Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Jason Fried: Working closely together ain’t productive
LifeClever ;-) Tips for Design and Life: "Proximity is an invitation to interrupt somebody. And interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity that there is. When everyone is sitting together, everyone’s at the same desk or nearby. It’s really easy to shout something over to somebody or tap someone on the shoulder or whatever. That can be useful at times, no doubt. But for the most part, it’s interruption."
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3 comments:
It seems somewhat ironic that this article claims working in areas as groups in less productive when in fact all those who work in PTM, Stu-Tech, and the cluster do just that. Maybe we should rethink the way we set up ourselves to work.
-Aaron Siebert
But it has to depend on the type of work being done, and the amount of collaboration that needs to be done on a day to day basis. Using an example from my work this summer: the company was wanting to rearrange the desks and office plan, and an open-space plan was considered. Their main concern was that when a theater planner was designing a space and had a question for an engineer or an acoustician, he wouldn't be able to ask the question without completely leaving his work space. In the configuration they have currently, it was very common for office meetings or discussions to occur over cubicle walls with 5 different people talking very loudly, but all contributing. It worked very well because the engineer might give a solution to the theater planner, but the acoustician could overhear it and prevent the idea from going any further if it was not going to work well for him. There were a lot of side conversations and distractions, but people enjoyed working and got the stuff done.
This article can serve as a warning to those of us moving into shared spaces for the first time this semester. The student offices and design studios force us to work in close proximity of each other, so we should heed the disadvantages of this and avoid causing issues for those around us trying to work. It's likely impractical to allow each student an individual work space at school - there just isn't room - so we need to become aware that things we say/do in the shared offices really affect the way those around us can function.
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