Open offices (without walls and doors) are “damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction,” writes Maria Konnikova in her article for The New Yorker. Like me, Maria went to a school with an open design. “Distracting at best and frustrating at worst,” she writes, “wide-open classrooms went, for the most part, the way of other ill-considered architectural fads of the time, like concrete domes. The biggest problem with an open design, she writes, is noise. I agree with that. Wired magazine had an open plan and the constant noise and interruptions made it impossible to do actual work there. I did all my editing at home or in the office on Sundays when no one else was there.
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