Productivity: Cheap Fix. Army Ear Defenders
Anyone who works with me, or has in the past, knows that I’m easily distracted. I find it easy enough to get into the flow, but I’m very easily knocked out.
My best work is done in a silent house, all alone. I can happily start work at 10pm on a Friday night after a full week, and look up again at 4.30am without even realising it.
However, my office environment isn’t conducive to my success as a productive developer. There’s plenty of articles and books which point out the devastating impact of interuption on programming, and I imagine most high-concentration jobs. (“hey, Mr Surgeon, I can see you’re busy there with a heart by-pass but would you mind just sorting this dislocated shoulder…”)
Anyway, I’ve been struggling with this for the last couple of years, trying different things. Requests for a separate development office have been denied, as have separating partitions to break up a large office space of ~40 people, comprising mostly sales, customer services and marketing (think: noisy people). We’re now in one corner, which is good, but next to the marketing team, which is bad. (they’re lovely people, but by their job definition, not quiet workers)
I use headphones lot, which does help, but I find that the music, although better than hearing other people’s conversations, is still quite distracting. I’ve been suggested music like Infected Mushroom, which is better as it’s quite repetitive and easy to not concentrate on. It’s still not silence though.
Last week, I saw these on ebay, and bought them on a whim:
They were £5.19, and they’re great. I used to shoot with ATC, so I sort of knew what to expect, but I’d never used them in an office environment.
They’re pretty useful actually. They don’t cut out all the noise like, say, some noise-cancelling earphones are, but they seem to cut out a lot of the frequencies. So, conversations aren’t completely stripped out but they’re muffled to such an extent that you can’t make out the words. That means that you can’t latch onto the conversation and get drawn into it, which is really good for me. I used them today for half an hour, and found it really good. After about 5 mins, I started to relax, in the way that I do at home, started to think deeper about what I was doing – essentially get into the flow in a way that I hardly ever do at work.
This was just my experience, and yours may vary. But, if you’re looking for a cheap solution to a really annoying problem then they’re worth a go, you might be pleasantly surprised.
Written by Tom Morgan
Tom is a Microsoft Teams Platform developer and Microsoft MVP who has been blogging for over a decade. Find out more.
These are the same as the ones I was given and are covered in mud from when I volunteer on canal restorations. I have joked about wearing them at work, but now I know I wouldn’t be the only one, I might do it for real! IT used to have walls, since they have taken them down I can hardly concentrate on work. I wonder what others will say
For canal work it is normally really nice to take them off, as it means the really noisy (often hard) work has finished.
Have you worn them much around work since your first trial?
Hi – yeah I do still use them. Not all the time, but sometimes, if you just need to concentrate on something and everyone else around you is having a big open conversation in front of your desk… then yep, they’re useful!