What is classified as an “interruption” is often the same for most people: a phone call; someone asking you a question; a barrage of IMs – things that require your direct attention. Disturbances, however, are very different from person to person. To one person, the sound of a keyboard’s clickity-clack may be reassuring and welcome, while to another a more heinous sound could not be made. Similarly, some prefer a fan in their bedroom or the sound of traffic while they sleep and others demand absolute silence.

In a private office interruptions and disturbances are often minimized as the environment is controlled. With a shared office, the environment can strongly depend on who it is shared with. In a cubicle farm there is no control.

With Office Variety Comes Variable Productivity

As I briefly mentioned, my first salaried position came with a fairly nice office in that it wasn’t particularly confined, I had a door, a window, and the ability to seclude myself when needed. After moving on I found myself doing a lot of freelance work in-between jobs, enough that I was able to work many months before really feeling the need to get back into a true office environment. With the change of “jobs” also came an extreme change in environment, as I moved from a private office to a home office and coffee shops.

Somewhat surprisingly, working from home is full of interruptions while working from a coffee shop is full of disturbances. At home, things like the dog needing walked, my wife asking me to run errands, and a copious amount of ever-enticing entertainment demand my direct attention and prevent me from doing any work at all; though, when uninterrupted, things are quiet and I am able to focus to my heart’s intent. At a coffee shop, interruptions are rare but disturbances are plentiful. Fortunately for me I am quite good at ignoring generally disruptive sounds such as dishes smashing together, loud conversation, and doors opening/slamming shut — some are not so adept at this. If I were to compare the two environments, I would say that my level of productivity at the coffee shop remained much higher for much longer as I was able to consistently enter and remain in “the zone” with few, if no interruptions.

As I moved into my next salaried spot I was placed in a large cubicle with a “cube mate” in a rather quiet environment with the exception of being right next to the main entrance of the area. Without the ability to seclude myself combined with the fact that our cube area was literally void of sunlight and half-lit at any given time, the environment was utterly dismal and ridden with interruption. It seemed as though the moment I entered “the zone” and started working optimally I would be interrupted by a colleague hovering over me awaiting to be noticed so they could ask me a question. Now, this hovering is not the colleague’s fault by any means — they have a question and I am the one to answer it. The fault is of the office space’s design as it does not allow for any type of signal that says, “No go away! I am busy!”

After a promotion I moved into a private office shared with another colleague, whom I get along with quite well. Being quiet people we put our headphones on and dive into work, only to be interrupted by the occasional phone call. If we both have a lot of work to do, we often close the door and rid ourselves of potential intruders. This situation is equally productive to my original private office, with the benefit of having long hallways with ceiling to floor windows that I can stroll down frequently to stretch my legs and grab a glass of water. On the whole, the situation is quite desirable.

Migrating to a Cubical Farm

Movies such as “Office Space” depict cube farms as a layer of hell that most middle-class white-collar workers have found themselves stuck in. Whether or not a cube farm is really bad has been a long-debated topic and I’m not here to continue that battle. I am, however, expecting a personal plummet in my productivity without an effective way of secluding myself from interruptions. Being close to my team is wonderful for bouncing ideas, getting clarification on projects, and just generally enjoying their company, but this proximity benefit has its negative effects as well. The chances of me getting deep into a zone and have someone ask me for a clarification or update are very high whereas they may have pinged me on chat (which I can ignore for some time with a polite away message), they may literally step into my cube and tap me on the shoulder — as many of you know, there are few things worse when you’re “zoned in.”

Compounding my apprehension towards moving to a cube farm is that the ceilings are low, I have little outside view, and the decor is going to be void at best. As a creative-type person studies have shown people like me work best in high-ceilinged, open air environments where our minds can wander to figure out problems. Even in college I was always drawn to the vaulted ceilings of the library to write rather than a cubby where I often saw engineering friends happily huddled away. I would like to imagine a place where I am excited to go to work and enjoy the environment I am in and the things I am doing within it. From experience, even if you’re working on an engaging product, a continuous flow of interruption and a non-ideal work environment can take your edge off quite quickly — I am hoping this is not the case in the new environment.

As a professional, regardless of my circumstances, I will always maintain the same level of workmanship regardless of my environment…it may just take a bit longer to get there in a non-ideal one. Though, on the same token, if I were job-hunting and applied at a company that utilized cube farms to hold its personell, I may very well think twice about accepting the offer knowing that my performance may not be as ideal as it could be elsewhere.

I had made a fairly blanket statement, both on Twitter and Facebook, that the value of both of these social services is actually amplified by the number of people you remove from your following, not the more you add. I had said this with the notion of ‘quality > quantity’ in the back of my head, since instead of using Twitter and Facebook to see how many people I can spam with my life updates and witty commentary I like to simply keep tabs on the people I admire or am close to — both on a personal and professional level.

Some would respond and say, “Well, I just follow people I am close to as well!” Which very well may be true, but you aren’t close to 200, 500, 1500, or 5000+ people. When you (or I) sign into Facebook or Twitter, we scroll down the list of status updates keeping an eye out for specific people whose updates we want to read; the fact that we are scrolling and searching for these people in and of itself is an indicator that we really don’t care about most of the people we’re “connected” to.

So, if you’re ready to admit you really don’t care about the updates of those fringe people you saw in high-school or that awkward colleague that friended you, why not sever that digital connection? If you’re anything like me, your time is precious and there’s no need to waste it wading through the noise of updates just to hear from the people you really care about. After all, if you’re at a gathering you aren’t going to ask 15 people how they’re doing before going up to your best friend to see how his/her new baby is, are you? Of course not, so why do it on the internet?

I would ideally like my social network connections to mimic my real life connections, and that involves having a core group of people I interact with that I value and who value me in return. As a practica example, if I only had 50 twitter followers and each one of them read my tweets and articles I posted, obviously that is more valuable than if I had 1000 followers where only 10 really cared and interacted with me. Conversely, if I were to follow thousands of people instead of a select few I was very dedicated to, the value of each individual person I am following goes down as their updates are washed away almost as soon as they are posted — what’s the point in following them in the first place? The signal to noise ratio obviously applies to Facebook as well, which is why having hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends renders your Facebook utterly useless.

I may just “not get it,” but I try to be fairly pragmatic and if I am going to engage myself in these immensely popular services I want to make them valuable to me, not useless.