The open office plan at WeWork on 3rd Street was actually worse for productivity than I expected

I spent two months working out of the WeWork location on 3rd Street in Austin, and everyone kept saying how great the open layout was for collaboration. But I found the constant noise and lack of privacy cut my focused work time by about 40 percent. By the third week, I started wearing noise-canceling headphones just to get through a single spreadsheet. Has anyone else seen their output drop after switching to a fully open office?

2 comments

2 Comments

park.adam1mo agoMost Upvoted

Why does everyone act like noise is automatically bad? I've worked in dead silent environments before and they made me want to fall asleep at my desk. The background chatter at WeWork on 3rd actually kept me alert and moving through tasks faster because I felt like I was in a real work zone, not a library. Plus the whole point of being there is running into people from other companies and picking their brains. I closed two deals just from overhearing conversations and jumping in. I get that spreadsheets might suffer, but for most of what people actually do day to day, that constant buzz beats staring at a wall in a cubicle.

hugo_cooper1mo ago

Did you see that study from a few years back where Harvard tracked office workers and found open plans actually cut face-to-face collaboration by 70 percent? People just put on headphones or hide behind monitors instead of talking... I read that noise and lack of privacy make it harder to focus on complex stuff, which is probably why your spreadsheet work took such a hit. It's funny how the whole "collaboration" pitch backfires when everyone just tunes out.