that in my experience it's unstructured, so anything that can catch my ear might require my attention, and that takes a lot of focus away from the thing I'm actually trying to do. That is, the psychoacoustic form of the noise makes a difference, at least to me.
Conversely, one of the most distracting things for me is barely hearing people talking. My brain keeps trying to interpret the murmuring as words before it can reject it.
Same! My family loves calling each other on speakerphone. Asking however politely and considerately for them to use a headset or hold the phone is a mortal sin.
Coincidentally, when I moved out on my own, my ability to focus suddenly shot through the roof. Like putting on glasses for the first time when you're nearsighted.
Going back home I don't lose that sense of focus. Until the phone calls start again...
The type of throat clearing I'm talking about is when someone really just needs a good, deep cough but for whatever reason they won't, and are constantly doing this "Ah-hmmmm" sound. Once doesn't bother me. Every 30 seconds is maddening.
More generally, I think this can be extrapolated to frequently recurring sounds with unpredictable intervals.
A few years ago we had a Salesforce BA on site under a fairly long (1yr+) contract. He matched this 'partial cough' pattern exactly as you described it.
I kept a clicker-counter at my desk and kept stats, and updated HR frequently with the numbers.
They finally saw the light and allowed him to work from home for the remainder of his contract term. My productivity immediately bumped back up 20% …
But all of that goes out the window when someone has developed a habit of obnoxiously and unnecessarily extending their involuntary sounds by activating their vocal chords. It's completely unforgivable to me.
People collaborate less in open plan offices compared to traditional private offices. Yet open plan offices are promoted as strengthening cooperation.
I work in a co-working space with an open office section (fortunately there is a written rule that you must be silent), and surrounded by offices that sit 3 - 6 people. The offices have the same density as the open section - they are just separated by glass walls and a door.
At least I can block out most of that with music, but I'd really like to be capable of interacting with my co-workers more naturally.
I have to get up and walk away on my own a lot to make sure I don't snap. Wearing headphones 24/7 also makes my head sore and often gives me headaches.
I've never worked in open-plan offices. But cube farms are bad enough. One of my coworkers was going through a messy divorce. And spent time on the phone arguing loudly with his wife. And talking with his attorney.
I ended up knowing too much about his situation. And I sympathized with his wife. So it became problematic to work effectively with him.
Also the two older dudes near me always have their phones dinging, like when any notification comes to their phone, im close to insanity about it
I don’t mind office noise, but this drives me nuts. Their phone is on their person, turn on vibrate already.
[1] Example: mail applications other than apple mail must make a sound to generate an apparent notification - there is no vibrate-only function for non-apple-mail clients as far as I could tell.
Lower your voice.
No real sample data from MN or the deep south, as yet.
I've found that the earbuds that Etymotic makes are far superior to anything I've tried with active noise canceling. They're less expensive, they don't require batteries, they're more portable, the audio quality is better, they don't have that "stifling" feeling, they're a LOT more effective, and, best of all, you can control the level of noise damping by adjusting the fit. With mine (the MK5's), I find I can adjust them anywhere from "foam earplugs" levels of sound dampening to "can't hear someone trying to talk to me in a normal tone of voice." (Yes, really.) Half the time I'm wearing them, I'm not even listening to music, because there's no need, and I'm one of those people who finds that, productivity-wise, silence really is golden.
Since getting them, my Bose headphones that cost 5 times as much have just been gathering dust.
I'd add that Comply makes a line of memory foam tips that are much nicer than Etymotic's.
According to their Twitter account, 'BBC Worklife' has been around since 2013. I read the BBC a lot, but have never come across it before - this is another example of how un-discoverable most of the BBCs online content is :(
Now I'm wondering if that's genetic and how many other people have the same experience with those sounds.
I don't think it has anything to do with the sensations themselves, just my brain perceiving the stimulus as abrasive / piercing. It causes some kind of psychological pain, and weirdly I did not have this problem until my mid-20s.
I would put on noise cancelling head phones and blast music which helped, but headphones can be uncomfortable and more often than not, you want to be able to think in a quiet environment.
After everyone left, I would be massively productive in complete silence.
However, when I was later moved to a quieter area, what would be massively distracting was the sound of people walking by lightly breaking the silence. The only way I could avoid being distracted by these events was to put on headphones and blast music.
It's a shared cultural thing unique to each company, no need to cast a blanket statement.
Best way to handle this is communicate. Last office mate I had asked if he could bring his in, and since it was something that's never bothered me I was totally fine with it... I brought mine in shortly after ;)
The dampening rings don't help much either.
On the other side of things, the sound of a door closing too strongly will ruin my concentration and put me in a mood.
At university, I shared an office with a student who made so much noise typing that I could only stop and ponder with amazement. This guy typed like the keyboard was a piece of meat, and his hands were basting mops. Somehow, his fingers mashed out whole words and phrases as he dragged his paws across the keys.
I use a mechanical, as the Apple keyboards gave me RSI. My pain has gone away since, and I've not had any complaints about noise. (Much of my office uses mechanical, and most of us do it for our wrists.)
I use some of the quieter switches; I'm not in mechanical for the noise, but for the feel & layout. That said, it's about on-par noise wise with an Apple keyboard, but people think mechanical == noise.
Nobody will be excessively interrupted/distracted by a quiet keyboard. The same is not true for the other direction.
At my last position, open office, a few people on my team complained about other members' loud buckling-spring-like keyboards. Since it was an open office and we were all complaining about noises well beyond some of the keyboards, like sales calls and constant conversations, it was somewhat moot and nothing was really done about it. But it definitely increased animosity within the team, it pays to be especially considerate of your neighbors, particularly ones you need to collaborate with.
