Originally posted by Minimonster I've taken to wearing headphones when trying to be productive in our busy little office. It means people don't talk to me unless they really need to. I also managed to get a huge amount done at home today.
I have a pair of good noice-cancelling headphones, and they do help. But I tend to get a headache if I use them for more than a couple of hours in a day. And they don't remove the visual noise of people walking past my desk. We are simply too many in too small an office.
Originally posted by robgski I agree!
I often have the headphones on in my office without music playing, it just insulates me from the noise and distractions. It's not that so many people are chattering about nothing, actually many of them are talking about interesting things, and that is almost more distracting.
If it's not too noisy that can work, but most often I have to play music to drown out the noise. And yeah, most of the talk is relevant for what people do - it's just not relevant for everybody all the time, which makes it noise more than anything else anyway.
Originally posted by wstruth I do the same when working from home. I've always found it best to treat working from home like working from the office just no commute. Schedule for me is important in this as is blocking out distractions. I do find that my most productive time seems to shift to later in the day like it was during my college days though. I have my staff working from home part time now because of Covid 19 and we just got notice that the NYC Department of Buildings will start taking digital filings (no more signing and sealing triplicate sets of drawing and forms - Yea!). Printing documents for issue and review will now be curtailed and we get save more than a few trees. So we will probably go to only coming to the office only as needed, unless the Governor of the state decides that for us.
Originally posted by robgski Hopefully this event will force a lot of agencies to finally get into the 21st century and shift more ops and paperwork to online filings.
That might be one good thing following all of this. We are forced to actually make use of the 21st century solutions which too many resist as long as they are allowed to. I don't think going back to the old ways will be easy should anybody want to try.
Or I may be an optimist