Open office layouts are the bane of my existence. When I come to work I want to put my headphones on and just focus on working through my backlog of tasks. The manager understands the work we do, but for some reason being a Manager has corrupted him into thinking we work better as a team when we're all stuffed into a single room with no partitions. At the slightest inconvenience someone faces, they feel the need to broadcast this to the entire room and there goes another 5-35 minutes of chatter and interruptions. Not to mention there is much less resistance to people bugging others for things that should be a Google search away. Why bother spending 30 seconds thinking, when you can instantly blurt a question to the 5-6 people at arm's length? The workforce stops being a group of individual contributors and becomes something much less.
My colleagues are from a different generation from me and don't understand that my wearing headphones to focus isn't a personal attack on them. They feel that my wearing headphones or working from different areas of our building are that I don't like them or don't want to be part of the team, It's about me wanting to focus.
All the chaos and noise that open offices promote I assume looks and sounds impressive if you're a manager (e.g. heat and noise = work), but the actual output of work compared to when I can sit in a quiet room and burn through my jobs is night and day. I feel at most 30% effective when in an open office, closer to 80% when I'm by myself (The other 20% is generally Email/Chat interruptions).
I enjoy my Job and the work I do, but I enjoy it more when I'm able to focus and get through tasks I've been assigned or I believe need to get done. I'm starting to suffer from action paralysis, I'm so worried about the next interruption stealing my focus, I somewhat avoid starting complex tasks and wait for the next focus-stealing interruption. Open offices in essence promote shallow, reactive work. No offense, I'm all for talking to colleagues about their Kids/Animals or holiday plans after work at the Pub. But not at the expense of getting my work done and leaving on time.
My plan going forward will be to stick to finding refuge in some of our spare empty offices and mixing that in with a bit of “social” time in the office. Open offices really are a failed experient for some lines of work.