The guy I sit next to uses a mechanical Logitech keyboard with their custom switches and I've never heard any complaints about that one, either.
By the way, striking resemblance of the design of inside of The Francis Crick institute to that of H.M.P. Pentonville [1] not too far away. Same architect, maybe?
https://static-independent-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/stat...
I quickly realised that in space that is all one company all the discussions concern my work, especially if you sit in teams. So I was always half listening to chat as it was my work and if I didn't I could easily miss things.
But in an co-working space where noone there is my colleague, none of the chat concerns me and I find it far easier to tune out.
https://www.dineenwestcottmoore.com.au/services/hyperacusis-...
“Overexcitabilities are inborn intensities indicating a heightened ability to respond to stimuli. Found to a greater degree in creative and gifted individuals, overexcitabilities are expressed in increased sensitivity, awareness, and intensity, and represent a real difference in the fabric of life and quality of experience. Dabrowski identified five areas of intensity-Psychomotor, Sensual, Intellectual, Imaginational, and Emotional. A person may possess one or more of these.”
https://www.sengifted.org/post/overexcitability-and-the-gift...
Bill Gates’ insistence on personal offices for all developers (at least during his reign) probably helped improve Microsoft‘s productivity a great deal.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/01.cir.94.5.878
Nicotine is a stimulant. It improves concentration for individuals with ADHD, for much the same reasons that prescription stimulant drugs do. I picked up nicotine gum, and eventually switched to vaping myself, as a form of self-medication for my ADHD. If it really helps you block out distracting noises and sights from a busy office, that might be part of why.
You know what has really helped my focus? BREAKING THAT ADDICTION. Please, if anyone else is reading the parent I'm replying to and thinking about starting to use nicotine to self-medicate ADHD trust me it is NOT worth it. It's not worth not being able to enjoy a whole movie or show because you need to intake nicotine. It's not worth being trapped in airplanes without being able to vape. It's not worth the chemical dependence, even if you "only" get addicted to the gum or patch. Please hear my appeal to what a terrible idea the parent comment is proposing! Nicotine is the absolute worst drug.
I was never a smoker, and I vape the lightest dose nicotine available (3mg/ml). I have definitely developed a light addiction over the years, but I can go all day without needing my vape. The worst my cravings get are a feeling of "Man, vaping would be really nice right now." I even went on a week-long vacation last year, left my vape at home, and didn't even think about the nicotine I was missing until I got home.
But please! Don't take my anecdotal evidence and think it means you should pick up vaping! I know it's not the best for my health, and you may become far more addicted than I am.
I haven't even gotten into the world of rebuildables or anything like that. I use a basic Smok sub-ohm box (a T-priv), that I'm probably going to upgrade to the latest model in a few months, but I know there's an entire world of vape devices out there I've barely even glimpsed over the horizon, let alone explored. Luckily it's not too hard to talk myself out of fancy new hardware ($$) when my current mod gets the job done.
But flavors? I went and spent around $70 on flavors a couple weeks ago. Sounds crazy, but it's still cheaper than spending $100/month on commercial juices. And now I have a vast array of cool flavors to play with, and design my own recipes from.
Vaping can absolutely become a dangerous hobby.
Anyway, you're right, nicotine is a pain to quit and I wouldn't recommend it obviously. But vaping seems to be even more unhealthy and more distracting.
So, doing the math, as I use 3mg/ml juice, I vape about 720 mg of nicotine a month. If I bought the cheapest Wal-mart generic brand gum, in the 2mg pieces (because to replace my vape, I'd want a low dose per piece), 720 mg of nicotine in gum form would cost $81/month.
That is a huge difference. Even accounting for the fact that my vape device cost me originally $70, it's still cheaper, potentially as soon as the first month, to vape over chewing gum.
The nicotine is slowly absorbed through the oral mucosa. Coating the gum would give you an initial burst of nicotine, but would not have the sustained drip of nicotine that the traditional nic gum does.
I suppose one could melt down gum base, add a vaping nicotine solution, stir it together, let it set and then cut into pieces... but I would worry about the PG or VG that the nicotine is contained in doing something weird to the gum base. And you would have to be careful to stir it quite thoroughly to prevent nicotine "hot spots" in your gum.
Making a homemade lozenge or mint would be much easier, and I believe some people do, in fact, do just that. It would be similar to making hard candies, only at some point you would mix in the nicotine liquid. Since many of the flavorings used in vape juice were originally designed for use in baking and hard candies (and usually have a PG or sometimes VG base), I'm pretty certain the PG or VG of the nicotine won't screw up the texture of the candy.
https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Chewing-Gum
There doesn't seem to be any known interaction with gum base.
This stuff bothers me greatly on a daily basis. If there was some switch I could flip in my brain to stop processing these irrelevant inputs that would be fantastic.
The caveat is that I very much appreciate my own, private space. There's nothing I love quite as much as being first in, and blaring music for an hour and a half.
The title could be better as there is some discussion about health implications. Then again, I read the article because of the title. I am pretty sure you can't make it less interesting, as it already reads like "people react different to things". Yeah, no doubt on that.
I've used the silicon moldable ones and the plastic ones that go in the earl canal - but they are not very re-usable, and when someone pops over to chat taking them in and out is a chore.
They are a great option for people who have issues with ANC.
I despise almost all noise these days
I think people shackle their identity to their *version, and it can be limiting.
In general I'm fairly skeptical of personality tests, beyond just intro/extro version, for the similar reason that a) I can test vastly different based on my mood and b) people tend to tie their self image to the results and you end up with a tail-wagging-dog situation.
I'm just glad so many managers are cool with responsible use of headphones & noise cancellation approaches these days. Certain tasks simply require more focus.