ADHD and the Open Office: Focusing in the Middle of Noise

The sound that tires me most in an open office is a conversation held in a low voice at the next desk in which I can understand every word.

A machine, the air conditioning, a distant hum, after a while I stop hearing. An intelligible sentence I cannot stop hearing. My mind follows it, waits for the end of the sentence, sometimes joins the conversation silently. Meanwhile I am reading the same paragraph of the report in front of me for the third time.

I described the general picture of sensory load in the article on sensory overload. Here I look at the open-office layout itself and at what makes working in it a little more possible.

Does the open office deliver what it promises

The idea behind the open office is well-intentioned: if the walls come down, people will talk more and collaborate more.

A study that followed two corporate headquarters as they moved to a more open layout, using wearable devices and electronic communication data, found the opposite. Face-to-face interaction fell by roughly 70 percent in both places, while email and instant messaging rose (Bernstein & Turban, 2018). When the walls came down, people turned to writing messages instead of talking face to face.

A broad analysis looking at employee satisfaction shows a similar balance: the benefit of easier communication brought by the open layout turned out to be smaller than the cost of increased noise and reduced privacy (Kim & de Dear, 2013).

These findings come from the general working population and make no ADHD-specific claim. But they make you think about how expensive an environment that is costly for everyone could be for someone whose attention is already strained.

The measurable cost of noise

In a study testing the effect of open-office noise in the laboratory, participants did tasks requiring working memory for two hours in a simulated open office. In the high-noise condition, compared with the low-noise one, they recalled fewer words, felt more tired and their motivation for the work dropped (Jahncke et al., 2011).

The study was done with forty-seven students and does not focus on ADHD. Still, the place the finding points to is familiar: one of the places noise hits is working memory. And that is exactly one of the functions ADHD struggles with most.

The open office takes an attention tax from everyone. In ADHD this tax is levied at a higher rate.

Why the picture can be heavier in ADHD

In this section I look at the place where experience and the literature meet; I make no claim of a definite finding.

Filtering is strained. Selective attention, the ability to hold on to what matters and leave what does not outside, is one of the functions that is strained in ADHD. The open office makes this function work all day.

The interruption chain. In an open office interruption has forms other than sound: someone passing by the desk, a colleague who comes with "can you take a look for a second," another person showing something on their screen. In an experiment on interrupted work, people finished the interrupted work faster and the quality did not change; the price of this was more stress, frustration, time pressure and effort (Mark et al., 2008). We make up for the interruption by speeding up, and our body pays the bill.

Returning is expensive. Returning to the work after an interruption is especially hard in ADHD. A part of the mind stays in the interruption. In the glossary, attention residue. Twenty interruptions in a day mean starting over twenty times.

Visual movement. Something that is talked about less than sound. People constantly moving at the corner of the eye quietly draw attention.

Silence is not always the solution either

I need to open a parenthesis here. A completely silent room also does not make focus easier for some people with ADHD. Some of us work better with a light, meaningless background sound. I covered the findings on white noise and their limits in the article does music help with focus.

So defining the problem in the open office only as "too much sound" falls short. The real issue is the kind of sound and who holds control. A background sound you chose yourself and an intelligible phone call at the next desk do not have the same effect even at the same volume.

Building the space around your desk

Changing the architecture of the open office is often not in our hands. The small area around the desk is a bit more in our hands. The things I find worth trying:

Simplify the visual field. If possible, choose or ask for a desk where people are not constantly passing behind you or at eye level. Reducing visual interruption can be easier than reducing sound.

Use headphones as a signal. Besides cutting the sound, noise-canceling headphones also send the surroundings the message "I am focusing right now." Talking about this openly works: "If my headphones are on, could you send a message if it is not urgent?"

Agree on focus hours. Setting aside a certain interval of the day as uninterrupted work time by agreeing with the people you work with. A focus hour declared alone is easily broken; it is easier to protect one that has been agreed on.

Reserve the empty room. If a meeting room is free, moving there for a few hours for work that needs intense focus. Putting it in the calendar like a meeting means nobody questions it.

An interruption note. When someone comes, before leaving the work, writing a single line: where did I stop, what is the next step. When you return the starting point is ready.

A polite sentence for postponing an interruption Saying "let me finish this sentence and I'll come over to you in ten minutes" postpones most interruptions without refusing them. Very often, ten minutes later the matter has already been solved.

Focusing in a café and not in the office

There was a contradiction that surprised me for a long time. I can work for hours in a crowded café, but in a nearly silent open office I cannot finish a paragraph. From the outside it looks illogical, because the café is noisier.

Today I explain this difference with a few things. These are not research findings but observations I drew from my own experience.

The sound in a café is a meaningless hum. The voices of dozens of people talking at the same time blend into each other and no single sentence stands out. In the office, generally two or three people are talking and every word is understood.

Nobody in the café knows me. There is no chance my name will be said, no question will be asked of me, nobody will come over to me. In the office every sound is potentially about me. My mind therefore follows every conversation with half an ear.

In the café I am in control. When I get bored I can get up and leave, I can change my table. In the office my desk is fixed and my right to change the environment is limited.

In the café I do not have to show anyone anything. There is no pressure to look like I am working. In the office the presence of others sometimes has a body-doubling effect, and sometimes it turns into a feeling of being constantly watched.

This distinction showed me what to look for in an open office: not complete silence, but protection from intelligible conversation and from attention that can be directed at me.

Planning the day by sound

The sound of the open office does not stay the same through the day. The first hours of the morning, the lunch break and the last hour of the working day are generally quieter; the time after meetings and the middle of the afternoon are more crowded.

The approach I find worth trying is to distribute work according to this rhythm. Putting work that needs intense focus in the quietest hours of the office, and phone calls, emails and routine work in the noisiest hours. Instead of fighting the noise, placing in those hours the work the noise does not make harder anyway.

Also, getting completely out of the noise a few times a day works. Stepping outside for five minutes, going up and down the stairs, walking along a quiet corridor. These short breaks drain some of the accumulated load and delay the complete scattering of attention in the afternoon.

Asking

For some of these you need permission, for some only a conversation. You can ask without disclosing your diagnosis: the sentence "I work more productively in a quiet corner" requires no diagnosis. I gathered which accommodations can be requested and the decision of disclosing a diagnosis in the article ADHD at work.

Presenting the request as a trial also makes it easier. The sentence "let me try working in that corner in the mornings for two weeks, and then let's look together at how things went" does not ask the other side for a permanent decision. When you can show a concrete difference at the end of the trial, keeping the arrangement turns from a request into a business decision.

Struggling in an open office does not mean you cannot cope with a crowd. Most of the time it only shows that your attention was not made to carry everyone's voice at once.