My 6 year old son has been having a lot of trouble with kindergarten. He has trouble focusing on tasks, becomes disruptive, and runs away from class. We have him working with an occupational therapist.

His school has a relatively experimental (and failed IMO) open design, where several classrooms are open to one another. For the kindergarten classes, this means constant chaos.

Continued...

His teacher took him to a quiet room for his end of year assessment and was completely blown away by what he was capable of accomplishing. He's pretty much absolutely normal developmentally when not surrounded by chaos.

This has made me realize how terrible open plan offices are. I have never actually had a private office, so I have always thought it was just that I wasn't very good at focusing.

@freakazoid When Microsoft was dominant, they partly ascribed it to giving every worker an office with a door and the social ability to close it. Even temps! Concentration is scarce and valuable and they didn't want to fracture it.

@clew Yeah that was the thing that most struck me about Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus. Everyone had offices, which was something I more associated with "old guard" IBM.

@freakazoid Well, maybe it will be a measurable competitive advantage and spread???

My dad worked for a Japanese firm for a while and was originally horrified by the completely open office. But the local manners were completely respectful of concentration -- if a coworker was sitting quietly with closed eyes, he says, you didn't interrupt because it was taken as a sign of deep concentration.