re: Move Your Office to the Library
Interesting argument. Though there are couple major assumptions that I think work against this idea.
- Students dont have offices: You’re assuming students have selected the optimal work environment out of many options, but students don’t have many options. In particular, they don’t have offices (unless they’re grad students, and in my experience most grad students choose their offices over the libraries). For most undergrads it seems the library is simply the best of the bad.
I’m not sure it’s the best of the bad; students are known to voice their opinions, and I personally haven’t heard a lot of call to change libraries into other kinds of places. It’s true that more social locations appear, generally in response to a need for students to work together on group projects. In my limited experience, these social places are usually used to conduct meetings and brainstorm sessions, not to sit down and write essays or code. That part usually happens somewhere else, somewhere quiet(er).
- Students primarily work as individuals. Companies primarily work as teams: This is the big difference: In school it’s all about *you*: your learning, your grades, you as an individual. Rarely do you actually have to collaborate and when you do people book out the group rooms in the library so that they can make noise. Conversely, a company is all about the team. Everything is collaboration, everything is group work. And having an effective teams is all about communication - all the distractions and interruptions you pointed to are really just forms of communication. In teams, communication trumps individual nose-grinding, and so in companies open, communicative workspaces trump library-like silenced halls of study.
Team communication doesn’t need to be as intrusive as it currently is; an increasing number of organizations are starting to realize just how important quiet spaces are. I’ve long been a proponent of non-realtime communication (email, IM) as a way to reduce interruptions, and I find quiet spaces to be an extension of that idea in helping workers achieve the highest levels of productivity. Once the brain is on track to solving a problem, anything not directly speeding up that solution is a negative coefficient. And while I agree that communication is important for a team to succeed, I find that to be more of an argument for turning down the volume in the workplace. The signal versus noise ratio increases to near perfection when all exchanges of information are strictly functional. The questions that do get asked have to go the non-realtime route, which makes for better long-term planning (you can’t rely on fast responses), allows workers to address everything at once (contiguous attention blocks) and gives one time to think the answer through.
I should also mention that my approach is meant primarily for Makers. Although applicable to other classes of workers, it’s likely to be inadequate for those in support or sales roles because of the nature of their work. In a sense, quiet spaces are a way for Makers to self-segregate from their more chatter-prone colleagues if they feel such separation would improve their work.
