The Failure of Open Floor Plans

If you’ve ever worked in a building with few to no offices, at first it seems so inviting, creative, and collaborative. Yet, the day-to-day reality is that these environments breed distraction. It’s like they were designed by extroverts to make everyone have to talk and force them to collaborate; yet it ends up being a constant fight to stay focused.

Research supports growing complaints from professionals who say that these environments look great on paper but are a painful and unproductive space in which to work. Certainly, you can cram more people into smaller spaces and sell it as a way to foster more collaboration, but does it lead to more interruptions and distractions and to less privacy? In addition, in many of these open environments, there’s practically no place to go for a private call or conversation, not to mention an area to work that’s quieter and conducive to concentration.

In one study of these open environments, there was an ironic, noticeable increase in workers interacting less face-to-face and relying more on technology like e-mail and instant messaging to communicate. More research is showing that the spaces directly impact concentration. In fact, the main sources of workplace dissatisfaction were increased noise and a marked loss of privacy.

- Joseph McCormack, Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus (2020)

External Solutions to Internal Problem

For the past five hundred years or so, we’ve searched for external solutions to our internal problem. We have been deluded by the forces of economics and religion to believe that the purpose of life is hard work. So every time we feel empty, dissatisfied, or unfulfilled, we work harder and put in more hours. This trend can be traced to Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, Christopher Columbus, and the Age of Discovery. With Luther, laziness became a sin, and with Columbus and the Age of Discovery, the developed world’s eyes turned to new and unfamiliar places, to novelty as an end goal.

These obsessions became widespread during the industrial age and they have only strengthened in the more than two centuries since. Our time periods are not named for human development anymore, like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. We are currently in the jet age, the information age, the nuclear age, and the Digital Revolution. We measure our years in work products, not personal development.

Ultimately, the solution is not digital. It is as analog as the human body. Technology can do many things for us—extend our lives, keep us safe, expand our entertainment options—but it cannot make us happy. The key to well-being is shared humanity, even though we are pushing further and further toward separation.

We don’t seem to trust our human instincts. When we’re faced with a difficult problem, we search for the right tech, the right tool, and the right system that will solve the issue: bulletproof coffee, punishing exercise, paleo diets, goal-tracking journals, productivity apps. We think our carefully designed strategies and gadgets will make us better. My goal is to dispel that illusion and help you to see that we are not better, but in many cases, worse.

- Celeste Headlee, Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving. 2020.

Fight off Non-essentialism

We have all observed the exponential increase in choices over the last decade. Yet even in the midst of it, and perhaps because of it, we have lost sight of the most important ones.

As Peter Drucker said, “In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally—substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.”

We are unprepared in part because, for the first time, the preponderance of choice has overwhelmed our ability to manage it. We have lost our ability to filter what is important and what isn’t. Psychologists call this “decision fatigue”: the more choices we are forced to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorates.

 Here's how an Essentialist would approach the closet:

1. Explore and Evaluate
2. Eliminate
3. Execute

ESSENCE: WHAT IS THE CORE MIND-SET OF AN ESSENTIALIST?

This part of the book outlines the three realities without which Essentialist thinking would be neither relevant nor possible. One chapter is devoted to each of these in turn.

1. Individual choice: We can choose how to spend our energy and time. Without choice, there is no point in talking about trade-offs.

2. The prevalence of noise: Almost everything is noise, and a very few things are exceptionally valuable. This is the justification for taking time to figure out what is most important. Because some things are so much more important, the effort in finding those things is worth it.

3. The reality of trade-offs: We can’t have it all or do it all. If we could, there would be no reason to evaluate or eliminate options. Once we accept the reality of trade-offs we stop asking, “How can I make it all work?” and start asking the more honest question “Which problem do I want to solve?”

- Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. 2014.