This chestnut 'home has too many distractions' line is getting old. Work has equivalent distractions, and those people actually get paid to distract you. It takes time management wherever you sit your butt.
For you maybe. For some of us, the office is like a monastery compared to home and is the only place where deep work is even close to possible. As we return to normal, I hope more employers embrace a hybrid approach that allows everyone to thrive.
I've been advocating "quiet rooms", for head's down working, like a law library.
Mitigation until such time employers acknowledge decades of empirical evidence that open offices and cube farms sabotage productivity, health, morale. (Never.)
Quiet rooms have some benefits, but a big downside is that I want to use the equipment I have at my desk - multiple monitors, mouse and keyboard, etc. The quiet rooms I've experienced have either no peripherals, or a shared set that is a significant downgrade from what I'd have at my (noisy) desk (or home).
>This chestnut 'home has too many distractions' line is getting old.
And yet in my home it's accurate. Of course, your mileage may vary.
Where I work, it's like a library. Quiet, serene, productive, but tense.
At home it's noisy, disjointed, non-productive [hey look, I'm on HN!], and full of disruptions [slack, 5+ zoom meetings per day, kids screaming [Brother keeps hitting me!!!], and wife trying to live her life [TV, music, etc...]. But it's relaxed.
I prefer working from home, I feel like it's better, but there is a lot that can be improved.
I think you’re lucky, then. I’ve worked at multiple places and they are almost always nothing but distractions. In fact I think most employees need training on how to behave in an office environment.
For many, when they have a question or an item to discuss, that moves to top of mind and the first impulse is to go interrupt whatever the person is doing to satisfy it. This is made even worse when these types of employees are in management positions because saying “not now” isn’t an option. I used to work with a guy who would regularly have unimportant questions come up and if we didn’t have an immediate answer he would say “let’s go ask X.” I’d usually say, “let’s bring it up in our next meeting or ask in an email, I don’t want to interrupt what he’s doing.” He’d say “who cares, let’s go bother him!” Zero consideration for other people’s time. That experience permanently scarred me I think.
To this day I pretty much never call anyone at work without an appointment or at least pinging them asking when they have a few minutes to chat. I realize most here probably get that but I think the average workplace has a few people like that and it only takes one or two on a team to make a massive impact on productivity.
Work distractions are generally work related. The person at work who closes his door gets more output, but often that isn't the output that is needed. The person who pays attention to work distractions gets less work done total, but more useful work. Home distractions are not the same.
It's a nice thought but is there any evidence of this? I've also heard this quote "If you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But ten years later somehow, you don't quite know what problems are worth working on."
In my experience at work, I've seen the opposite. The people most distracted get the least done and it's obvious to everyone on the team. Plus obviously you do need to pay attention to some distractions. Going too far in one direction is not good. I think, however, most people lean more towards distractions than focus.
The whole premise of this line of thought is faulty because everybody seems to assume that you're entirely either a door-open person or a door-closed person.
The point is choice. There are door-open and door-closed times of every day. In an open office, there is no choice, it's door-open always, and that sucks.
Do you live in the US suburbia? Because that is a unique place in the world which is built to support big houses for middle class people, where everyone can have a room for their home-office for cheap.
Most of the world is not like that. For example[1], avg apartment size in Bangalore 1260 sqft and in Mumbai is 700 sqft. Most of the knowledge workers live in dense cities around the world and it is not feasible for them to move to the US suburbia.
If you have a door you can close at the office you must be upper management. Everyone else is still in cubes if they are lucky or in open seating plans more likely.
>"and those people actually get paid to distract you"
And it looks exactly like other non-productive things at work: in my morning standup i can say: " i got pulled into a meeting about 'random irrelevant issue' so thats my day"
