Distractions are Productivity Killers

My work setup currently has me working on a large rectangular open desk suited to 2xN people, where N is determined by the length of the desk. The office consists of a large room with M tables where everyone works at. The problem with this setup is that the office can get really noisy and I have a hell of a time concentrating when there are that many people around, all conversing about a wide range of different topics and phone going off every 15~20 minutes.

In an environment like that, memory and concentration intensive work is nearly impossible. To be honest, some of the best progress I've made with code was done while working the night shifts where no one was around and I was able to just zone out and simply focus on what was going on with the code. While programming, I really need to be able to keep track of variable names, the structure of the program and algorithms in my head. The instant my concentration is broken, it takes time to reorient myself to figure out what I was doing again. This is actually a classic coding problem, especially when looking at code that one wrote days earlier.

To me I am not a huge fan of large open offices. There are some people out there that are able to focus in such environments, however, I am just not one of those people. I'd much rather have headphones on and be dead to the world while getting work done.

I am quite sure that offices around the world are setup in some manner like this, but I think it is rather counter productive. With laptops being used a primary computing devices, I really don't mind having a main desk somewhere, but I'd be much happier to have access to a silent stall where I can allocate blocks of 2-3 hours to get some serious work done and return to my desk to get less mentally intensive work done and be accessible to people. I am sure that there has been plenty of research done in this field and I am curious at how much of this research is implemented in offices around the world.

I would venture to bet that an architect that is able to create highly productive environments would be paid big bucks!