filling the empty space between my ears....

[bgary]

My team at work has recently been moved from "office space" to "open space" - which means I now share a large room with 23 other people.

Makes having confidential conversations with other companies a little interesting.

But more interesting is the challenge of creating a "quiet zone" in which I can concentrate, without being distracted by the half-dozen or more conversations going on around me.

Have found that Bose noise-cancelling headphones are a part of the answer.

And the rest of the answer seems to center around what to pipe through the headphones into my ears. Too "rock"-y and it becomes counterproductive. Too mellow and it doesn't block enough ambient noise.

The best I've hit on so far, if you'll pardon the irony, is Thelonious Monk. Great jazz, intricate and syncopated but yet calming rather than distracting. John Klemmer, Oscar Peterson and Sadao Watanabe are in the mix too.

What about you? If you're putting on tunes while you work, what do you choose?

Bruce
(I figure this qualifies both as "mindless ramblings" and "less than cosmic topics...)

 

[u079721]

I've never found the noise cancelling headphones to be very good with limiting sound from conversations, so it depends on what I'm trying to tune out. But in my last cube I kept a pair of big ear muff type headphones, the kind you wear to limit exposure to loud noise, and played "white noise" through them. My favorite was the loud rain simulation. It works, but it's tiring to have that much sound input, sort of like trying to sleep next to the diesel while it's running.

 

[Christian Williams]

Bruce, I think that as project manager you need to establish an office/conf room/corner where privacy is possible. Even if it's on another floor.

I worked for years in big newsrooms where open was the tradition, and it sort of did work for collaboration-whether-you-like-it-or-not, but there was always a conference room or an office to borrow for privacy.

Anyhow, isn't the trend away form open and toward some offices again?

 

[bgary]

isn't the trend away form open and toward some offices again?

Apparently not here. It's almost like we're trying to out-Valley the Valley and be like a start-up. Or something.

This place has always sort of had enclosed offices as a "perk"... everyone has had an office with a door, dating back to the early days. But in the last couple of years they've been re-doing it, building by building. The building I just moved out of is now top of the list - they'll gut it, then make some trendy maze of spaces with an assortment of "focus rooms" and "conversation nooks" sprinkled throughout, and move us back into it sometime next summer.

If I were leading a software team and the bunch of us needed to be constantly collaborating on shared code or something, I could see the value of open space. But my whole team works with external companies - many of whom view each other as competitors - and now I spend a good part of my pre-call prep-time looking for a "focus room" I can claim for an hour or so.

Seems like a big step backward.... especially, as you note, since most of the rest of the corporate world started backing away from the open experiment a couple of years ago.